In 2021, an obscure US government division had a busy – and merciless – year, murdering almost 1.75 million animals around the country at a pace of about 200 per hour. The latest yearly toll from Wildlife Services, a division of the United States Department of Agriculture, has inflamed conservationists, who have branded the kills […]
Tag: wildlife services
How People Are Peacefully Mitigating Human-Wildlife Conflict
According to a study released in April, a mere 3% of ecosystems around the globe remain intact. To determine the integrity of the world’s wildernesses, the study’s authors looked at both the current state of habitats (flora) and the remaining populations of wild animals (fauna) that traditionally live in the examined areas. Populations of many […]
Idaho documents reveal weeks-old wolf pups among 570 maimed, slaughtered wolves
BOISE—As the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced last week that the removal of wolves from Endangered Species Act protection nation-wide is “very imminent,” new data from Idaho show the ugly face of state wolf management there. According to an analysis of records obtained by Western Watersheds Project, hunters, trappers, and state and federal agencies […]
Environmentalists sue the US Wildlife Services for killing more than 1.2 MILLION native wild animals in 2019 to make way for agriculture
Wildlife Services has come under fire after releasing the death toll of wildlife it killed in 2019. The US Department of Agriculture program slaughtered more than 1.2 million native species including wolves, coyotes, cougars and birds – all of which was funded with taxpayer money. The multi-million dollar federal program conducted the acts primarily to […]
More on Wildlife Services’ sketchy depredation reports blaming Mexican gray wolves for livestock kills
Mexican gray wolves are blamed for all kinds of livestock deaths in Catron County, and so we wanted to see for ourselves, by reviewing depredation reports, how USDA Wildlife Services is investigating dead livestock and arriving at determinations that Mexican wolves are to blame. Spoiler alert: It’s not particularly convincing. (I’ve written about this before, […]
The secretive government agency planting ‘cyanide bombs’ across the US
The call came over Tony Manu’s police radio one March day in 2017: some sort of pipe had exploded in the hills outside Pocatello, Idaho and the son of a well-known local doctor was hurt, or worse. Manu, a long-time detective with the county sheriff’s office, was shocked. A pipe bomb in Pocatello? “We were […]
Idaho Agreement Restricts Wolf-killing, Bans Use of M-44 Cyanide Bombs
BOISE, Idaho— In a key victory for wildlife, conservation groups finalized an agreement today that sets strict limits on how and where a federal agency can kill wolves in Idaho, bans the use of M-44 “cyanide bombs” statewide, and prohibits the use of snares to kill wolves on public lands. The new restrictions on wolf […]
Rangers just killed one of Kenya’s most famous lions because they didn’t have tranquilizers
Mohawk the lion, one of Kenya’s most famous big cats, was fatally shot Wednesday by wildlife rangers. In a country that has invested millions in protecting its wildlife, Kenyans are trying to figure out what went wrong. The animal management team that first arrived had no tranquilizers, only rifles. A second, with tranquilizers, was on […]