Council's approval of the rezoning bylaw to allow student and family housing on the new University College of the North campus has made the future of an expanded wolf enclosure at the Thompson Zoo uncertain.
Volker Beckmann, a member of Spirit Way Inc.'s ad hoc committee working towards a better wolf habitat at the zoo, says the next step is probably more consultations.
"It depends how the vote goes," he said prior to the Jan. 24 meeting when the rezoning bylaw was approved in a 5-3 vote. "We're just waiting for the final decision. We have to know what the final outcome is and go back to all those people and ask what is their recommendation."
"All those people" include landscape architects and the former director of the Assiniboine Park zoo, who have acted as consultants in the planning stages of the wolf cage improvement project.
Beckmann is still hopeful that the housing could be shifted slightly south to provide a larger buffer for the zoo.
"We have expressed the point that that was a little too close," he said of the proposed student housing location, which project consultants said could create issues, for instance children playing near the enclosure.
"There were suggestions that maybe the housing could move a little further south," said Beckmann, who said they requested the housing be moved about 100 feet. "We ended up asking them to leave a little bit of a buffer."
Approximately $8,000 to $10,000 had already been spent on the groundwork for incorporating a wolf park into the zoo - something that the group working on the project envisioned including a combined tourism and educational viewing building with a solid glass wall for observation of wolves. But having the proposed housing nearby could make previous plans unfeasible.
"It changes the dynamics completely," Beckmann said. "So now we have to go back to the drawing board if that is the final outcome."
Any changes in plans could also affect the amount of funding available for the project.
"We have about $202,000 donated or committed from different sources," said Beckmann, which is mainly in the form of grant applications that have been approved or money in the bank. Since construction of the new enclosure was originally planned to begin last summer, the wolf enclosure committee has had to ask for extensions on some of the approved grants. "That's committed funds."
When the idea arose two-and-a-half-years ago to build a better wolf cage for the zoo, nobody expected it would take this long or become a part of a larger conflict in Thompson.
"When we started this in 2008 we thought we would be finished in 2010," says Beckmann, who believes a new enclosure could be the start of a tourist draw as well as a way to make the Thompson Zoo self-sustaining. "You have a captive audience every year on its way to Churchill to view wildlife. They support ecological causes. There's an industry in the waiting here"
But it will never get started with the wolves housed in their current facility.
"It's not up to the animal care standards of today," says Beckmann, who's been in contact with an American organization in Washington state that's expressed interest in hosting a wolf conference in Thompson. "We can't do that with the current conditions with the wolf cage as it is."
Creating a new enclosure within the zoo is the best option for a proposed Thompson wolf park, says Beckmann, because the infrastructure already exists. Moving elsewhere is possible, but drastically changes the scope of the project.
"If it goes somewhere else it becomes a bigger project," he said, estimating that creating a wolf park from scratch on the north side of the Burntwood River, for instance, would probably cost $5 million. "It's an option but I'm not sure that it's something we want to do as volunteers."
For now, however, the people who want to see a wolf enclosure the Thompson Zoo can be proud of will just have to do something they've become quite used to.
"Right now we're just waiting, I guess, to see what's going to happen," says Beckmann.
