New York City Will Ship Prospect Park Geese To Pennsylvania For Slaughter, Distribution

Remember last year when the city secretly gassed 400 geese in Brooklyn's Prospect Park? And then double-wrapped the carcasses in garbage bags before dropping them in a landfill?

Well, this year New York will dispose of its geese a tad more humanely--the geese will be fed to hungry Pennsylvanians.

The New York Times reports:

Last summer, much of the outcry prompted by the roundup of hundreds of geese in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, in the name of airline safety focused on the fact that after the geese were gassed, their bodies were dumped in a landfill, leaving literally tons of tasty, high-protein free-range meat (an adult goose can weigh 25 pounds) to rot in garbage heaps. The authorities said the state had not established safety protocols for processing and consumption of wild goose meat.

In response to the criticism, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection has arranged to truck this year’s captured geese to Pennsylvania, where they will be slaughtered and then distributed to food banks there.

The time has come for the Canadian geese to molt, leaving them temporarily unable to fly and thus easier for officials to capture.

Authorities have increased efforts to thin the region’s goose population since some of them flew into the engines of US Airways Flight 1549 in January 2009, forcing it to famously ditch in the Hudson River.

Pennsylvania was chosen because it already has an established protocol for processing and distributing slaughtered geese, according to the Times. New York is in the process of establishing its own protocol and will likely distribute the slaughtered geese to New York food banks next year.