We weren’t going to weigh on the Great Brentwood Goose-Poop Debate — really, we weren’t — but it has now become a debate about something far messier and more unsightly.
Reasonable people can disagree on whether killing a half-dozen Canada geese last month to prevent them from fouling up a Brentwood city park was really necessary. But the fact that the city apparently lied to the public about what became of the carcasses undebatably stinks.
It turns out the six dead geese weren’t, as the city initially claimed, donated as food for the needy. At this writing, no one is specifically saying what officials actually did with the birds, but they apparently just disposed of them.
Why is this important? Because public bodies that are willing to mitigate even a minor controversy with lies and stonewalling can’t be trusted to be transparent about more serious issues. Brentwood residents should fairly wonder what else their local government officials are lying to them about.
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The underlying controversy over the geese themselves had already riled the ӣƵ suburb before the lie came to light this week.
Three mated pairs of geese had imprinted on the site where Brentwood Park was built and opened in 2023, meaning they would keep coming back year after year. The geese and their offspring were fouling paths and water in the park, creating not just an unpleasant situation for human park visitors but potential health hazards.
City officials said they tried all kinds of things to drive them off. It was perhaps a testament to the birds’ determination to stay that even shining lasers at them didn’t work.
So city officials last month captured 19 geese, euthanized the six adults with carbon dioxide and relocated their offspring to different habitats.
The six dead geese, officials said at the time, would be donated to food banks “to help feed those in need.”
Public response to the move was mixed, with some residents decrying it as a cruel overreaction. While the nuisance and potential health problems were real, there is something unsettling about the scenario: A city builds a wildlife area, then summarily executes the wildlife that shows up.
Was that really the only option, even after the other things they tried? If the young geese could be relocated to other environments, couldn’t the adults be relocated to, say, a petting zoo? (Some online wags have suggested that, because these are Canada geese, perhaps the Trump administration could have been alerted to immigrants run amok? Who knows, they might have sent in the Marines.)
The first problem here was that city officials didn’t tell the public about the eradication of the geese until after it was done. Doing so required obtaining a special permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and working with the Missouri Department of Conservation on the removal. That’s some pretty extensive official activity for a city to go through without any public discussion.
And yet, as the Post-Dispatch’s Sam Totoni and Seth Nelson reported last month, the first time the issue was even broached in an open forum was during a mid-June Board of Aldermen meeting after the removal was complete. As one park user told the newspaper then: “It wasn’t something that we had the chance to give any input on in the decision making. This was so top-secret.”
Now, the other webbed foot has dropped. As Totoni reported Monday, the city never did donate the six dead geese to food banks, as officials had earlier claimed.
It’s unclear why. One U.S. Department of Agriculture official says Missouri health officials nixed the plan out of concern about the potential for transmitting the bird flu virus to humans. But the health agencies deny they had given such an order and pointed instead to the Missouri Department of Conservation. An official of that department says that, no, it didn’t prohibit donating the birds for meat, and in fact bird flu isn’t even a concern given normal cooking temperatures.
Even as these state and federal agencies can’t seem to get their stories straight about who it was that prevented the birds from being donated for food, the city of Brentwood at this writing hasn’t responded to questions about what actually did become of the geese.
That lack of transparency seems to be in keeping with the city’s handling of this entire flap. Brentwood voters should remember that when they next migrate to their polling places.
