Alberta no longer has a human-wildlife conflict specialist. Some want that to change
CBC
Alberta's former human-wildlife conflict specialist is calling on the province to fill the position he left vacant last year, given the volume of human and bear interactions seen in the province this fall.
Jay Honeyman retired in spring 2022, after a decade spent working as the province's only large carnivore conflict biologist — primarily dealing with grizzly bears.
Honeyman said his job was proactive in nature, and that he focused on preventing conflicts between humans and bears from happening in the first place. Often, this was done through education and by removing or securing attractants like food sources from public and private properties.
The goal? To improve coexistence between people and bears, and to increase tolerance for grizzly bears in Alberta, said Honeyman.
Today, Honeyman's post remains unfilled.
"Bottom line, there is no dedicated position to doing this kind of work and bears and people are interacting more than ever and it's not going to change. It's going to continue to be an ongoing issue," said Honeyman, whose regional role covered the Rocky Mountain House area down to the Montana border.
Honeyman added that people living and working in bear country need to feel safe, something difficult to achieve when there is no one working to prevent bears from causing property damage or creating public safety concerns.
"If landowners are not going to be tolerant of grizzly bears where they live and work and recreate, then we're going to end up with a lot of bears being killed because of a low tolerance for their presence."
Honeyman said he was hopeful someone would be hired to replace him, but that he retired during a year of ministry changes and later, budget cuts. Now, he said he isn't surprised that the role remains vacant.
After a number of human-bear interactions throughout Alberta this fall, Honeyman said it's time the province follows its own recommendations and hires another expert to fill the role.
The province's latest Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan, released in 2020, calls for a database to track the location, cause and response to human and grizzly bear conflicts.
It also calls for more conflict specialists to be hired in areas where there's high need.
Honeyman said most of what's listed in the 83-page plan has not been completed.
"It's been written up, but it hasn't gotten off the page. It needs to get put into practice. It needs to get executed, and it hasn't been," said Honeyman.