Manitoulin Transport recently delivered six tons of dried dog food to Bear With Us, the largest bear rescue center in Ontario that cares for around 100 black bears.

This 12-skid delivery is part of the fleet’s ongoing support, which has seen 34 tons of food delivered in the last two years to help feed injured and orphaned black bears.

Feeding the bears is one of the organization’s costliest expenses, particularly during the critical periods before and after hibernation when their food intake spikes. They often go through more than one skid of dog food a week.

“They eat like there’s no tomorrow,” Sandy Donald, director of Ontario Wildlife Rescue, told Trucknews.com, adding that the center relies heavily on donations from pet food companies that provide expired or damaged dry dog food. “There is one pet food manufacturer, they’ll give the stuff to us for free, but then we have to move it around. When you start moving skids like dog food from Bolton to Thunder Bay, it’s not cheap. And Manitoulin, for about two years now, they’ve been doing it for us. They have been unbelievably generous, and it just quite literally helps save the animals.”

When asked about the fleet’s charity work, Jeff Smith, Manitoulin Transport’s vice-chairman, says this is the way of giving back to all parts of the community, just like giving back to hospitals and food banks for people.

“Trucking businesses – unfortunately, anybody who’s on the highways – could inadvertently have collisions with wildlife. So, we felt that this was a good way to give back,” he adds. “A lot of these bears, [for example], have been either orphaned in the springtime or in tragedies where the mothers have been killed on the road and now you have orphaned bears that need to be taken care of until they can get big enough that they can let them out and back into nature again.”

Going the extra mile

Manitoulin’s contributions have alleviated the burdens that wildlife rescue centers face – Smith estimated that in the past year, the fleet, based in Gore Bay, Ont., has delivered about 60 shipments, or 120,000 lb. of food and medical supplies to 23 different Ontario Wildlife Rescue locations at no charge.

The food and medication usually get delivered to Bolton, and the donations are then distributed to various rescue centers across the province, including locations in Barrie, Cambridge, Cornwall, Huntsville, Kingston, London, Ottawa, Pembroke, Peterborough, St. Catharines, Sudbury, and Thunder Bay. As an LTL carrier, Manitoulin is able to fit these shipments into its existing routes and network.

This has helped the centers to spend available resources on taking in more animals and being able to provide them with care they deserve, Donald says. He adds Manitoulin’s employees, from management to dispatch and drivers, are going the extra mile to help.

Donald shares numerous examples, including a driver returning five times to a pet food manufacturer to pick up a donation despite paperwork issues on the other end and collecting donations totaling $2,500 to give to an Ottawa wildlife rescue center during an avian flu outbreak.

“[Upon deliveries], we are responsible for getting it out of the dock. Nine out of 10 [times] Manitoulin Transport staff joins in and helps load the vehicle, which they don’t have to do. They’re actually not required to do it, but they just do it to help,” he says. “They do seem to care, and it’s all the way from the top to the bottom.”