I agree that there are quite a lot of crows in Vancouver. Maybe too many, I don't know. But it the solution really to kill them all? This is a situation by no means unique to Vancouver. Many cities in North America have this same problem. Generally, municipal governments of such cities encourage citizens to get out their old rifles and shoot them out of the sky. They hold contests to see who can shoot down the most birds. They get their Parks and Rec people to shoot them down all day. Sometimes the birds die, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes they are just injured. Apparently the city residents aren't all that good with a gun. So the injured crows are left there, in various stages of death...can't fly, can't eat, whatever. Anyways, that's the culling part of it.
Now....is it necessary to do this? Philip Till, on the local radio station CKNW was complaining about the decline of "songbirds". Well, this is maybe true. The number of crows are increasing and the number of so called "songbirds" decreasing. So what do we do? We shoot down all the crows? Does this mean that the songbirds will come back? No, of course it doesn't. Instead of looking at the symptoms of the problem, we need to solve the root of the problem. If you have a cold, you can nasal spray yourself, but it'll wear off after four hours or something. Then you gotta do it again. The only way to cure yourself for good, is to get rid of the cold entirely. So are you going to, every four years, load up the old machinegun, and mow down the whole row sitting on the telephone wire? Some cities do. Doesn't seem to make sense to me.
The way I see it, you look at WHY there are so many crows. And what's the reason? It's because of us! We are ruining the habitat for those songbird things. Less and less parkland. What are they going to eat? Where to find food? Crows eat garbage. So what are we doing when we expand our city? We're actually building crow homes. And if you build crow homes, what do you expect to happen, other than crows coming and other birds leaving? And you can shoot all the crows you want. But the city is still a crow home. And more crows will come to roost. Killing the crows won't help the songbird population. They aren't going to want to live in a crow home, when they got a songbird home out in the forest. So the problem is this. Too much accessible garbage, too little parkland.
And the solution doesn't seem especially difficult. Build more parkland. I don't see how this could hurt, even for the people. Sure, you could have a 50-story skyscraper in that place, and get an extra $120 million or something. But to build a park there, to increase the songbirds...how can that be such a bad thing? The other thing, and more important thing, is to get a better handle on garbage in the city. Get tighter garbage lids. Don't litter so much. Keep it clean. Then not only the crows will decline, but also raccoons and skunks. And this one has side-benefits also. The city will be cleaner! It'll smell better. How can this be a bad thing?
So it's possible to get rid of the damn things while not having to shoot a single one. If we want to get rid of them at all, I'd say the non-killing method is far superior. And has some pretty significant side-effects to booot.