Sports & Exhibition Authority Using Dogs To Rid The North Shore Of Canada Geese
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- The Sports & Exhibition Authority is trying to rid the North Shore of geese and geese droppings.
Posing against the sun-splashed skyline, the geese look like the official birds of Pittsburgh.
Canada Geese live in the area year-round and are almost always found on the Great Lawn of the North Shore or bathing along the Riverwalk.
You also can't miss what they leave behind, by the pound, per bird, each day.
Doug Straley of the Sports & Exhibition Authority said goose poop is "dangerous to bicyclists and people who are jogging and walking and you can fall or have an accident because of it."
So the SEA is once again calling on the dogs of Brandon Bowen's Geese Police.
"We're not exterminators," Bowen said. "We don't kill anything. We just try to influence them to stay away. We appeal to their sense of survival. They view the dog as a predator."
Bowen said the idea is to train the geese by using visits from the dogs "multiple times a day, depending on how bad the problem is, the time of year. We'll visit them as many as four times a day. Nothing wants to hang out where there is predators."
And that's exactly what the SEA is hoping for.
"We're trying to push them out of the park territory altogether," Straley said.
Bowen says the other issue that brings the geese back are the people who continue to feed them.
The dogs can run them off. But if people are feeding them, they will always come back.
