Federal Agency Kills Pets, Endangered Species, and More

Anatomy of a DWS snare

Over the past decade a federal agency has been responsible for killing more than 50,000 animals using traps, snares, and poison. Even rare and endangered species have been killed. According to some very deep investigative work by the Sacramento Bee, the Department of Wildlife Services, a sub-agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture?s Animal and Plant Inspection Service, has an annual budget of nearly $100 million. Their job, to protect farming interests and control so-called ?nuisance? animals, has left a massive death toll on wildlife. Far too often the wrong animals are being killed, and worse, the killings are going on without notice and often without official record keeping.

And the practice isn?t new: Wildlife Services has been around for 75 years. And even though its work has been roundly criticized over several decades, including in hearings by Congress, not much has been done to curb its sloppy and reckless work.

That work includes killing the wrong animals on both public and private land to the tune of 50,000 animals since 2000. These animals included golden and bald eagles as well as wolverines. The department also exposed at least 18 employees and several members of the public to cyanide meant to poison animals, and it?s killed pets, too: More than eight family dogs have been killed every month, on average, since 2000.

Not that the Bee?s journalists were able to get this information easily.

?If we accommodated your request, we would have to accommodate all requests,? wrote Mark Jensen, director of Wildlife Services in Nevada, turning down a request by The Bee to observe its hunters and trappers in action.

The paper relied on court-ordered Freedom of Information Act requests to do the job and talked to many whistleblowers who have left the agency, often in disgust over practices that aren?t merely secretive but unnecessarily bloody and cruel.

One former worker in Texas told the newspaper that it was actual policy not to report the accidental poisoning or killing of family pets; they were told to throw away dog collars and bury the animals. Similar practices go on for mistaken killings of thousands of animals, 150 species in total. And this is happening even as hundreds of millions of tax dollars are spent for species protections nationwide.

The findings, detailed in a three-part series, come on the heels of a bipartisan bill put forth by congressmen John Campbell of California and Peter DeFazio of Oregon that would ban Wildlife Services? most dangerous killing tool: spring-loaded sodium cyanide cartridges, which have killed tens of thousands of animals in recent years.

But even if that legislation gains ground in Congress, the entire mandate of Wildlife Services, the Bee concludes, isn?t drawing as much scrutiny as it should, especially since the government?s own research shows that the so-called ?war on predators? is doing a great deal of ecosystem damage. Scientists point to the coyote as an example, saying that without them disease carrying rodents and crop-destroying rabbits create their own scourge. Even feral cats will cut down on bird populations, which leads to way too many insects, which again, hurts farming.

Which is ironic. Since supposedly this agency was created to help agriculture. A claim that today?s science simply doesn?t support.

Links to all of the Bee?s reporting on this story can be found here. Environmental coverage made possible in part by support from Patagonia. For information on Patagonia and its environmental efforts, visit www.patagonia.com.

Tagged as: activism, conservation, endangered species, environment

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