To the Editor:
I’m proud to call myself Canadian. I love our many wonderful back to nature places right outside our back door.
From the east coast to the west coast with its’ ruggedness and great splendour it can be breathtaking at times.
I have a few favourite places I go to with my husband, come the weekend.
Ripley, Madden and Sawmill Lakes, for example.
It makes me so disgusted to go there and see all the garbage some people leave behind.
Things like old tents, sleeping bags, people’s dirty clothes and along with used toiletries, ropes hanging from trees and on the ground.
Along with this is used toilet paper and feces in the bushes, with beer cans and broken glass and leftover food left at the waterfront and in it.
The mother bear and her cubs will be shot in the end, for they come to associate people with foofd, and become habituated and unafraid in time.
Just because someone is too lazy to pack up their garbage and take it with them when they leave their camp site.
I had to rescue a small duckling from under the dock that was fighting for its life and would have died if I hadn’t come along. The duckling had plastic from a six pack and fishing line on its body and around its feet.
It’s not the first time I had to save a creature of nature from someone’s garbage. Some lives must be put down, like the little fawn I had to shoot many years ago. Someone was getting rid of their garbage in the forest for years, along with some razor barbwire, out in a lovely forest meadow with a river running through it. A deer with three fawns came to drink in the river every day. I got the call to go out as I was an animal rescuer at the time. There was nothing I could do for the little fawn was so badly cut up by the razor wire I had to shoot her, as the mother and other two fawns looked from the bushes. I went back to the office with a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes and wrote out the report.
I wonder if these people who think they are smart by getting rid of their garbage in our forests have ever had to look into a fawn’s deep brown eyes or any animal’s eyes in that case and felt its pain and suffering before having to shoot it. I think not.
If the forestry bathrooms are unclean, dig a hole and do your business and bury it, don’t do it for the whole world to see.
Would you like it if you had a nice home and property and some person came and put their garbage and feces on your lawn and toilet-papered your trees?
If you’re not proud to be a Canadian and can’t clean up after yourself and leave a clean camp for others to enjoy, then move to a different country where there is garbage and sickness running wild. Please keep our wilderness clean and unpolluted for the next generations to come. Don’t be stupid and throw your garbage in our forest. Use your brains.
After all, we are humans and are to be above the wild creatures in intellect.
Wendy Cordell, Keremeos