U.S. wildlife officials on animal-killing spree

The Science Recorder
By Rick Docksai
June 9, 2014

The many animal wildlife populations in North America dip up and down by small margins year to year, the numbers of animals that U.S. wildlife officials kill in the name of animal and human safety swings up and down by enormous margins—and it topped off an unusually high 4 million kills last year. Critics within the conservation community and the U.S. Congress are now calling on the U.S. Department of Agriculture to explain why it has so many dead animals on its hands.

In 2013, wildlife officials affiliated with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services program shot, poisoned, or trapped more than four-million animals, according to the department. That figure included 866 bobcats; 3,700 foxes; 12,186 prairie dogs; 419 black bears; and at least three eagles. By comparison, the agency’s wildlife officials killed a mere 1.5 million animals in 2001.

Annual agency reports list the numbers of animals that the agency’s personnel capture and either release or kill in any given year. But none of them go into why any individual killing took place. And none fully account for how the kill totals could swing so disparately from 1.5 million in one year to 4 million in another.

But at least two members of Congress are now pressing for answers. The legislators, who include Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon), are calling for an investigation. In a recent statement, DeFazio expressed concern over not only the killings themselves, but the poisons that the wildlife officials might be using and the danger that they may or may not pose to humans and the environment. He complained that Wildlife Services is “one of the most opaque and obstinate departments I’ve dealt with.”

The conservation group Center for Biological Diversity is also on the case. Last December, it filed a petition demanding that the agency make a full account of the reasons for every animal that it killed and the methods that it used. The report called the Wildlife Services program a “rogue agency” that is “out of control.”

Wildlife officials will sometimes kill off invasive species that are harming local ecosystems. The nutria rats and certain feral pigs are examples of such undesired species. Birds that amass near airports and risk flying into airplane engines also end up on its kill lists.

Critics contend that many more killings, on the other hand, are not the result of any legitimate threat—the wildlife officials kill animals in masses because local farmers or homeowners demand it. Ranchers and farmers pay half the costs of killing animals that they think are in their way. The Center for Biological Diversity’s petition calls for new standards to be put in place to limit unnecessary killings such as these.