Canadian Blog

by Barry Kent MacKay,
Senior Program Associate

Born Free USA's Canadian Representative

Barry is an artist, both with words and with paint. He has been associated with our organization for nearly three decades and is our go-to guy for any wildlife question. He knows his animals — especially birds — and the issues that affect them. His blogs will give you just the tip of his wildlife-knowledge iceberg, so be sure to stay and delve deeper into his Canadian Project articles. If you like wildlife and reading, Barry's your man. (And we're happy to have him as part of our team, too!)

Habitat Destroyed; No Surprise Here

Trapping Conservation Argument Again Shown to Be a Myth

Published 07/05/11

Muskrat Falls
(Photograph by Eckart Dege)

The CBC’s flagship news program, “The National,” featured a story a week or two ago about Innu in Labrador voting on whether to accept a massive, multibillion-dollar engineering effort at a place called Muskrat Falls, Labrador. There was an Innu woman, posed against the magnificent but doomed scenery of her ancestral home, tearfully explaining how Muskrat Falls was so integral to her personal life and that of her people, part of the source of their survival through a long history of habitation.

Or Is It Zoocheck, or Elephants, She Dislikes?

Published 06/17/11

Toronto City Councillor Gloria Lindsay Luby and I have never formally met, but I think she doesn’t like me. Or maybe it’s not that personal, and it’s just an organization I’m with she doesn’t like. The organization is Zoocheck-Canada, on whose board I happen to sit. But I could be wrong about both; sometimes I get the impression she doesn’t like elephants.

Killing an Endangered Species: Does It Make Sense?

Published 05/31/11

What I’m about to write about makes no sense, is an astounding example of ... what? Stupidity for sure, and much else, none of it good, and all of it funded by me, unwillingly, and the rest of Ontario’s taxpayers, most of them unknowingly.

How Our Elite Masters Shaft Reason, Logic, Facts and Animals

Published 05/17/11

Among my list of appalling politicians is one who, if you don’t live in Ontario, you have probably never heard of: Michael Bryant. A Harvard Law School graduate, he perches upon a comfortably high rung of the social ladder, and was the youngest person ever to be appointed attorney general of the province of Ontario, in which post he advocated for a complete ban on handguns and for the destruction of any cars involved in street racing.

The Road Kill Who Survived

Published 05/04/11

I had just turned the corner, driving onto the road that circles Markville, a large shopping center in the middle of the suburban Markham, where I live, just north of Toronto. Sadly, on the northbound lane, right in the space where cars’ tires go, was a dead crow, on its back. Obviously it had just been hit; the next car would almost certainly squash him, but he was intact.

Insanity Rules Once More

Published 04/27/11

In April spring flows northward through the deciduous forests and woods, touching off colorful displays of flowers and filling the morning mists with an increasingly complex “dawn chorus” of bird song. It is great to be alive.

Bad Things Happen in the First Four Days of April

Published 04/19/11

All that I am about to report happened in the first four days of April, and has left me dazed at the sheer, absurd, perfidy of my own species.

The Extraordinarily Unusual Really Should Be the Norm

Published 04/07/11

My colleagues who have formed an organization to protect a native species of bird from being shot in large numbers while nesting were shocked to read that a “land conservancy” agrees with us. So does a conservationist.

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