When an animal is brought to us here at Aspen Valley, we have one major objective: it should go back to the wild, where it can live a full and natural life.
This is not always possible. We do have large, comfortable enclosures as natural as possible, where an animal incapable of a natural life, can live happily. However, if at all possible, back to the wild.
This last visiting day a gentleman stopped to talk to me about an experience he had had setting a fox free. It had been snared in a trap, the rope tight around its throat. With considerable effort, the man managed to get the rope off, and let the fox go. It ran free and then it stopped, turned around, and looked at him for a long, long moment before it ran again and lost itself in the woods. Why did it stop? Of course, we can’t prove anything, but, from long experience with releasing I deeply suspect, it was a “thank you.”
I was releasing three beavers which I had raised from tiny kits. The three of them ran as fast as they could toward the pond, but one stopped, turned and came racing back to me. It put its paws on my knees, reached up, rubbed noses and then turned and ran after the others into the pond.
Freedom is the best gift we can give to any animal, which comes into our care. Over the last 25 years I have had the privilege of taking young bears away into the woods and letting them go. Ninety nine point nine per cent of the time, they run. Like the one in this picture.
The bear had been orphaned as a very small cub. Someone brought it to us. We had fed it, kept it warm, given it other bear cubs for companionship.
When winter came it hibernated very naturally, with a few cubs, deep in a shelter in the bear enclosure. Fat, furry and warm - asleep through all the snow and storm. But spring would mean naturally parting from its mother, and freedom. We could supply the freedom.
Ed Brown coaxed it into the carrying cage, put it into the back of the truck and headed to a good place, more than an hour north of Parry Sound.
Down a back road and then another, more remote, and another, back to a place where bears are not hunted.
Without doubt Ed said a few kind words of advice and goodbye before he lifted the cage down, faced it up the trail, and opened it.
Bear didn’t need any coaxing. It didn’t even stop to say either goodbye or thank you. As fast as it could go, it was up the trail, and away.
Free.
(Audrey Tournay is the executive director of Aspen Valley Wildlife Sanctuary and a regular contributor to the Beacon Star.)