Eagles

Eagles

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
In a recent meeting of the North American Falcononer’s Association, Ben Woodruff and his 12-year-old female Golden Eagle named Holly showed up to talk with sheep ranchers who, strangely enough, are not big fans of these majestic raptors. They are known to feed on young sheep and lambs. It turns out that Ben’s a very successful trainer and through his program, He can re-orient these birds of prey. “For birds of prey in the wild, everybody wants to kill you and take your food. Social bonding is through food. That’s like a date for an eagle, giving your ego a rabbit. She has literally come to think of me as her mate, which is kind of embarrassing during mating season. We need to talk about how we can have a win win situation between eagles, eagle falconers and sheep ranchers. There are laws in place that make it so that if an eagle is eating sheep and lambs, that is a legitimate economic problem. There are laws that allow eagle falconers to get permits and come to your property to trap those eagles that are causing the damage, take them back home with us and train them for falconry. Once they are trained, they won’t go back to your property. We train them and we hunt rabbits with them. We are looking for sheep ranchers to help and be a voice with the government to say, hey this is a problem, we do have eagles eating our sheep and we do value this opportunity to get the eagles out of that situation without having to kill the eagles.
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