Whistler employee told to shoot 70 sled dogs in post-Olympic cull | BC SPCA probes mass killing

PHOTO | Wolfgang Hägele

Please note the video is from a previous case. Contacts for Outdoor Adventures Whistler below.

Please click on and sign Prosecute for the senseless slaughter of 100 Sled Dogs

From The Globe and Mail

By Robert Matas

An employee of Outdoor Adventure Whistler has received compensation for post traumatic distress disorder after he was required to shoot at least 70 healthy sledding dogs.

The huskies, weighing about 40 to 50 pounds, were used by the sledding company to take tourists into the wilderness around Whistler during the 2010 Winter Olympics but were uneconomic to keep after the Games were over and the tourists went home.

“People might be shocked, in the sense, you spend your $150 and you see 20 dogs hooked up in an idyllic setting in Whistler,” Marcie Moriarty, the general manger of cruelty investigation for the BC SPCA said Monday in an interview. “What do you do not see is the 200-plus dogs tethered back at the compound,” she said

“When the demand is not there, presumably what happened in this case, they just decided to put them down. Apparently the reason was that they needed to reduce the herd,” she said.

The company’s general manager, who has not been identified publicly, says in his claim for compensation that he went out on April 21, 2010, and April 23, 2010, with a shotgun and proceeded to kill the dogs.

“What is extremely upsetting is to read what he described – some of them requiring mulitple shots, his having to slit their throats, dogs faces being blown off and they were still running around, dogs that he thought had been dead, that he put in what he described as a masked grave and he looks back and sees her trying to climb out,” Ms. Moriarty said.

“That one, to me, I had to stop reading them and pick it up later. It is just so upsetting.”

Ms. Moriarty said she believes the killings are Criminal Code offences. “I have no doubt he has PTDD but does that absolve him? No one can force you to commit a Criminal Code offence,” she said.

“As for the company, they are morally responsible, absolutely, for any connection to this.”

The general manager’s lawyer Corey Steinberg was not available early Monday for a comment. A WorkSafeBC spokesperson said claims for compensation are confidential and the provincial agency could not release the compensation decision that sets out the circumstances of the event.

The company has said that 100, not 70 dogs, were killed.


RELATED | Neglected Sled Dogs Rescued

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From CTV News | BC SPCA probes mass killing of sled dogs
By Bethany Lindsay

Police and the B.C. SPCA are investigating “horrific” reports that a Whistler tour company slaughtered at least 100 healthy sled dogs last year, dumping their bodies into a mass grave.

Marcie Moriarty, general manager for SPCA cruelty investigations, told ctvbc.ca that a worker at Outdoor Adventures Whistler filed a WorkSafe BC claim for post-traumatic stress after being ordered to shoot dozens of dogs to death.

“It’s horrific,” Moriarty said.

“I’ve seen some pretty terrible things, but reading this [claim], I had to put it down at times.”

Moriarty said the slaughter was conducted between April 21 and 23. On his claim, the worker wrote that he had killed 70 dogs, but the company allegedly corrected that number to 100.

The dogs were reportedly killed because of a “slow winter season.”

Whistler RCMP Staff Sgt. Steve LeClair said police are investigating the allegations, and criminal charges are possible, including cruelty to animals and injuring or endangering animals.

In the documents, the worker describes a dog that survived a shot to the face: “(his) eye was hanging off, and (he) was still running around,” Moriarty said.

Another apparently dead dog was dumped into the mass grave, but the worker later noticed (her) trying to pull (herself) out.

“The fact that he did this in front of all the other dogs tethered there, I can’t even imagine,” Moriarty said.

Vet-supervised lethal injections would have been the ‘humane way’ to cull the dogs, she added. “It is technically legal to shoot an animal, as long as (he) dies instantly. That most certainly did not happen in this instance.”

She said the SPCA will now have to dig up the mass grave to complete its investigation, which will include the possibility of criminal charges.

The Vancouver Humane Society is now calling for a ban on sled-dog tours.

“The details of how these dogs were killed are absolutely shocking,” VHS spokesman Peter Fricker said in a release.

“This is what happens when animals are exploited for profit and become surplus to requirements when business is bad.”

Outdoor Adventures has not returned calls from ctvbc.ca.



Related:

Outdoor Adventures Whistler

• ph.604 932 0647
• fax.604 932 0657
• email.info@tagwhistler.com

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• Compassion
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• Animal Wrongs

just when one thinks
enough abomination
on their plate
along comes this
monstrosity of behavior
man’s blood lust
in its perpetual
search for sate
how anyone can do this
is beyond my comprehension
if these mutants are ever
caught
they need a life time
of incarceration

Karen Lyons Kalmenson