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Dome lids — the leading cause of plastic wildlife injury and death locally

The animal services department at the GHS sees roughly four to five skunks a season that have their heads stuck in a plastic dome lid
20210414Skunk
A dead skunk with a dome lid around its neck found by GHS staff last month. Supplied photo

Most have seen images of animals around the world tangled in plastic pollution facing inevitable pain and suffering.

But ask local animal care officers what the most common plastic item posing danger to wildlife is they'll tell you it’s dome lids.

“It’s without a doubt McFlurry or iced capp lids and more typically around skunk heads,” explains Ben Worthington, manager of animal services at the Guelph Humane Society.

Worthington’s team attend calls for sick, injured and distressed animals of all kinds in the community. He says just locally in Guelph, his team encounters roughly four to five cases of McFlurry or iced capp lids around skunks’ heads in one season.

He also points out that those numbers are only of animals that they encounter in populated areas in the night time, suggesting there could be more out there that no one has come across.

Worthington, who has been in animal services for six years, says he's attended a fair share of animals suffering incidents, including full-term pregnant deer getting hit by a car, animals with organs hanging out of their bodies with bones protruding out of their skin, injured domestic animals or orphaned wild animals. 

And while responding to these calls can take a toll on officers on the animal services team, Worthington highlights that the death and suffering of an animal with something unnatural is particularly difficult to process because it shouldn’t be out in the wild in the first place. 

A month ago, Worthington’s team responded to a call of a dead skunk whose neck was trapped and suffocated in a plastic dome lid. 

“It’s such a senseless and unnecessary death I mean it's completely and utterly avoidable. There's no reason for it,” says Worthington. 

“That's why this type of death or suffering is harder to digest.”

Even when people dispose of them responsibly by tossing them in the garbage, they still end up in landfills where animals frequent. 

“They are trying to get some contents of the cup that they're trying to feed off of and they stick their heads into the only accessible hole and then whenever they get to pull out, that lid gets stuck onto their head,” says Worthington. 

He explains that skunks have poor vision and heavily rely on their sense of smell and touch. So while another animal would access the situation when it sees a plastic cup with a dome lid attached to it, a skunk would be less likely to realize the danger and stick its head right in the dome and put itself at risk. 

He says while sometimes animal service officers are able to catch a skunk and remove the dome lid from around their neck, in other cases, a long time can pass before the animal is even seen with the lid around its neck that cuts through its skin.

“You add that with swelling from an injury and stuff and you have animals that eventually and painfully quite frankly suffer from this kind of encounter,” says Worthington. 

“If you have it for a long period of time or you go through a hibernation cycle starting to get to the colder weather, you're trying to build your body weight as an animal, that device is going to get tighter and tighter and tighter as you’re doing what you’re naturally supposed to do.” 

Worthington says it's preventable by cutting the lid in half so when it does end up in the landfill, there is no hole for an animal to get trapped in. 

If one is unable to cut the lid, he says at the very least, detach it from the cup because what the animals are really after is the remaining contents in the cup which they access through the lid. 

“There's definitely a functional purpose to having this (dome lids) but if we could really stress to these chain type companies that have these splash guards in place and really portray to them that there's a need for a paper splash guard, so that when it rains, it's biodegradable,” says Worthington, it would really help he says. 

“I understand it's going to be a bit of money, but at the end of the day, communities just like Guelph all across southern Ontario, all those animals would benefit directly from that.”


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Anam Khan

About the Author: Anam Khan

Anam Khan is a journalist who covers numerous beats in Guelph and Wellington County that include politics, crime, features, environment and social justice
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