The meat industry’s war on wildlife

A red fox was killed by a cyanide bomb. A gray wolf was shot dead on the plane. A jackrabbit was lassoed by the neck. 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 cruel program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The program kills wildlife for a variety of reasons, including poisoning birds to prevent them from hitting planes and eradicating beavers that sneak onto golf courses. But one of the main purposes of the $286 million largely taxpayer-funded program is to provide on-call pest control services to the meat and dairy industries.

“We were the hired guns of the livestock industry,” said Carter Niemeyer, who worked for Wildlife Services and related programs from 1975 to 2006. , these animals are suspected of killing farmed cattle and sheep.

Wildlife Services have also killed hundreds of endangered gray wolves, threatened grizzly bears and highly endangered Mexican gray wolves, often at the request of the livestock industry and through exemptions from the Endangered Species Act accomplish.

The top three species killed by wildlife services in 2023 were European starlings, wild boars and coyotes, according to data released last month. How these animals are being targeted, from shooting coyotes to poisoning birds, has prompted Congress to fund non-lethal initiatives within the program and conservation groups are calling for sweeping changes in how wildlife services operate. The USDA did not respond to several emailed questions.

Niemeyer said of agents killing animals in the wild, God is our only witness.You just wish everyone could do it [choices] Be morally and ethically acceptable and as humane as possible.

To their credit, Wildlife Services does much of its job of scaring away animals in non-lethal ways. However, controversy has dogged the program for decades, with critics such as Niemeyer and other former employees saying much of the program’s predator killings are unnecessary, imprecise and inhumane. Conservation groups say the predators are destructive to ecosystems because they are vital to ecosystem health and biodiversity.

Predator hysteria, explained

Adrian Treves, a professor of environmental science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the roots of today’s rampant predator killings can be traced to early European settlers in the Americas, who brought with them the mentality that wolves were super predators. Humanity poses a dangerous threat. He says we’re fed the story that wolf eradication is necessary for livestock production.

Today, the Wildlife Service’s most controversial job is killing coyotes and other predators because they pose a threat to U.S. ranchers and the food supply. But in 2015, predation accounted for only 4.7 percent of cattle mortality, according to USDA estimates.

Predation accounts for only 0.3 percent of cattle mortality, according to an analysis of U.S. Department of Agriculture data by the Humane Society of the United States. (Disclosure: From 2012 to 2017, I worked at the Humane Society of the United States on issues unrelated to agriculture.)

The Humane Society pointed to several flaws in the USDA data, including that ranchers reported livestock being predated by grizzly bears in six states where grizzlies do not exist. In the northern Rockies, ranchers reported livestock depredation rates 27 times higher than data provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which actually confirmed livestock deaths at the hands of predators.

When I first went to work, the common belief was that if a rancher called and said he had a coyote problem, we would assume [he] Niemeyer said there is a coyote problem. We didn’t question it. I didn’t see a lot of meticulous autopsy work done to investigate the cause of death. He now believes the numbers reported by ranchers to the USDA were inflated and embellished.

USDA Animal and Plant Inspection Service

The U.S. Department of Agriculture offers ranchers financial compensation for livestock killed by wolves and some other species, which could prompt them to blame predators for farm animal deaths. Robert Gosnell, former director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service in New Mexico, which manages the state’s wildlife services program, told the Intercept in 2022 that the agency’s field inspectors have been ordered to report livestock deaths Case of wolf kill for ranch owner. ‘My guys on the ground are rubber-stamping anything people ask for,’ Gosnell said.

Niemeyer does not object to killing individual coyotes or wolves suspected of killing specific cattle or sheep. But he said (and another former employee claimed) that Wildlife Services’ predator control was mostly preventive and aimed at reducing coyote populations.

Niemeyer said each coyote was suspected of being a possible killer, which he described as coyote or wolf hysteria.

Last year, 68,000 coyotes were killed by a variety of methods, including ingesting compound 1080, a poison that can cause acute pain such as heart blockage, respiratory failure, hallucinations and convulsions.

Thousands of animals were also killed as collateral damage. Last year, more than 2,000 people died accidentally as a result of numerous booby traps and cyanide bombs. The devices also caused a small number of injuries and killed more than 1,100 dogs between 2000 and 2012.

Some employees have died on the job, and there have even been accusations within the agency of ordering a cover-up of the unintentional killing of pets and federally protected golden eagles.

Irrational biases against predators make it difficult for Americans and their regulators to recognize the many ecological and social benefits of predators. For example, a study in Wisconsin found that wolf populations kept deer off roadways, reducing costly and sometimes fatal car crashes.

Counterintuitively, killing predators could lead to more livestock deaths, Treves said.

Some predatory species that experience mass killing events may compensate by having more offspring at a younger age. This may partially explain why when wolf killings increase in some Western states, livestock predation increases as well. When you eliminate some animals, others may fill the void. After centuries of wolf extermination campaigns in the United States, coyotes’ range expanded significantly in the 1900s.

Ultimately, Treves said, killing a suspected predator in one pasture might just drive the remaining population into neighboring pastures. A study he co-authored on wolf kills in Michigan found that the risk to livestock on nearby farms tripled after Wildlife Services fatally controlled wolves.

Agricultural Expansion and the War on Invasive Species

Wildlife Services is yet another example of the USDA’s seeming indifference to animal welfare, but it also highlights a little-known fact about human-wildlife conflicts: Much of it originates in agriculture.

Nearly half of the land in the contiguous United States is now used for meat, dairy and egg production, much of it for grazing, which crowds out wildlife and reduces biodiversity. Whenever wild animals end up on farmland that was once their habitat, they are at risk of being poisoned, shot, or trapped by wildlife services.

The same is true for those animals that feed on fruit, vegetable and nut orchards. But the Wildlife Service’s primary goal is to protect the interests of livestock producers, USDA public affairs specialist Tanya Espinosa told me in an email, a response to an industry that is already highly subsidized. another subsidy.

While much of the criticism leveled at the Wildlife Service involves its handling of otherworldly megafauna like coyotes, bears and wolves, little attention has been paid to the Wildlife Service’s most talked about species, the European starling. Starlings account for slightly more than half of all animals killed by Wildlife Services, with a total of 814,310 birds.

Starlings are targeted because they like to feast on grains on dairy and cattle farms, and most of them are massively poisoned by DRC-1339, also known as Starlicide, which destroys their heart and kidney function. Killing them slowly and painfully in the process. In cities and towns across America, it’s not uncommon to suddenly find thousands of starlings falling dead from trees or falling from the sky.

Australian ecologist Arian Wallach said despite the deaths, the starlings received little sympathy even from bird enthusiasts given their status as an invasive species, a term often used Justify the exclusion of a species from moral considerations.

Here, as with predators, we may need to reframe, or at least expand, our one-way conversations about non-native species like peccaries and starlings.

Natalie Hofmeister, an assistant professor of ecology at the University of Michigan and author of a forthcoming book, says starlings never think of themselves as an invasive species built by humans. Citizen Myna.

Rethinking mass murder

Despite its high kill numbers, Wildlife Services has expanded its use of non-lethal methods in recent years, including guard dogs, electric fences, audio/visual deterrents, research on bird repellents and tying flags to fences, which Can scare away some predator species.

Colette Adkins, director of carnivore conservation at the Center for Biological Diversity, said there have been some shifts in trends for wildlife services over the past three years. People place more emphasis on preventing conflicts than killing animals.

Matt Moyer/Getty Images

Treves agrees but is skeptical that meaningful change will occur. Most importantly, he’d like to see Wildlife Services conduct experimental testing of its lethal methods to see if they actually prevent livestock predation.

I’m cynical, he said. I’m frustrated that we’ve been arguing with this entrenched, bigoted establishment for 20 years and won’t listen to people who disagree with them.

There are no easy answers here. While much of Wildlife Services’ work is ecologically damaging and extremely cruel, wild animals do real harm to our food supply. Better management by farmers and ranchers and further USDA investments in non-lethal methods could help. Better to reconsider the USDA and meat industry’s license to wage war on wildlife.

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