After last week's controversial goose murder in the town of Ulster, a 19-year-old named Christopher Roser has been charged with the act. Instead of being charged with animal cruelty, however, he's being charged with "the unlawful taking of a migratory bird, a violation under the state Department of Environmental Conservation Law," according to the Daily Freeman.
This is a little odd, for a couple of reasons. First, New York State itself is in the goose-killing business: Canada geese have exploded in numbers, and become somewhat of a nuisance in recent years. In July, state officials corralled 400 geese together in Brooklyn and then gassed them to death. (The idea is to have fewer of them flying into jet engines.)
Secondly, many Canada geese have given up migrating altogether, so it's possible that the late goose of the Ulster incident wasn't, technically, a migratory bird. The DEC itself has declared that New York State's Canada goose population should be about a third of what it is -- though, they emphasize,
there are absolutely no plans by DEC or others to capture, euthanize and bury 170,000 resident geese to achieve the statewide population goal of 85,000 birds.
