The Netherlands will have to slaughter over 500,000 geese over the next few years in an effort to get their numbers under control and stop damage to crops, Trouw reports on Tuesday.

Most of the geese will be gassed, as currently happens around Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, Trouw says. The paper bases its claims on interim reports from provincial government bodies which signed up to an agreement on combating the geese nuisance two years ago.
Bird protection group Vogelbescherming, one of the signatories to the 2011 agreement, said then it expected 100,000 geese would need to be killed.
The plan now states that the total population of some 200,000 ordinary, Nile and Canada geese need to ‘be systematically removed’, Trouw states. In addition, 350,000 geese which used to migrate but now remain in the Netherlands will be killed, so that ‘just’ 150,000 are left.
According to Trouw, the nature organisations which signed up for the agreement have said they will not launch any protests, so that the mass cull can begin in 2014, once EU approval has been won for the mass gassing.
Earlier stories
Gassing of geese begins under heavy security
Supreme court blocks killing of protected geese
Nature, farming and hunting groups agree goose cull plan