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We advocate on all animal protection and exploitation issues, including experimentation, factory farming, rodeos, breeders and traveling animal acts.

Animal Defenders of Westchester
P.O. Box 205
Yonkers, NY 10704

Articles

Geese Summit in the News

From Newsday.com
20 June 2013

Goosinator, Geesebusters and Goose Chasers square off at Westchester geese summit

"The Goosinator is remote controlled and can go into water, where the geese are," Klein explained. "I (use) it whenever I can. Now when the geese see it, they run."

The animals are so conditioned to be afraid of the Goosinator that it doesn't even have to be zipping across the course fairways or lakes to be effective, Klein said: "They see it in the (golf) car, they run."

Several people, like Mary Castrovelli of Yonkers, said they were at the summit to make sure that Westchester's towns and villages don't revert back to the catch-and-kill solution, which sparked an outcry from animal rights activists.
Animals shouldn't be killed for doing what nature intends, Castrovelli told people at the summit.

"We will go down in history," she said, "as the civilization that killed geese before they poop."

Before the discussion turned toward less-exciting methods of geese control, such as egg oiling techniques, attendees heard from Pete Rizzo of Hudson Valley Wild Goose Chasers. Rizzo's company uses border collies to chase the waterfowl away from Harriman State Park, Orange County's Hessian Lake, and Bear Mountain State Park.

The dogs don't actually harm the geese, Rizzo said, but they're effective deterrents.

"What I offer works," Rizzo told the audience. "If you have a solid egg deprivation program and haze the geese with collies you can have goose-free property."

In Mamaroneck, where groundskeepers said athletic fields and parks near the town's harbor were rendered unusable because they were saturated with geese droppings, elected leaders have employed the "egg deprivation" program after initially deciding to cull the birds.

But the process is labor-intensive: USDA officials had to return three times to coat some 95 eggs with oil to keep them from hatching, and that doesn't solve the problem of adult geese pooping on fields used for sports and recreation.
Rob Guadagno of Geesebusters says his method is the cheapest of all. It involves flying a remote-controlled device that emits a sound frequency the birds don't like. The combination of what looks like a swooping predator and an awful noise are enough to terrorize the geese into leaving -- and to condition them not to return, he said.

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