WildSafeBC Information

WildSafeBC is a program that is designed to reduce human-wildlife conflicts throughout BC. Our motto of "keeping wildlife wild - and communities safe" underscores our belief that if we can keep wildlife living in the wild we can, in turn, make our communities safer for us and at the same time keep wildlife from coming to harm. WildSafeBC was developed by the BC Conservation Foundation and is a direct descendant of the immensely popular and very successful Bear Aware program that has run since 1999. We learned from that program that if we can educate communities as to how to live responsibly with wildlife we can drastically reduce the conflicts and can reduce the number of bears that have to be destroyed because of this conflict. Over the life of the program we saw the annual number of bears being destroyed drop from approximately 1,000 a year to about 500 a year. Not only does WildSafeBC now look at all types of wildlife that come into conflict with humans we are also expanding our scope to address the four areas of our lives that bring us most often into contact with wildlife. You'll see our theme of "Live, Work, Play, Grow" repeated throughout our site. How we behave as we pursue each of these different activities requires a slightly different approach to ensure that we reduce our contribution to human-wildlife conflicts. Naturally, these actions will also be modified depending upon what type of wildlife we are apt to come into contact with. Please bear with us as we get things up and running. This website will grow quickly over the next month as we migrate our materials from our Bear Aware website and bring in our new materials. For now however we direct our visitors to our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/wildsafebc.