A homeowners association in Madison, Alabama has voted to round up 226 Canada geese and kill them in a carbon monoxide gas chamber. The neighbors who moved there specifically to "live alongside nature" have some thoughts about that. Dozens of them showed up to say so in person.
226 Geese, One Very Unpopular Vote
The Edgewater HOA in Madison, Alabama did not achieve unanimity when it voted to euthanize the entire flock of Canada geese living at Lady Ann Lake. That is, in itself, a notable sentence to have to write. According to The Guardian, the vote passed anyway, and the HOA informed residents the plan involves carbon monoxide gassing.
Edgewater HOA board president Brian Goodwin told local station WAFF 48 that the 226 geese at the lake are harming water quality, creating public health risks, and threatening resident safety. The HOA's statement, shared with FOX54, says the association has been managing the goose population for more than six years and exhausted non-lethal options including predator deterrents, goose-deterrent sprays, and reducing grazing areas.
Here is the problem with that argument: one of their own board members thinks the plan is barbaric. Jack Hollum, who voted against the cull, described the process to WAFF 48 in terms that do not exactly sell it. "They shoot nets over the flocks of geese, capture as many as they can, they put them in a trailer, and gas them to death," Hollum said. "And geese can hold their breath for 45 minutes or so, so in doing that, it's an agonizing death for them."
They've Done This Before, and It Did Not Work
If you are wondering whether mass gassing of neighborhood geese is a proven, effective long-term strategy, The Guardian has the answer for you: absolutely not. The same method was used on geese in Edgewater back in 2020. A new flock moved in and replaced them. The HOA is now preparing to do it again.
This is the part where a reasonable person might ask: what exactly is the plan here? Gas the geese, wait a few years for more geese to arrive, gas those geese too? Run this cycle indefinitely at the expense of animals that, by multiple resident accounts, are not actually causing the catastrophic problems the HOA claims?
PETA opposes culling for exactly this reason, arguing it only provides short-term relief while the underlying population pressures remain unchanged. The geese, for their part, are not consulting the HOA's strategic plan before deciding where to nest.
The Neighbors Who Actually Live There Disagree With the Threat Assessment
The HOA's case rests on the geese being a documented public health and safety hazard. Resident Natalie Tidwell told WAFF 48 she has never personally witnessed the aggression or danger the board describes. "I've never had any issues with hostility or aggression," she said. "We personally never got sick as kids rolling around in the dirt."
Resident David Field launched a Change.org petition to stop the cull, and the language in it gets at something bigger than one HOA's goose problem. "Our family, like many others, moved here to enjoy not just the tranquil environment but to live alongside nature," the petition reads. "This isn't just about these birds; it's about the ecosystem and the balance we disturb when we decide that we can control nature."
Dozens of protesters gathered in the Edgewater neighborhood to push back, calling for humane alternatives like using horns to disperse the geese or relocating the flock. These are not fringe ideas. They are the standard toolkit of wildlife management professionals who are not trying to justify a mass killing.
So How Is This Legal, Exactly?
Canada geese are federally protected birds. That is not a trivial detail. It means you cannot just decide one afternoon to wipe out a flock because you are tired of the droppings on your walking path. The Guardian reports that culling is legal with a permit from the US Department of Agriculture, which is the bureaucratic off-ramp the Edgewater HOA is using here.
Board member Hollum confirmed to WAFF 48 that a USDA subcontractor actually carries out the extermination. The USDA's Wildlife Services division has a long and controversial history of killing large numbers of wild animals at the request of private landowners and municipalities, so this tracks.
The HOA's statement leans hard on the USDA authorization as justification. "Under federal guidelines, USDA Wildlife Services is authorized to assist communities when goose populations exceed sustainable levels and create documented public-health and environmental impacts," they wrote. Authorized is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Lots of things are technically authorized. That does not automatically make them the right call.
The Dingo Take
Let's be honest about what is happening here. An HOA, the most reliably petty governing body in American civic life, has decided that the geese sharing their artificial lake are a problem worth solving with gas chambers. They tried this exact approach six years ago, it did not work, and they are back for round two with apparently zero irony about that.
The HOA's defense is that they exhausted every non-lethal option. Their own anti-cull board member is publicly describing the killing method as an agonizing 45-minute death. Residents who actually use the lake say they have never experienced the dangers the board keeps citing. And the last time they did this, the geese came back anyway. At what point does "we tried everything" become "we are committed to this specific violent solution and would prefer not to revisit the question"?
The geese did not ask to live in a man-made lake in a planned subdivision in Alabama. People built that neighborhood, marketed it as a place where you could live alongside nature, and then voted to gas the nature when it got inconvenient. If that is not a perfect little parable for how humans relate to the environment, nothing is.
