In a previous post
US Person referred to the Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services as the "SS" of agribusiness
{23.02.12}. Some readers may have thought that to be excessively severe rhetoric, but journalist Tom Knudson writing in the
Sacramento Bee tells why the description is not
out of bounds. Each year more than 100,000 animals are exterminated by the agency as alleged "problem" wildlife. The techniques used by the Service are brutal and indiscriminate. Each year pets are injured by traps, snares, and the diabolical
M-44 that ejects sodium cyanide into the mouth of whatever tugs at the bait.
[graphics: Sacramento Bee].Since 2000 agents have killed nearly a million coyotes, millions of birds, and thousands of 300 other species
[below]. Scientists who have study the agency's war on wildlife think it is ineffective and degrades ecosystems by diminishing biodiversity and inviting disease. For example coyote populations continue to increase despite intensive lethal control. Where coyotes have been reduced, rodents and feral cats tend to thrive. In Nevada's Granite Range, the agency spent half a million killing 45 mountain lions from the air to supposedly help mule deer, a big game hunting favorite. Despite the eradication of one the West's most iconic predators, the mule deer population was left unaffected. The agency tends to operate without public oversight, priding itself on efficiency.
The federal government began the lethal campaign when Congress allocated $125,000 to exterminate wolves in Nevada, hoping to increase beef production for World War I. The program became popular with ranchers, so President Herbert Hoover, being a good Republican, started a new government agency named the Branch of Predator and Rodent Control, mandated to eradicate a wide range of inconvenient wildlife ranging from mountain lions to prairie dogs. The zeal of federal hunters and trappers got so
out of control that a panel of scientists wrote in a 1964 report to the Department of Interior that the program had become "an end in itself and no longer a balanced component of...management". President Nixon banned the use of poison for federal predator control, but President Ford amended the order to allow the continued use of sodium cyanide, the same substance used to kill convicts in California's infamous gas chamber. M-44s were banned in California in 1998 but the Service still uses them elsewhere including Indian land. Killing has continued on a massive scale at the cost of tens of millions of dollars. It is time to stop indescriminate killing preditors as vermin because biological science says it is the ecologically wrong practice. You can help end the slaughter by asking Representative Peter DeFazio (D-OR) or Representative John Campbell (R-CA) to revive a bill to cut all federal funding for lethal predator control
