This Conservation Officer Who Was Fired For Refusing To Kill Bear Cubs Won Legal Battle Clearing His Name
By Anthony McLennan / Truth Theory
Bryce Casavant, a Canadian conservation officer, has won a legal battle to clear his name after he had been fired in 2015 for failing to kill two bear cubs.
The original incident occurred when Casavant was called out to a mobile home park near Port Hardy in British Columbia after residents had spotted a female black bear foraging through a freezer containing meat and fish.
British Columbia’s policy in these situations – where a bear allegedly becomes reliant on human food sources, is for the animal to be killed.
But after executing the mother bear, Casavant was told that the baby bears had not been eating the human food. He therefore felt that the cubs deserved a chance to survive and he took them to a vet. From there, the small bears were taken to the North Island Recovery Centre and later released back into the wild.
The story should really have ended there. But instead, Casavant’s refusal to kill the cubs resulted in his supervising officer issuing a formal notice of complaint alleging ‘the disciplinary default of neglect of duty’.