Editorial:
They are as emblematically Canadian as the Rocky Mountains and lumberjacks. They are breathtaking, statuesque symbols of the north woods; a wilderness icon that renders us the envy of other nations around the globe…But the moose of the Cape Breton Highlands are not just ordinary moose. They are the imposing Andersoni strain, the second largest of the six strains of moose (with 1,400lb bulls sporting antlers five and a half feet across) introduced from Elk Island National Park near Edmonton Alta in the late 1940s.
And in Cape Breton, NS, you can slaughter one, illegally and outside the lawful hunting season, for $500 cash money; your chances of being caught and prosecuted almost zero.
Something has gone terribly wrong in the Cape Breton Highlands, right on the borders of a national park.The traditional plaid-clad moose hunter with birch bark calling horn and a readiness for hardship and discomfort in the stalking, dispatching, field dressing and transportation of such a large animal has given way to sloppy road hunting by unskilled opportunists demonstrating no respect whatsoever for the animal or the ethics of fair chase, and a willingness to stoop to the use of high-tech equipment like night vision goggles in what is fast becoming just an ugly slaughter.
The politically correct term is "first nations harvest"; seasoned outdoorsmen and conservation officers call it a revolting mess. Rumor and stories and second and third-hand reports of distressing behaviour have been rampant for years. The province's conservation force has thrown its collective arms up in frustration at not being able to tackle such a blatant problem inside their turf but outside their jurisdiction.
The context is important here. The abuses are being perpetrated, we are told, by a small minority of status aboriginals much to the chagrin and embarrassment of their communities.
Nor is the problem restricted to aboriginals. The clientele for the illegal commercial slaughter of Cape Breton moose is non-aboriginal. The right of first access to wildlife granted Canadian aboriginals by the Supreme Court is only the loophole by which the unscrupulous among both ethnic groups seek to circumvent the law and abuse a priceless wildlife resource.Indeed, witnessing the carnage and abuse that is taking place under the guise of aboriginal rights, local non-aboriginal residents have adopted a "what-the-hell" attitude and moose poaching has become rampant and socially acceptable.
Late last summer the inevitable happened. A fatal shooting of one non-aboriginal "hunter" allegedly by a second non-aboriginal "hunter"-in August. It was a wake-up call. A strong joint initiative between provincial officials and the aboriginal communities in Cape Breton appears to be under way, while federal officials hang back and play observer.
What you read in this, the first of a two-part series on the subject, will disgust you. But it's only half the story. In this issue we outline the problem. In the following issue we will delineate what we hope will be the solution.
Jim Gourlay, publisher
The Highlands of Cape Breton has abundant moose for the taking-for now-and a maze of getaway roads. One NS DNR enforcement officer talked to EW&W about his work in the Highlands.
"They [the moose] are getting hammered in the one area basically [Hunter's Mountain], Park Spur Road area and Cheticamp Lake, northern… they're getting a whack at the odd one all over but that's where they concentrate. Farther north, mostly.
One of the biggest problems we're having these days is the non-native guys going with the natives. The natives have the right of course, and the non-native guys don't, but it's a rent-an-Indian kind of thing. The non-natives are covering the trip, and they get to shoot a moose. And the Indian says he shot it…and in some cases he does, but in most cases it's the non-native guy doing the shooting.
There's a little bit of everything going on…she's a wild spot I tell ya. I stopped a non-native guy the other day; he had eight violations. The Indian with him was in there with a truck driving around somewhere. He [the non-native] was driving around on an ATV with no helmet on; he had a loaded .30-06 on his back, an uncased firearm; he had no orange, no registration for the bike, no plate or nothing on her, all dressed in cammo ….no orange even with him. He said he didn't realize the Indians had to wear orange, and I said "Well buddy they do, and you're not an Indian." It was the second week of the non-native hunt, and I said to him "Boy, you got a lot of wrongs…where's your hunting licence?" and he said "Well I don't got one…I'm with an Indian." And I says "Oh man, this is unreal. You're going home with a major fine here." I only gave him two tickets…for a loaded firearm and hunting without a licence, and gave him warnings for the other six. One fine is for $445; that's for transporting a loaded firearm in or on a vehicle, section 84.2 of the Wildlife Act; and the other one is for $330, that's section 4.5 of the moose huntin' reg's: huntin' moose without a valid moose huntin' licence.
This guy is from up the province, he come down with his buddies, two non-native guys and a native…that's usually what you see, a couple of non-natives… And it goes on steady. Every rig or every second rig…we DO have groups that come down and there's nothing but Indians in them, right? But very seldom, very seldom. If we do it's usually our local boys, from Eskasoni or Whycocomagh; they usually come up, just a couple of Indians, and some of them even do it right, you know? But it seems like every year it gets real busy at night. They just don't care, they go out there with the big spotlights and then we hammer them for a little while and write a lot of tickets and then she slackens off…and then they get back at 'er. They kinda forget.
The other night we had a wild night up there…we had one group just after 11 p.m., we just got there and didn't even have a chance to get our decoy out, and there was shots fired…anyway we charged one group right off the get-go and then 43 minutes later we had another group come, and they ran us, and we got them stopped on a dead-end road and they rammed our truck and went around us. They got away; but the RCMP stopped them at the bottom of the mountain. He got a whack of tickets-he had over 500 rounds of live ammunition in his vehicle, and 30 spent cartridges. And they never pick up their brass. Ever. That's telling us that he's shooting right out of the rig, eh? They don't pick up their garbage…we know they didn't pick them off the ground. Sometimes they'll clean the truck out and throw the garbage all around the gutpile.
These are guys we just got 18 months ago for the same offence-jacking. They were playing for high stakes because one guy had just got out of the pen. He spent that whole time in jail and just got out, and he'd be on parole, eh? So they weren't stoppin' for nothin', in fact we ceased the chase because somebody was going to end up killed. They were going to be on their roof in no time, because they were driving no lights on and hammer down at four o'clock in the morning. Just flying.
No booze was involved. It's not a real big problem, booze. You'll see empty cans and garbage around every moose site, every gut pile, but as far as when we're stopping them they may be smoking a little bit of dope but they're not drinkin'.
Why do these guys have to hunt at night when they can hunt all day long? That's the big question. That's what's ticking everybody off: they got no seasons or bag limits and they're out here at night when it's unsafe and unfair. It don't make any sense, but they're hardcore at it. It don't make any sense at all. But we're getting some feedback too from natives, from the natives themselves, like when they hear about some good charges and stuff, it's like "hey, good work boys, I'm just tickled pink. Good to see you out there." Callin' up our boss….I have an email I just got from our boss, who got a call about a native that we stopped just before daybreak, when we were coming off the mountain from working all night, and how happy this fella was to hear about his buddies that were caught, and how they deserved it.
We have a division big-time in the natives…we have guys patting us on the back and guys trying to outrun us. Big time split. We have guys stopping us and saying we've got to go to the old-time tag system. We got guys like old _______, he's a little bit rough, you know, but I respect him all to heck. I think the bands give him a little money to come up here to get moose to take back to them. He's a hardcore old Indian, and I stop him all the time up there, and he's got his share of tickets too but he's a good old guy, and guys like him telling me the other morning there we gotta go back to the tagging system. "You know we gotta do something about this," he said, "it's getting ridiculous." And he comes up a lot and he's finding it hard to get moose. He's concerned about not being able to come up here and take a moose every trip. That's his major concern. They're concerned about managing the resource so it'll be there in a few years-that's what I'm readin'.
Unfortunately the tickets we seem to be writing right recently here [for night hunting] have been all natives, but we're more apt to get non-natives with natives, and that's at night too. When they come up, they don't care, they figure it's the wild west up there and they can do anything they want, and there's so much back country that there's a very slim chance of getting caught. And that's the case.
We got the decoy set up and we're waiting for them to come to us-we've tried it all different ways, and we find we're hearing rifle shots off in the distance, and you try to pinpoint them, and then you go and you try to find them shots, and you screw everything up because they see an enforcement truck and their guns are put away and their lights are put away, hidden in the woods, and they don't come to you, you know… so even when we hear shots in the woods, it's frustrating as hell not to go chasing them, but we try to let them come to us and shoot the decoy, 'cause we find we've been missing so many charges by trying to find these shots in the dark, and there's so many roads up there it's just unbelievable-all Stora roads. The decoy is half a moose, and he's kinda ugly looking but they shoot him.
Out of our office there's three of us . Then the other office has another four. There's usually at any one time two guys working the Highlands, but if we do any night work we like to have four guys. The RCMP have been great to assist us when need be…they don't usually go on patrol with us or anything up there but when she hits the fan they're there. They're not usually too far away…well, it's far…no matter where you go up there it's far. You're always looking at a couple of hours for backup.
We have laid five different jacking offences in one evening, in one night…that's a busy night. You're usually looking at one or two, but a lot of paperwork and stuff goes with them. A lot of times if you're seizing a truck or a bike or something and you have to come off the mountain with it and store everything your shift is pretty well shot by then…but we like to keep them going right through, especially if it's busy. The other evening there when we were doing all the running around, the chasing and banging and stuff there was shots being fired in farther that we couldn't even deal with. In farther north you can see it all going on...the spotlights going and all that. She's a busy spot.
Now that deer season has started the non-natives have a defence ….a permit to carry a rifle, and now that's another major loophole. We get the boys up there they're gonna tell us they're huntin' deer and we know there's no deer up there. We know very well what's goin' on but we gotta get them squeezin' [firing] or in possession of a moose, or we nitpick them with no orange or a loaded firearm in the vehicle …guns uncased, we just keep nitpicking them. Basically we see the same guys over and over again, all the hardcore boys [including guys from the mainland].
This starts in June. As soon as the snow's off the mountain they start at 'er. And they hunt right through all the hot weather and everything. I'm sure there's a fair bit of it spoiled. It's not an easy job…we have reports of moose being dumped, and that's why: they can't get them home quick enough. The only ones that usually do it right is the boys from the mainland that come down with the big tubs of ice and everything …or the freezer trucks. Our local boys try to get them home and they lose a few. Quite a few I'd say.
I'd like to see a tagging system and maybe even …I'll tell ya, our biggest problem is the non-natives. I'd like to see the non-natives not even be able to go on the hunts with the boys. Like they do in Saskatchewan. Here the non-native guy is fair game…he can accompany the native, and he can't buy the meat from the Indian but he can get a gift. He can come in and get a permit…the Indian can give him the whole moose. And we know what's going on…but they can't say there's an exchange of money. The native can get it, but the non-native guy can't give it. But we know very well there's an exchange of something going on there, whether it's money or dope or somethin', but there's nothin' we can do about it. If the Indian wants to give him the meat, and he's got over 15 pounds and needs a permit, we've gotta give it to him. They get them at our DNR offices…it gets rubbed in our face. [They go up there and jack them, and then come down and get a permit for the meat.] It makes you grit your teeth. …there's a whole whack of frustrating aspects of this job.
There's loopholes in everything. There's always a loophole…we get guys saying they're hunting coyote when we know they're hunting moose. You don't even need a permit for coyotes anymore. You can carry a rifle until the end of deer season...but you can have a shotgun all year round, up until deer season starts here. You'd have to have a deer hunting licence to have a slug, a single projectile, but you'd have slugs hid on you somewheres…that's what the boys do.
And we get non-natives registering bait sites for bear, and hunting moose out of them, or not even hunting [there]…it's just their excuse to be carrying a rifle around. The boys, the way they register their sites, some of them, they register them right in bogs where moose will be, and say they're hunting bear, but we know very well they're hunting moose and not bear. This would be a non-native trick…the Indians don't mess with any of that stuff. They just go up and shoot them. Most of the guys who register sites are from down in industrial Cape Breton. Basically what they're saying is 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em", is the biggest thing I think. A lot of these guys don't agree with it but they hate like hell to miss the bandwagon too. They get a moose hunt, they always got moose meat, and you know you can almost not blame the boys, cause it's legal [for natives], and to just go and break the law a little bit by you squeezing the trigger instead of the natives….
When you ask me, what I'd personally like to see is a tagging system with so many tags put out, and us not care who kills the moose-like we know there's 20 tags to this band, 30 to that one, 100 to that one… and this guy's up there, and just what I'd like to see is any moose that we stop if it doesn't got a tag on it we can lay paper on the buddy. We don't care if it's his non-native buddy that shot it and paid for the hunt or whatever he did… we just want to have a tag on every moose shot. [Imagine]…working their guts out for $500 when they could take one moose instead of ten and make more money at it. [by marketing moose hunts]
We have one native that's on that Unama'ki/DNR council who is an enforcement guy also, so I daresay they've got an idea what's going on up here. We know [for any proposed system of management] it can only be [from] them…no if, ands or buts. It sounds like when you talk to most of them there's a lot of good people there and it sounds like they want something done. It's not because they're native, the non-natives are the same way - there's a bad bunch in every crowd, and they realize that too and there's something gotta be done. It'd just take the frustration level right down - when we see a moose, we stop it, we don't care who killed it if there's a tag with it, we don't care if it's an American that the Indian's guiding or if it's a non-native that's paying for his hunt.
It'll go on till the snow hits. In December they won't be able to run the mountain any more I wouldn't think. It should hit early December.
We're not up there every night but at least a couple of nights a week. There's day shift patrols too. A lot of guys hunt in the daytime also…especially after we do some big stings, you see the boys coming in at night, I'm not saying they wouldn't shoot the decoy but they don't got the spotlights out the window. They crash around in their trucks until it gets light enough to go driving around…a lot of it's driving around eh. They don't hike and tromp or go into the bogs or anything. They drive around till they see them. One of our biggest problems is loaded firearms in the vehicles, and they're hard to catch, right, because by the time you pull them over the bullets are all over the floor, you know…they just empty them as we're coming. But if you come up around a turn or anything and they're out of the truck you can guarantee the gun's loaded, if they can't get at it. We had one guy there, me and my partner, just to explain to you, we were coming out of Cheticamp Lake and it was 9 o'clock in the morning and we seen a truck coming towards us, and here's a guy standing in the back of the truck, and I'm driving and we hit the red and blues. We seen movement and I tell my partner watch it…I seen movement, he might be gonna unload his gun. And he's standing in the back of the truck with the rifle and then I say "Whoa now, he's got a gun. He's gonna shoot!" And here we are coming front on to him, and he's got a non-native guy driving his truck-this is a native guy-and he squeezes off at a moose before we come to a complete stop. The game warden's in front of him with the red and blues on. Head on, you know? And the movement we seen was he was putting his beer down. He had about six beers into him by nine o'clock in the morning. Normally it's not too bad for the booze, we don't see the drinkin', but this guy was, first thing in the morning. And he hits the moose in the antler and drops it. So we got out and demanded him to lay the gun down and he did that, and we put his hands on the roof and stuff and we checked him and cuffed him and got him out of the back of the truck. Then we went in and was gonna put down the moose, and he come in the woods with us after we got him all searched up and stuff, and he said "I shot a moose and he's right there". We were watching him, you understand, we weren't watching the moose. So we went over and the moose got up! I had him in the scope, I was going to finish him off and I said "jeez, he looks alright to me". And the Indian was saying "no, he was ******* hit, he was ******* hit, drop him". And I said nope, he looks healthy enough to me…and the moose walked away, and he looked back…he hit him in the horn. Another Indian shot him the next day, that's how I know that. Yup..he was mad that I wouldn't put his moose down after him shooting it from the back of the truck. I said "Buddy you're not getting it anyway, you're getting a whack of tickets and we're taking the moose"-it was a lot easier for us to let it live. Oh buddy…and he said that's how he was trained to hunt, out of the back of a truck, and he didn't think he was doing anything wrong.
[I said] "Well buddy you tell your trainer it just cost you." He got pretty steep fines. He got open liquor plus loaded firearm in a vehicle plus a bunch of stuff.
We go for any safety violations. They have to have orange. In the Highlands they aren't listed roads so you can shoot right off the road, though you shouldn't be shooting up them…it's unsafe to shoot up a road or around a turn. Can't have a loaded firearm in a vehicle; they don't have to have it encased but they can't have it loaded. As I say there's always little tricks we can play on them and stuff to get them. A lot of times it's just luck, where you come around a turn and buddy's out of the truck and you stop and check him; the first thing you want to do is check his gun because you know there's one in the pipe.
When the moose are in the rut, right around when the non-native hunts on, it's really busy during the non-native hunt with the natives….this year the natives just giv'er during the non-native hunt, they never slackened off a bit. There was more Indians on the hill than non-natives for sure. And there was a lot of night work going on. A fair bit of poaching going on, I'm not saying it was all natives…there was the odd non-native guy doing it too.
I've got some good information from an informant up the province there who's a native himself, and he's statin' that they're getting' a little bit nervous of running the roads with their spotlights because we've been dinging so many. So what they're doing is they're going into the bogs with night scopes. They've been going to Boston and getting night scopes by the bunch…a half dozen at a time. He said that was a new thing going on this season, that they're doing a lot of runs to Boston, filling orders for night scopes. They jack their way into the bogs, and they jack their way out, but they wouldn't go driving around all the roads. Mainly trucks, and then they'll hike into the bog where they have a staging set up and hunt that with the spotlights or the night scopes, whatever they have. What this one group is doing a lot of is building staging, the staging for doing roofing-scaffolding-because a lot of times around the edges of the bogs there's not much for trees, right? And they cammo it with brush, and you got a big high scaffolding in the middle of a bog. It's illegal to interfere with a legal hunt, and who's to say it's not a legal hunt…but a lot of times that stuff goes missing.
Hopefully we're going to have something in place next season. I was hoping this year, but she's just been a zoo, and it's getting worse every year. Every year I can watch it grow…every year it's getting worse and worse. Every year. I'm going into my seventh year, and it was active when I started but nothing like the last few years. It's just gotten more popular and more popular. More people getting into it. I mean there's people coming down and there's guys that stay there for a month. There's one group from the mainland right now that have been there for over a month. Non-native guys with Native Council Indians. Off-reserve guys, and they only hunt after the first full moon in September, just an agreement they have I guess, and they do have a tagging system: they get a moose tag, a bear tag, and two deer tags, I do believe. And when we stop them, they are to have that tag, but what we hear they're doing is that they're boiling the tag, and they open it again, and going back up with it. It's a little plastic tag and it's got a ball on the end of it that you drive up into the end of the tag, almost like a snap-tie, it plugs into each other, but I guess when you boil it you can back it right out. I've never tried it but that's what my informant tells me.
There are a lot of good ones that come and take their one moose and they're happy with that and think everybody should be doing it, but then there's the others. There will be one Native Council, and a lot of times it's a woman …an old lady, and then the rest of them in the rig will be all non-natives. We know what's going on and we know who's doing the huntin', and it's frustrating.
It's foggy, misty, bad up there a lot, just like the night …this guy I just charged with the cammo on, I said "buddy, you're nuts! You're here dressed all in cammo, even dark like a moose," and I said "you didn't hear about buddy just getting shot up here not long ago? Apart from being illegal, you're crazy to be in the woods without orange on." I know I don't walk too far without my orange on up there….
We had one guy in the wrong zone , who had a tag for one zone and shot a moose in the other one, and as we get investigating we find his blind is in the park, he did have a native with him, maybe to cover for him, we don't know, but as we check into that the native is banned from firearms…so it just keeps getting deeper and deeper…
Definitely more enforcement officers would help…we get, well, not burned out but we work hard. And like I say it's frustrating. Even to know there's other work being done and it's not just you…we try to get up there every chance we get but you think about the enforcement it could be getting if we did have more guys, and I feel bad for that."
Continued, native solutions...
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