Vermont’s hunting season for Canada geese began this past week, and a local golf club planned to take advantage by culling an unwelcome gaggle.

But the Quechee Club, which runs two golf courses, capitulated after animal rights groups and local residents pelted the club with social media messages and calls pleading for a more humane solution.

“It was so upsetting to hear,” said Maureen Bacon, a property owner who received an email from the club warning residents that they might hear gunfire. Bacon and her husband own property at the Quechee Club, an exclusive, 5,500-acre residential development with ski slopes, tennis courts and two golf courses in Hartford, Vermont.

According to the email, which was reviewed by The New York Times, culling the population each year was necessary because the growingtheir avian neighbours.

“This is so divisive in communities,” said Feld, a retired systems engineer who was inspired to form the organization in 2000 after his hometown, Lake Barcroft, Virginia, “almost broke apart” over its dealings with geese.

Unlike their migratory brethren, which still commute south from Canada in the fall, resident geese are a man-made problem, Feld said. Before the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which protects the species to this day, market hunters bred the birds as live bait to hunt migrating geese. But when geese born in captivity were released into the wild, they became trapped because they are biologically programmed to nest in the area where they are born, he said.

The population later dwindled, and in the 1960s and ’70s, state and federal agencies enacted