EXPOSED - USDA's Secret War on Wildlife

By Darryl Fears, Published: December 15
Washington Post

They say U.S. critter assassins work in secret, quietly laying traps, lacing food with poison, sniping at targets from helicopters. Few people know exactly how the hits go down; the methods are largely hidden.


What’s certain is that the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s little-known Wildlife Services program kills up to 3 million animals a year, mostly those deemed a nuisance but also some that agents kill by mistake, including endangered species.


Now, in a turnabout, the hunter is the target. A petition seeks to reduce the power of Wildlife Services and shine a light on its practices, claiming its agents have “gone rogue,” overstepping the mission to protect the public by killing indiscriminately.


There’s no dispute that Wildlife Services plays a valuable role by eliminating invasive animals such as nutria and starlings that are a menace. But critics have questions: How many is too many? Does the agency euthanize wildlife too often on behalf of farmers and ranchers without regard to ecosystems?


The petition filed in December of 2013 by the Center for Biological Diversity isn’t the first time that animal rights activists have squared off against Wildlife Services, but this time their coalition includes politicians who agree that the agency is too secret and too deadly. Even some federal workers frown on it; staff members at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service quietly dismiss Wildlife Services agents as “gopher chokers.”


“Wildlife Services is one of the most opaque and obstinate departments I’ve dealt with,” said Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.). “We’re really not sure what they’re doing. I’ve asked the agency to give me breakdowns on what lethal methods they’re using. They can’t or won’t do that. We’ve asked them to tell us what goes into their poisons. They won’t say.”


DeFazio and several colleagues requested a congressional hearing on the agency’s practices without success, so they pushed the USDA inspector general to conduct an audit, which was announced this month.


“The WS program is inefficient, inhumane and in need of a review,” the lawmakers wrote in a September letter to Inspector General Phyllis Fong. They said that the frequent killings of top predators, such as wolves, bears and coyotes, benefit “a small proportion of the nation’s private agriculture” and other interests.

Wildlife Services said in response that it has nothing to hide. Answering questions by e-mail, a spokeswoman said that the bulk of its work is to protect humans.

“For example, we work with the aviation community to protect the public by reducing wildlife hazards at more than 800 airports around the country,” spokeswoman Lyndsay Cole said. “Wildlife Services’ efforts to protect threatened and endangered species are conducted in more than 34 states. Wildlife Services also operates the National Rabies Management Program, which distributes oral vaccines in 16 states.”


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Hunters are conservationists? Maybe many years ago . . . not today.

By Georger Wuerthner - The Wildlife News - March 5, 2014

Many hunter organizations like to promote the idea that hunters were the first and most important conservation advocates. They rest on their laurels of early hunter/wildlife activist like Teddy Roosevelt, and George Bird Grinnell who, among other things, were founding members of the Boone and Crocket Club. But in addition to being hunter advocates, these men were also staunch proponents of national parks and other areas off limits to hunting. Teddy Roosevelt help to establish the first wildlife refuges to protect birds from feather hunters, and he was instrumental in the creation of numerous national parks including the Grand Canyon.  Grinnell was equally active in promoting the creation of national parks like Glacier as well as a staunch advocate for protection of wildlife in places like Yellowstone. Other later hunter/wildlands advocates like Aldo Leopold and Olaus Murie helped to promote wilderness designation and a land ethic as well as a more enlightened attitude about predators.

Unfortunately, though there are definitely still hunters and anglers who put conservation and wildlands protection ahead of their own recreational pursuits, far more of the hunter/angler community is increasingly hostile to wildlife protection and wildlands advocacy.  Perhaps the majority of hunters were always this way, but at least the philosophical leaders in the past were well known advocates of wildlands and wildlife.

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The importance of predators: The Yellowstone case

Wolves were systematically killed in the Yellowstone region and many other areas of the West beginning in the late 1800s. A concentrated effort between 1914 and 1926 finished the job - the last known wolf pack disappeared in 1926.

This video provides a highly educational overview of the important role an apex predator like the
North American gray wolf plays in maintaining a healthy ecosystem.

Now, with the recent reintroduction of wolves back into Yellowstone in 1995, streamside shrubs and cottonwoods within the Lamar Valley are beginning to become more prevalent and taller, and were the focus of a second study in the same area. That study outlines how the fear of attack by wolves apparently prevents browsing elk from eating young cottonwood and willows in some streamside zones.

With the renewed presence of wolves, young cottonwoods and willows have been growing taller each year over on "high-risk" sites, where elk apparently feel vulnerable due to terrain or other conditions that might prevent escape. In contrast, on "low-risk" sites, they are still being browsed by elk and show little increase in height.

Traditionally, "keystone" predators such as wolves were known to influence the population of other animals that they preyed on directly, such as elk or antelope. What researchers are now coming to better understand is the "trophic effect," or cascade of changes that can take place in an ecosystem when an important part is removed.

Idaho violates the Wilderness Act and wolves die

By Leonard Hitchcock

Where in Idaho can a wolf find a friend? Obviously not among the cattlemen, or the sheep men, and certainly not among the hunters and outfitters, whose credo seems to be: If humans enjoy killing another species, like elk, then they have the right to eliminate any non-human predator that reduces their chances of doing so.

And then there are all those Idahoans who may not feel any particular animosity toward wolves, but for whom wolves symbolize the big, bad federal government’s unwelcome interference in Idaho’s affairs. These are the same people who eagerly help themselves to federal agricultural support payments and tax subsidies and cheap grazing fees for public lands, and snatch at dollars flowing into the state from innumerable other federal programs, but who feel that only Idahoans have a right to control that land within the state that legally belongs to all the citizens of the nation.

When the U.S. Congress – which is to say, the people of this country – passed the Wilderness Act, in 1964, its intentions were perfectly clear. The country was in danger of losing all those areas in which nature alone shaped the landscape and the living things within it: areas that could still remind us of the America that Europeans found several hundred years ago when they appropriated it and began the inexorable process of transforming it to suit their needs and desires; areas in which we can now find solitude and rejuvenation; where we can reestablish contact with the daily rhythms and activities of a living world independent of us, a world in which we are now, of necessity, only visitors, yet one to which we are still attuned because it is akin to the world in which our species evolved.

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