At the beginning of April, Anne Crowley and her six-year-old Australian Shepherd mix, Luna, headed out on a walk down a forest service road near their Pemberton Meadows home.
Suddenly, a couple of kilometres out, Luna started acting weird.
“In a short period of time, she started staggering and couldn’t walk," recalled Crowley. “I didn’t know how I’d get her home. She’s big and we were out of cell service.”
Alarmed, the pair slowly made their way home with Luna taking frequent breaks.
“I nursed her through the night,” said Crowley. “Thank God she threw up quite quickly. I knew she had been poisoned.”
By the morning, Luna started to seem a bit better. Now, several weeks later, “she’s totally physically recovered, but, mentally, she’s afraid of everything,” she added.
A couple of months earlier, in late February, another nearby resident came across a dead coyote on his property.
“It looked like it was in good shape, no signs of trauma or attack, so something didn’t seem right,” wrote the resident, who wished to remain anonymous, in a message. “Under it was some type of processed meat that it had vomited.”
The man called the Conservation Officer Service (COS) who came to pick up the carcass for assessment.
“The meat was gone and I feared it was eaten by another animal,” he wrote. “A few weeks later I found another coyote that had been eaten by probably a bear. I am sure this coyote had also been poisoned.”
When Crowley told him about her dog getting sick, he pieced together that it could be the same poison and urged her to call a conservation officer.
In the meantime, the coyote carcass was tested and a report came back confirming it was poisoned, the man said.
Now, COS is asking anyone with information—or anyone who finds more dead wildlife in the Pemberton Meadows area—to call the RAPP line at 1-877-952-7277. Under the wildlife act, anyone caught intentionally poisoning wildlife can be fined up to $250,000.
In a Facebook post, COS also said several other dogs had been reported sick in the area.
“We suspected someone was poisoning coyotes, which is a stupid thing to do,” Crowley said. “For one thing, we’re all interconnected … If you poison them, you poison the whole food chain down the line. Unsuspecting dogs can get into it. Some animal might carry that piece of poisoned meat to some place where another animal gets into it.”
To that end, she’s grateful Luna survived. “She seems to have forgiven me,” she said. “It was really confusing for her. We’re always together, but she was looking at me like, ‘This terrible thing happened. Did you do this to me?’ They’re very reactive. They get spooked, like horses, and don’t always think logically.”
- By Alyssa Noel / Pique Newsmagazine
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