Long before a Minnesota dentist shot Cecil the Lion, a Minnesota hockey player from British Columbia killed Cheeky the Grizzly.
The bear killing in May 2013 by Clayton Stoner, a defenseman then with the Minnesota Wild, drew strong outrage from Coastal First Nations members upon whose land he shot Cheeky. They ban such trophy hunting of wildlife.
But it wasn’t until Thursday that a government charged Stoner with a crime, none of which have to do with the actual killing of the bear. Instead, British Columbia wildlife authorities have hit Stoner with five counts of what amount to bureaucratic violations.
The charges include: two counts of making false statements to obtain a license and one count each of unlawfully possessing a dead wildlife, hunting out of season and hunting without a license.
Essentially, the BC government is building a case on the fact that Stoner, a native of the province, was not a true BC resident because he was playing in Minnesota at the time and therefore was living more than six months outside the province. In order to have a hunting license in British Columbia you must have lived more than six months of the previous 12 in the province. Since Stoner was playing in another country, halfway across the continent, the officials say he illegally-obtained his permit.
The province does not recognize the Coastal First Nations law against trophy hunting, which is why Stoner could not be charged for the actual killing of the bear.
Cheeky was well-known in the estuary where he was shot. The Vancouver Sun, which first ran a story about the bear-killing in 2013, quoted one local resident who remembered the bear well, recalling how he would come within 160ft of humans in a search for food.
“He would pop his head up, look at us and stick his tongue out at us,” Robert Johnson of the Coastal Guardian Watchman Network told the paper. “We started talking to him, telling him what we were doing there. We got to know him quite well, to the point we could go in on our boat ... and get off and walk around in the area without having to worry about him.”
Stoner, who signed with the Ducks in 2014, will appear in court on 9 October.
