Group rescues dogs from cull in northern Quebec

Buddy (L), a Black Lab breed mix, and Rosco, a Duck Tolling Retriever mix, sit with a handler at the North Shore Animal League America (NSALA) in Port Washington, New York, July 27, 2010. She is one of seven out of 36 dogs that were rescued from a "dog shoot" in Northern Quebec that was scheduled to control the dog population.


An animal welfare group says it helped rescue three dozen animals from a summer “dog shoot” in northern Quebec, as it tries to help the Inuit find a new way of dealing with unwanted dogs.

“It was an organized roundup of unwanted dogs,” said Jan Hannah, the Canadian project manager for International Fund for Animal Welfare. The dogs are being transported to shelters in Ontario and New York state, where they could find new homes within weeks.

So-called dog shoots, dog kill days or dog cleanup days are common in Canada’s remote northern communities, where veterinarians are scarce and canines reproduce at will. Typically, the dogs are picked up, thrown in a truck and driven to a dump, where they are shot in the head with a hunting rifle.

Pierre Russel, treasurer of Kuujjuarapik, confirmed that nuisance dogs in his tiny Inuit community in northern Quebec are regularly taken to the dump and shot.

“We have to do that occasionally, yes,” he said. “They are dogs that are endangering the people. When they start to be scary, when people are afraid to walk in the street, we have to do that.”

“It’s a choice we have to make. It’s not easy,” he added.

He said it was not fair to single out Kuujjuarapik for conducting a dog cull.

“We have no vet, no SPCA. We’re very isolated,” he said. “It’s happening all over Nunavik (northern Quebec). We’re not the only one.”

The International Fund for Animal Welfare uncovered the practice while providing veterinary services in eight towns in northern Quebec, all of which had culls, over the past eight years.

In the past, IFAW has not been able to stop the dog shoots.

“I don’t see my role as going into the communities and telling them what to do,” Hannah said. “I prefer to assist and empower.”

This year, however, the group found out about the cull in advance.

“Once we heard about the dog shoot, we got together with community members who wanted to find a humane solution,” Hannah said, applauding the townsfolk for their initiative.

“It’s fantastic that they wanted to try something different.”


She refused to name the towns that have culls because, she said, the problem is not isolated to those towns, and because stray dogs don’t fare much better further south, where shelters are jammed with unwanted pups.

“They do it because they have to. They don’t do it because it’s a hee-haw,” she said.

The problem, Russel said, is that nobody in his village of 1,100 is qualified to spay or neuter dogs, so the stray population gets out of control and the animals begin roaming around in packs, scaring kids on their way to school.

This year, however, for the first time, Kuujjuarapik has scraped together money for a veterinarian to come operate on female dogs.

“The better solution would be if there were some responsible dog owners, but that’s not the case,” Russel said.