Who you gonna call? Wildlife Control Hotline!

shannon woodward
airdrie city view

Racoons, rabbits and skunks, oh my!
Finally, there is an alternate solution to wildlife control that offers a humane and innovative method of ridding your property of those cuddly but perhaps unwanted mammals living beneath your deck.
The Alberta Institute for Wildlife Conservation (AIWC) recently launched its Wildlife Control Hotline, a service provided to those plagued by intrusions by mammals and birds of all sizes.
Ken Cheek, director, says that the service was created to respond to the hundreds of calls the Institute receives each year with similar complaints.
“We get thousands of calls from homeowners that are experiencing a wildlife invasion. Where they’ve got squirrels living in their attic or racoons coming down their chimney,” he says. “Because we’re non-profit and run mainly by volunteers, we just haven’t had the resources or the manpower to do anything about it.”
Until now.
Last fall, the Institute presented its idea for the program to the Calgary Foundation, a philanthropic society dedicated to making connections between donors and community organizations for the long-term benefit of Calgary and surrounding area. The Foundation was more than impressed with the program and committed to donating the start-up costs as well as funding for the first and second years of its inception.
A niche service, the Wildlife Control Hotline is unique to Alberta and Cheek, a Wildlife Zoologist trained specially by AAA Wildlife Control in Toronto, is one of only a handful of individuals trained for this type of work in all of Canada.
“Up until now it has been left in the hands of extermination companies. So that’s what’s going to happen to the animal, it’s going to be exterminated. Or what some of them will do is take these animals and dump them out in the country,” explains Cheek.
Many of the animals he removes have been so urbanized that rehabilitating them into a wild setting leaves them with a very small chance for survival, he added.
“They think they’re helping them by releasing them back into the wild. But these are urbanized animals, they’re accustomed to living alongside humans now, they have for generations, they don’t know what the wild is. So when you take them out and dump them into the wild, there’s a 60 per cent chance it’s going to die within two weeks. They’ve got to find new food sources, new shelter, new territory, and there are new predators.”
In fact, Cheek uses a patented method that allows the animals to move off on their own with little to no human interaction.
“That animal will always have a second den site, so it will go to that alternative,” he says.
And unlike other animal removal services, the Wildlife Control Hotline works with the property owner to rectify the situation by coming up with a long-term solution to keeping animals away and guarantees the work for one to ten years.
“We don’t go in there and just trap and relocate the animal, we address your problem. So the problem isn’t that you’ve got skunks under your deck, the problem is your deck.”
The Wildlife Control Hotline is a paid service and rates vary depending on the animal and the work involved in relocating it. All proceeds from the service go directly back to the Alberta Institute for Wildlife Conservation.
For more information or to book a free consultation with Ken Cheek, call 403-946-2361 or visit the website at www.aiwc.ca

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