After a three-year legal saga, a judge has just decided that a hundred deer located in an urban park in the suburbs of Montreal can be killed. This affair has inflamed a large part of Quebec since 2020, when the municipality of Longueuil decided to euthanize around fifteen excess deer, a population that has increased by 238% over the past six years. This decision had even earned death threats to elected officials.
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With our correspondent in Quebec, Pascale Guericolas
A well-known flamboyant lawyer who takes up the cause of these animals threatened with death, petitions of several tens of thousands of names opposing this announced disappearance, experts underlining before the judge the degradation that this overpopulation causes the urban park of deer… These are some of the elements that have transformed this affair into a real bone of contention between the public authorities and animal defenders, some even threatening with death elected officials in favor of the slaughter of animals.
Several commentators see it as a “Bambi syndrome”, while deer are swarming in Quebec. Others analyze this event as a sign of growing urbanization of a population that has fewer and fewer hunters. Cut off from their rural roots, many would lose sight of the need to maintain a balance between the different species within the parks.
While the deer of discord inflame public opinion, the woodland caribou disappears in eastern Quebec, almost amid general indifference. Unlike the deer, it has the fault of living far from the eyes and the heart of the big cities.