‘Live prey for bears’: 3,000-km wire line branded a wildlife deathtrap

Century-old Yukon Telegraph is collapsing into forest floors, snaring wildlife and leaving them for slow, agonizing deaths

BY QUINN BENDER | For Black Press Media

A forgotten relic of Canada's telegraph era is now posing a deadly threat to wildlife in the northern wilderness, says a B.C. veterinarian, who is calling for the removal of thousands of kilometres of century-old iron cable snaking through remote forests from British Columbia's south and into the Yukon.

This moose was found alive entangled in telegraph wire along the White Pass and Yukon Route railway. Conservation officers euthanized the animal on site. (Mike Thomas/Yukon News photo)

“This is an underdog problem,” Dr. Veronica Gventsadze said. “It’s not a popular cause like animal abuse and neglect, but it’s a clear case of animal cruelty without anyone being deliberate or intentional. It’s just a consequence of what humans have left out in the wilderness.”

Gventsadze is speaking about the 100-year-old Dominion Government Telegraph Service line, a network of five-millimetre iron cables snaking through 2,900 kilometres of wilderness from Ashcroft, B.C., up to its termination point in Dawson City, Y.T. Known as the Yukon Telegraph, this logistical marvel of its time was a vital connection from the gold fields of the North to southern Canada and beyond.

North of Hazelton, B.C., telegraph operator Jack Wrathall and his dog sit in front of one of many Dominion Government Telegraph cabins. Photo courtesy Library and Archives Canada.

The line was abandoned in the 1940s and ’50s as wireless technology advanced.

But the galvanized cable was of such high quality it still shows no sign of corrosion or breakage. As the original poles collapse and trees naturally topple over the lines, the cables either sag to the forest floor or lie in tangles beneath moss and foliage, creating an ideal trap for moose and, farther north, caribou.

“A bull moose crashes through the forest with his antlers, and that’s it. That’s how he gets around,” Gventsadze says. “There must be a tremendous amount of anguish not being able to free himself [from the wire], possibly lying there exhausted, hungry — he’s live prey for a bear. The wire is like nothing found in nature, so the moose not having a chance to escape or protect itself is a completely unnatural situation.”

The Squamish-based veterinarian began a grassroots campaign to see the line removed in June 2016, during an otherwise regular visit to her Rosswood cabin in the Nass Valley. Her husband was picking lobster mushrooms when he stumbled across a one-kilometre stretch of the fallen line. He counted the corpses of three moose in varying stages of decomposition, she says.

Dr. Veronica Gventsadze

“This is grizzly bear country, so the moose will be dragged off pretty quickly. We don’t know how many have been there before.”

Since her husband’s discovery, Gventsadze has found other sites along the Stewart branch of the old telegraph service.

After being told last year there was very little the B.C. Conservation Officer Service (COS) could do in the matter, Gventsadze contacted the Terrace office again last month after reading news reports of a prolific and illegal snaring operation in the Kitimat River Valley, which the COS is still investigating.

Based on photographs, Gventsadze is certain the snare wire shown in recent news reports was cut from the telegraph line — scavenged from the forest and repurposed to kill. She says she once found a snare intentionally fashioned within a coil of cable left on the ground, a deliberate trap set inside an accidental one, deepening the wire’s deadly post-use legacy.

Spanning almost 3,000 kilometres across remote terrain, the Yukon Telegraph’s collapse presents a remediation challenge far beyond the scope of B.C. Conservation’s budget and mandate. Still, CO Zane Testawich told the Terrace Standard he hopes to offer some community-level support in the spring, possibly by organizing a cleanup of the Rosswood site identified by Gventsadze’s husband.

In the meantime, the provincial and federal departments have returned neither Gventsadze’s nor this newspaper’s calls with questions of who is responsible for remediation.

Andrew Gage, staff counsel with West Coast Environmental Law, says without public support, finding a legal avenue to force remediation will be difficult on a project initiated by the fledgling Dominion Government in 1899.

“These sites do get cleaned up where there’s particular health concerns and public outcry over them, but there’s a lot that don’t get cleared up without that pressure,” he said.

Gventsadze appreciates the costs of a remediation project of this scale, but hopes the government might see it as an employment and skills-training investment for northern communities.

This was the case in the Northwest Territories, where in 2015 a program partially sponsored by the federal government led to the removal of 116 kilometres of telephone wire from a Second World War pipeline project in the Mackenzie Mountains. It showed what’s possible when remediation is treated as both environmental recovery and economic opportunity.

The program was renewed the next year, and a further 126 kilometres of wire was removed, along with 27 racks of caribou antlers tangled within the cable, according to Northern News Services. The project was completed in January this year, resulting in 80 tonnes of wire remediated from more than 350 kilometres of terrain. The stretch of land is now a popular hiking destination called the Canol Trail. Indigenous and Northern Affairs said a key element of the program was to provide local workers with training in project management, field operations and occupational health and safety.

Similarly, in Yukon Territory, the Carcross/Tagish First Nation spearheaded the Southern Lakes Wire Recovery Project in 2015. In this case, the wire belonged to the same Yukon Telegraph line at the centre of Gventsadze’s concern.

“It is still a very unrecognized problem,” she says. “But once people start talking about it, others will probably come out of the woodwork who have been making local efforts to remove these lines themselves.

“Just because we can’t witness these moose suffering and dying, it doesn’t make their deaths any less acceptable.”