Alberta’s small force of 120 field Fish and Wildlife officers presently patrol all of the province’s 255,000 square miles 24/7.
This includes 850 lakes, promoting boat safety, legal fishing and search and rescue, 4,500 miles of rivers ensuring jet boat, hunting, angling compliance and drowning victim recovery, human and livestock safety from large predators, investigation of maulings and deaths of humans and livestock, utilizing DNA profiling to verify suspect animals with the only dedicated forensic lab in Canada.
Other duties include, but are not limited to, fur management area (trapline) compliance, general and prolific poacher investigations, aerial surveillance and deterrence patrols, alpine and back-country patrolling of the entire province excluding parks, urban problem/nuisance wildlife prevention and mitigation, inspection of commercial operations such as meat cutters, fur buyers, taxidermists and guides and outfitters, assist other agencies including RCMP, municipal police and provincial peace officers, when needed, such as the Alberta Sheriffs Branch.
In 1999-21 the Alberta government created the RAPID Response initiative with Fish and Wildlife officers being the lead. Sheriff Highway Patrol has also assumed duties. RAPID stands for: Rural Alberta Provincial Integrated Defence. These officers are trained to the high standard necessary to assist with rural 911 calls where a RCMP member is not readily available. The program is no way meant to be another ‘eyes and ears’ group such as Rural Crime Watch. To the contrary, its purpose is to help deter and defeat crime by being able to prevent it by 24/7 patrolling, and to respond as well as assist the police when a crime is occurring.
At present, the 120 field game wardens will be hard pressed with their current numbers to keep up with the aforementioned duties. While researching my ‘Game Warden’ books, I came across a MDF – or manpower density factor – number which is only one, among other means, of calculating the ‘ideal’ number of field game wardens, aka, wildlife officers working in a North American jurisdiction. The factor is derived at by calculating the number of personnel needed in a province or state, including population and area densities into an equation. To explain further, Alberta’s MDF in 2013 was 6.95. For comparison, Alaska’s was 4.30 in 2013. Ideal is 1.0. A decade later, Alberta’s was 13.32 using available figures. In other words it has decreased by 48 per cent.
To put these figures into some perspective, a police service gets nervous when they have more than 650-700 people per officer. At present, Alberta has one wildlife officer per 39,000 population.
Murray Bates OCAHF,
AB Fish and Wildlife officer, retired
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