The director of Sauvetage Animal Rescue, Eric Dusseau, confirms that all solutions offered by his organization to the city of Longueuil have been rejected.

It’s David against Goliath, Eric Dusseau said in an interview on Tuesday. We are slowly heading towards a dead end.

Longueuil was planning to slaughter half of the population of white-tailed deer living in Michel-Chartrand Park, or about fifteen.

But the city backed down last November after the idea sparked outrage and even led to threats against the mayor.

Instead, Eric Dassault’s group proposed moving the animals to a reserve, but the plan failed in February after the University of Montreal’s veterinary ethics committee deemed the strategy dangerous.

Deer Breeding

Meanwhile, deer numbers in the park continue to grow.

There are now about 70 deer in the park – a number according to Eric Dusseau, and it’s more than what urban green spaces can handle.

Eric Dusseau said of city officials that they didn’t want to move them. Great, let’s sterilize them then.

But the head of the ethics committee, Jean-Pierre Vilancourt, said that even if he did not want to encourage euthanasia, other options seemed unrealistic.

Jean-Pierre Vilancourt added that sterilization would be an expensive process in which Quebecers lacked experience.

It won’t solve the problem, it just slows it down., did he say.

lack of political will

Jean-Pierre Vilancourt sees a lack of political will to deal with the issue ahead of the November municipal elections.

The current situation, he said, is that we’ve had a huge increase in human-caused catastrophic deer numbers because we’ve been feeding them for years. It is our fault.

Eric Dussault asserts that his company is willing to pay to sterilize the deer so the animals are not killed. One option, he explained, would be a contraceptive vaccine. He suggests a product made by a Canadian company that can sterilize deer for up to six years.

We offer other solutions, but we were told they were too expensive, and we were not tasked with spaying the deer, but moving them so that our solution would not be recognized.Eric Dusseau said.

Representatives from the city of Longueuil could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.