A red fox killed with a cyanide bomb. A gray wolf gunned down from an airplane. A jackrabbit caught in a neck snare. These are just a few of the 1.45 million animals poisoned, shot, and trapped last year by the euphemistically named Wildlife Services, a little-known but particularly brutal program of the US Department of Agriculture.
The program kills wildlife for many reasons, including poisoning birds to prevent them from striking airplanes and destroying beavers that sneak onto golf courses. But one of the primary purposes of the mostly taxpayer-funded $286 million program is to serve as the meat and dairy industries’ on-call pest control service.
“We were the hired gun of the livestock industry,” said Carter Niemeyer, who worked in Wildlife Services and related programs from 1975 to 2006. Niemeyer specialized in killing and trapping predators like coyotes and wolves that were suspected of killing farmed cattle and sheep.
Wildlife Services has also killed hundreds of endangered gray wolves, threatened grizzly bears, and highly endangered Mexican gray wolves, often at the behest of the […]
It is extremely difficult to gain protection for land, water and wildlife. In a state and county with lots of public forest service and BLM lands, I have been working for over 15 years to get Wilderness protection for qualified Wilderness lands in the Forest Service with no luck. The timber industry controls what goes on down here. And the Wilderness Act allows grazing so where the wolves need to live, ranchers are able to graze their cows and sheep. It is gross and unfair that wildlife have fewer and fewer places to live. Habitat protection and the ESA which needs protection as an act of Congress as well.