FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Anja Heister, 406-549-6663, Anja@idausa.org

In Defense Of Animals Offers Mamaroneck Free Birth Control For Geese To Prevent Killing

Mamaroneck, N.Y. (March 6, 2013) – In Defense of Animals (IDA), an international animal protection organization with more than 100,000 members including over 19,000 in New York, is offering Mamaroneck free birth control for geese to help prevent a horrific mass killing of resident Canada geese.

The Village of Mamaroneck in Westchester County, New York has contracted with the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Wildlife Services, a tax-funded agency notorious for its brutal methods of killing hundreds of thousands of wild animals every year.

Now they target the families of geese calling the Columbus Park and Harbor Island Park their home.

IDA is partnering with Innolytics, Inc., a California firm, to provide the Village of Mamroneck with free OvoControl-G, a proven oral birth control method for geese. OvoControl-G is an environmentally friendly product that is easily administered via bait stations prior to and during the 10-week long nesting season. Innolytic’s CEO, Erick Wolf, has generously offered to provide Mamaroneck with enough Ovocontrol to treat the Mamaroneck Canada geese flocks in the spring of 2013 at no cost to the village other than shipping charges.

“There is no reason to kill these highly intelligent and social geese who are part of the Mamaroneck community, and who have a right to be there,” said Anja Heister, Director of IDA’s Wild and Free Habitat Campaign. “This is a great opportunity for Mamaroneck to opt for a humane and long term solution that benefits both their human and geese residents.”

USDA’s Wildlife Services agents will come in the early morning hours during the geese’s molting period, when they cannot fly and are entirely helpless. The geese will be packed in crates and trucked to a slaughterhouse, where they will be killed. Their lifeless bodies will be donated to food banks with no consideration of the probable contamination of herbicides and pesticides used in areas where these birds lived.

“Apart from the brutality and trauma inflicted on these sensitive birds, killing geese, or other urban wildlife, is never a solution,” said IDA’s Heister. “As long as there is desirable habitat, new geese will quickly repopulate the areas that have become vacant, locking communities into an endless, ineffective, brutal, and costly killing cycle.

Humane control of Canada geese begins with several measures that make up an integrated strategy, including habitat modification, cleanup using specialized equipment such as the village’s recently purchased “Toro Rake-O-Vac” machine to effectively remove goose droppings from parks, and population management through the use of oral contraceptives designed for use in Canada geese.

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