TULSA, Okla. — The Tulsa Police Department said a man was arrested after he shot and killed multiple squirrels in an east Tulsa park on Saturday.
Police said officers were called to McClure Park around 3:45 p.m. on reports of squirrel hunters in the area.
When officers arrived, they saw 23-year-old Kenric McFrazier walking across the park with a pellet rifle. Police said another suspect, Darrell McJunkins was still in the car.
The suspects told police they had been driving around the park shooting squirrels with scoped pellet rifles and collecting them to eat. The suspects also told police they came to the park because they do not have a good place to hunt squirrels and the park has a lot of them.
Officers found six dead squirrels, two scoped pellet guns and two pistols in the suspects’ car.
Police said due to McFrazier’s past criminal record, he can not possess guns.
McFrazier was arrested for possession of a firearm by a felon and hunting without a license. His hunting partner was cited for hunting in a city park and released.
McJunkins was issued a citation for hunting without a license.
The child experienced mild symptoms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Control and Prevention.
Health officials on Friday confirmed bird flu in a California child — the first reported case in a U.S. minor.
The child had mild symptoms, was treated with antiviral medication and is recovering, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in announcing the test results. State officials have said the child attends day care and lives in Alameda County, which includes Oakland and surrounding communities, but released no other details.
The infection brings the reported number of U.S. bird flu cases this year to 55, including 29 in California, the CDC said. Most were farmworkers who tested positive with mild symptoms.
One exception was an adult in Missouri who did not work at a farm and had no known contact with an infected animal. It remains a mystery how that person was infected — health officials have said there was no evidence of it spreading between people.
A British Columbia teen also was recently hospitalized with bird flu, Canadian officials have said.
H5N1 bird flu has been spreading widely in the U.S. among wild birds, poultry and a number of other animals over the last few years.
It began spreading in U.S. dairy cattle in March. California has become the center of that outbreak, with 402 infected herds detected there since August. That’s 65% of the 616 herds confirmed with the virus in 15 states.
Officials said they were investigating how the child was infected. California health officials previously said in a statement that they were looking into a “possible exposure to wild birds.”
There is no evidence bird flu spread from the child to other people.
People in the child’s household reported having similar symptoms, but their test results were negative for bird flu. Health officials noted the child and the household members also tested positive for other common respiratory viruses.
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NORTHBRIDGE, Massachusetts — An animal control officer shot and killed a pet dog in a Massachusetts town after mistaking it for a coyote in an incident that has the animal’s owner fuming, but that local police are describing as a sad mix-up.
The shooting happened on Tuesday after police received a call of a report of a coyote in a residential backyard, said Timothy Labrie, chief of police in Northbridge, Massachusetts. The animal control officer went into the woods to look for the coyote and found what they thought was the animal in a threatening position and shot it, he said.
The officer then further examined the animal and saw that it had a flea collar and was a pet dog and not a coyote, Labrie said. Authorities then located the dog’s owner, he said.
The dog’s owner, Kirk Rumford of Northbridge, said the dog was a husky named Odin that was less than a year old. Rumford said he felt non-lethal methods could have been used, and that his dog doesn’t resemble a coyote.The video player is currently playing an ad. You can skip the ad in 5 sec with a mouse or keyboard
“My dog would have been the most gorgeous coyote ever, on steroids,” Rumford said. “It’s huge compared to that. Look at pictures of what a coyote looks like in Massachusetts and my dog. My dog was beautiful. He looked like a wolf if anything, and there are no wolves in Massachusetts.”
Rumford said he has received an outpouring of support from the community, and he hopes his story will help prevent further encounters between dogs and authorities. He described Odin as “a knucklehead” and a “loveable klutz” who had a loving disposition and loved to play with other dogs.
Labrie said it was reasonable for the animal control officer to mistake the dog for a coyote, and the officer will not be disciplined. Dog owners can prevent these kind of mix-ups by keeping their dogs secure, Labrie said.
“We do have leash laws. At the end of the day if you can keep your fenced-in areas secure, keep an eye on your dog, do whatever methods that you can use to keep your dog in your yard,” Labrie said. “And also if your dog tends to wander in the woods, I would definitely have identifying markers on them.”
The shooting happened as communities around Massachusetts and elsewhere in the country have seen an uptick in interactions between people and coyotes. One town, Nahant, moved to become the first in the state to contract with the federal government to kill coyotes after residents said the animals killed pets and posed a dangerous nuisance.
Some scientists have said coyotes in the Eastern states have begun displaying increasingly wolflike traits as they have carved out a position near the top of the food chain. They are also hard to control.
Remington Moll, an assistant professor of natural resources at University of New Hampshire, led a study published in Ecography this month that said it is possible hunting coyotes doesn’t decrease their abundance, and can actually play a role in increasing it.
“Intensive coyote removal can obviously reduce populations in the short-term, but removal can also result in younger coyote populations with higher reproduction and immigration rates,” Moll said in a statement.
Northbridge, a town of about 16,000 people about 43 miles west of Boston, has had its share of interactions between people and coyotes, Labrie said. The animal control officer who shot the dog was a veteran officer who has had many encounters with coyotes over the years, Labrie said.
Exposing the Big Game 