Opinion: Ontario’s moose population is falling and I have pretty good idea why - Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources News Roundup

Alan Bisset is a retired ministry biologist and the former wildlife inventory program leader, who says the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry has mismanaged Ontario’s moose population for years and the declining numbers of animals prove it.

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When I retired from the Ministry of Natural Resources (now “and Forests”) in 2000, it had, in my opinion, the best moose management program in North America. Unfortunately, managers did not practice “adaptive management” and the program failed to produce the expected increase in the moose population.

Adaptive management simply means that you use the best information available to make a plan and if it doesn’t produce results, you change what you are doing until they do.

MNR had the first glimmer that things weren’t working properly in the early 1990s, but the information system had problems. These were cleaned up and by 2000, there was unequivocal evidence that the population was being mismanaged by MNR itself.