“I remember my grandad telling me that there used to be a gun mounted at the Comox harbour and they used to shoot killer whales when they would pass. It’s within my lifetime that the transients are starting to stabilize,” Griffith-Cochrane adds.
My grandfather respected the "black fish" but shot the seals, carried a .303 for seals and a .22 for halibut on board. He was, and I think most fishers were, crack shots. They started avoiding boats, the seals I mean.
Hell we carried a rifle/shotgun in the vehicle just about all the time.
Used go to the dump and throw garbage to the waiting black bears, they would sit there like dogs waiting, sometimes they even climbed in the back of the PU and pulled it out very neatly. Until one got too familiar and nipped a person, then they went out and shot close to 40 of them. Ditto with cougars, once they started following kids they got hunted. Didn't have to do that often though. This was Chemainus.
A funny story, one time late at night there was a bear creeping around the logging camp house and my grandda went out back in the dark to the fence to look around, he didn't have his gun, and he started to scratch our back labs head until he saw the lab in the kitchen door, he looked down and it was the bear, just sitting there enjoying the scratch, grandma screamed his name, he looked down and back again then sprinted to the door and grabbed his rifle but the bear was gone.
Another time in that camp grandma came around a cornered carrying to dishes and confronted a bear, she screamed and kinda threw the dishes, the bear grunted and both bolted in opposite directions.
Things were sure different. The camp had a dump and the bears knew where to go, now most houses have a meal sitting in a plastic container beside their house.
The black bears weren't so much of a concern but the cougars were, they just never got along
This was the Youbou and Renfrew camps
Not so funny, they used to put a chemical into tanks with a manual pump sprayer to spray areas to reforestation to prevent broad leaf plants from overwhelming the seedlings, it splashed around and got all over them, if they needed a drink they sipped from a bubbling spring, I did that to while hunting decades later. Well the US government used that same perfected formula in Vietnam and called it agent orange. Grandpa and grandma ended up with multiple cancers late in life. 2-4-D combined with 2-4-5-T worked best in BC.
