A Wildlife Article used with permission from All-Creatures.org

In this letter, Joan Harrison urges New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to issue an executive order protecting the city’s geese. She addresses misconceptions about Canada geese and discusses the systematic violence perpetrated by the government against these and other non-human animals—and the implications of this violence for human society.

Letter Urges NYC Mayor Mamdani to Write Executive Order Protecting Geese

By Joan Harrison
July 2026

Images from Canva

'Your Majesty,' the spokesman of the beasts continued, 'we and our fathers lived on earth before the creation of Adam, forefather of the human race. We dwelt in the countryside and roamed the country trails. . . . Each kind looked after its own, absorbed in . . rearing our young on the good food and water God allotted us, safe and unmolested in our domain. Night and day we praised and hallowed God, and God alone . . .

'Ages later God created Adam, the ancestor of humankind, and made him His vice-regent on earth. His offspring reproduced . . . Humans encroached on our ancestral lands. They captured sheep, cows, horses, mules, and asses from among us and enslaved them . . .

'Some of us fled to deserts, wastes, or mountain tops, but the Adamites pursued us . . . Whoever fell into their hands was yoked, haltered, caged, and fettered. They slaughtered and flayed him, . . . or put him to even harsher tortures, torments ultimately beyond description. Even so, the sons of Adam are not through with us. Now they claim this is their inviolable right, that they are our masters and we their slaves. They treat any of us who escapes as a fugitive, rebel, and shirker -- all with no proof or reason beyond mere force.'

("The Case of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn," Chapter 22 of The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, a tenth century Islamic text)

. . . all creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth; the creatures, too, need to be free.

(Thomas Muntzer [1489-1525] in a 1524 pamphlet quoted by Karl Marx in the second chapter of On the Jewish Question.)

Near the riparian
trees they killed our young. I hid,
bleeding feathered tears.

(“A Canada Goose Testifies,” a haiku by Sam Gold [2024])

The Honorable Zohran Mamdani
City Hall
New York, New York 10007

Dear Mayor Mamdani,

I am composing this letter with the hope of persuading you to write an executive order to bar the United States Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services from access to New York City's wildlife by stopping the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the Department of Parks and Recreation from cooperating in any way with that agency. I am doing so on behalf of a newly formed group, GooseSave NYC, many of whose members also belong to other groups fighting to save Canada geese and other wild creatures from the federal, state, and local agencies that seem bent on destroying them. The USDA war on Canada geese in particular does violence not only to the geese, which is bad enough, rather also to the human soul—not only here, indeed, throughout the country. And it’s not only by the suffering its agents inflict on those innocents, it’s also by the fact that they justify their so-called management practices with nothing but falsehood.¹ There's an urgency driving us, moreover. The one month molting season began mid-June. That's the season when the geese shed their flight feathers and cannot fly. That's also when Wildlife Services conducts its roundups at parks and other supposedly protected spaces including our one wildlife refuge that is no refuge for the geese. Time, as the saying goes, is of the essence.

And yet everything seems to militate against the geese. The Atlantic Flyway Council, made up largely of hunters, oversees the killing of Canada geese and other migratory birds and the destruction of their eggs and nests. The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) hires Wildlife Services on spurious grounds to destroy the eggs and nests of Canada geese and other birds at New York reservoirs.² The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey signs five year kill-contracts with Wildlife Services to kill those geese and many other creatures including owls, doves, coyotes, deer, and others, in and around city airports. The National Park Service allows Wildlife Services each year to terrorize Canada geese and their babies at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge by rounding them up, cramming them into tiny crates where they're unable to move, and then trucking them to a slaughterhouse upstate, turning the "crown jewel of New York City" into an Orwellian hellscape. Wildlife Services colludes with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC)³ to kill Canada geese and destroy their eggs and nests throughout New York State. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service, under the auspices of the Department of the Interior, issues permits to hunters and of course to Wildlife Services also for killing those geese and destroying their eggs and nests throughout the country, rendering the Migratory Bird Treaty Act a farce.

Wildlife Services works closely with the United States military. FOIA documents reveal that the Canada goose policies of Wildlife Services are dictated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the United States Air Force. At the bird strike committees and conferences, which Wildlife Services participates in and largely directs, there’s always a significant military presence. This is an AI summary:

The Department of Defense’s primary conference on this topic is the Aviation Wildlife Management Conference, also known as the Bird Strike Committee USA (BSC USA) meeting. It is co-hosted with the FAA and USDA, bringing together the Air Force, Army, Pentagon, and Defense Department alongside civilian aviation stakeholders.

These organizations gather to collaborate on the Bird/Wildlife Aircraft Strike Hazard (BASH) program. The conference functions as a centralized forum to share strategies, site-specific approaches, and cutting-edge technology—such as avian radar—used to mitigate wildlife risks to military and civilian aircraft.

For the U.S. military, these policies are directly governed by the Department of Defense to preserve warfighting capabilities . . .

Yet why is there such great military interest in a problem that is solvable without any violence at all and far less expensively than through the current mass-extermination program? If avian radar is truly acknowledged as a solution by the military, why is it not installed in New York and every other major city? Why, rather, is the military so eager to ordain the killing of birds when it's always the birds who die in the air collisions, not the humans? Why, indeed, when the current tactics are not making the skies any safer? For FAA documents show that bird strikes and the cost of property damage from them have skyrocketed since the 2009 mass-extermination program began. And why is there such a fixation on Canada geese when many other birds collide with planes far more frequently? At JFK airport, Canada geese collide with planes on an average of one time or zero times per year! I pass over the fact that Wildlife Services also persecutes mute swans on grounds of air safety, even though there are almost no documented collisions between airplanes and mute swans, whereas other species of swans do collide with airplanes and cause property damage and yet are not persecuted. And in the entire history of air travel, there are no known collisions between a commercial airplane and the geese or swans that resulted in a human fatality.

That a military agenda is driving wildlife management—not to mention factory farming—is already clear from a set of prophetic codes I discovered hidden in a book by my teacher published in 1997. A cipher there discloses that farmed animals are being exploited knowingly and willingly as paradigms for future human exploitation.⁴ Another cipher links the crimes of animal agriculture to the Department of Defense. Still another states explicitly that the Defense Department and USDA/Wildlife Services plot together to torture geese, swans, and other wild creatures, and then falsify their records. Why would they do that?

Those same codes, which prophesied the September 11, 2001 attacks and the wars following upon them, also foresaw that fascism would soon thereafter rise across the world. Yet fascism cannot take hold in a healthy society. Social and political manipulation, as many esteemed minds tell us, is required to generate an imbalance in the human psyche. Erich Fromm points to widespread helplessness and despair as a prerequisite, Otto Rank to a rendering public of what was private, Hannah Arendt to a stifling of empathy, a proliferating of the habit of depersonalization, and a crushing of the moral and juridical person, Wilhelm Reich to sexual dysfunction and repression, the evidence of Weimar to sexual excess borne of repression, Theodor Adorno to rigid conformity, fear before authority, a submission/domination consciousness, a love of violence, inter alia, and nearly all to a complete breakdown of standards, especially truth.

That the helplessness and depression required—along with the normalizing of violence, depravity, Schadenfreude, and a ceding to the irrational—are being brought in here largely through animal cruelty, particularly through the abuses of factory farms and wildlife management, would seem self-evident, all of which is taking a toll on human well-being. Demoralization is already so entrenched, and not only among animal activists, that almost certainly many would agree with the novelist Margarite Yourcenar that systematized cruelty toward animals is a crime against humanity.⁵ Demoralization of course is an old military strategy often used to facilitate the advent of fascist dictatorships.

The psychodynamic of fascism, in fact, would seem to coincide with that of all slaughter protocols, including wildlife management—the presumption of superiority, whether of race or species, used to justify the most obscene savagery,⁶ the seeming insatiability of bloodlust, the endless scapegoating, the carefully cultivated habits of denial including misplaced euphemizing,⁷ the pseudo-rational justifications built on lies. What ICE, then, is to immigrants, and Israel to the Palestinians, Wildlife Services is to Canada geese—for the high level of intelligence, sensitivity, and even moral and aesthetic awareness of the latter is known. So if the evils practiced by such aggressors need to be exposed and stopped, and the underlying psychodynamic sent into remission, an executive order for protecting the city's geese and other wild creatures from Wildlife Services would be imperative.

Endnotes

1 https://all-creatures.org/wildlife/wildlife-nyc-canada-geese.html

2 The DEP argues that by keeping the numbers of such creatures down, its destruction of the eggs and nests of Canada geese and other wild birds minimizes the amount of fecal matter in reservoirs. The DEP calls that destruction non-lethal management. Yet there’s nothing non-lethal about it. And a natural function such as defecating cannot morally justify the taking of a life, whether adult or baby. All the more so given the following. The DEP deploys Wildlife Services both to city reservoirs, such as the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir in Central Park, and to some outside the city limits—in Westchester, the Catskills, and environs—that supply most of New York City's drinking water. Those in the city are not used by humans either for drinking or for swimming. So there's no reason the geese can't enjoy themselves there and humans delight in the presence of the geese. The primary source of fecal contamination in the reservoirs that are used for New York City drinking water, is now known to be farmed animal agricultural runoff—something widely suppressed, including by the Google search engine. Why is the DEP not advocating for an end of animal agriculture, the most obvious solution? Instead, by scapegoating Canada geese, it appears to be solving the fecal contamination problem while actually enabling it and creating a new one every bit as abhorrent. For egg addling—shaking, puncturing—or oiling, as stated, is in fact lethal. The babies inside the eggs begin communicating early with their moms and siblings. When Wildlife Services coats an egg with corn oil, the baby inside slowly suffocates to death. And the effect of the loss on the parent geese is devastating, as attorney Lawrence Schnapf documents, who is suing to end the egg and nest destruction at the reservoir in Central Park. (See his cease and desist letter linked here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1990KqvyvFJ6pZm3lLokerpq79qtiRmuV/view? usp=sharing

and his formal complaint here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Y9MnkQEYV8t5tyyPuDFt8g7GAo91d_zA/view?usp=sharing .)

3 A few years ago the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation sought to exterminate all 2,200 mute swans in New York State! The huge public outcry and a massive letter-writing campaign by activists thankfully put an end to that, though it took a long time. The DEC's intention, nevertheless, needs to be noted.

4 See my letter to former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan linked here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/0B3D4fegnMpTTb2JzRGJOYW10RmM/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106068489059241563307&resourcekey=0-Q0Q7roE60FPixzscgin5ug&rtpof=true&sd=true

5 There's been testimony on the web about the formation of therapy groups specifically about and following USDA roundups of Canada geese. There's a vystopia support group on Facebook, and almost certainly others across the country. "Vystopia" is a psychological term coined in 2017 by psychologist Dr. Clare Mann to accommodate the mortifying effect on the human psyche of systemic animal abuse.

6 The Reverend Dr. Andrew Linzey points out that even on the assumption that humans are superior to nonhuman animals, something that’s increasingly in question today, superiority should rather incline us toward stewardship, not grotesque cruelty. That the higher is here to serve the lower and not the reverse, he argues, is the true meaning of the Incarnation.

7 The Nazis were notorious euphemizers. If the "final solution" referred to the systematized annihilation of Jews, "special treatment" meant mass-extermination, "selection" imminent murder in the gas chambers, "showers" gassing to death in the shower stalls. "Euthanasia" and "mercy killing" were the terms applied to Hitler's early T4 program of medical mass murder of handicapped, elderly, so-called mentally ill, and even merely depressed people. Nazi records were so full of euphemisms that it was sometimes difficult for subsequent researchers to know what they were talking about. Records from the extermination camps almost never mention killing or gassing or gas chambers or human experimentation—and on the rare occasion when they do mention them, it's by documents addressed to initiated insiders.

Wildlife Services, similarly, refers to its Canada goose terror roundups as "culls," the actual slaughter, or even the most sadistic gassing, as "harvesting," and the killing of goslings or cygnets by neck-breaking, “cervical dislocation.” What it calls "management" almost always means massacre, "removal" killing. Slaughterhouses it calls "processing facilities." And all its death-wielding activities more generally, no matter how brutal, it refers to as "humane euthanizing." Yet the word "euthanasia" means literally "a good death," and as we all know too well, no premature death of a wild creature is good, especially at the hands of Wildlife Services.

Respectfully,

Joan Harrison
Co-founder,
GooseSave NYC

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This is from a handwritten note I placed at the top of my letter:

Though circumstances beyond my control prevented me from finishing this letter soon enough to save this year’s molting geese, the geese are now being killed here year round. So an executive order would, according to my advisors, be the quickest way to get them relief until a more permanent solution is found.

Joan Harrison
July 10, 2026

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Posted on All-Creatures.org: July 14, 2026
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