Tag Archives: wolves

Wildlife services: Death from the air (taxpayer funded)

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Wildlife Services: Death from the Air
by wolf advocate and author Rick Lamplugh
From his Facebook page

Each of the 58 wolf-paw stickers adorning this Wildlife Services aircraft represents a wolf kill. This photo surfaced in 2011, after the federal agency had stopped using the stickers. But they haven’t stopped aerial gunning. Just last month, their gunners in helicopters slaughtered 19 wolves in the remote Lolo region of Idaho. The killing was kept secret until recently.

While I shake my head in disgust at this agency’s mission and methods, I find another bitter pill to swallow: all of us help fund Wildlife Services with our tax dollars. The amount paid by taxes is reduced by income from what the agency calls “cooperators”—counties, public institutions, private businesses, or special interest groups that want animals removed and will pay the agency’s bargain rate. Idaho’s Department of Fish and Game paid Wildlife Services to deliver death from above the Lolo wolves.

The other four Rocky Mountain wolf states also use the agency. Here’s how much was spent in each state in 2013 (most recent data) and the percentage of that total paid by taxpayers. Idaho—site of the recent slaughter—managed to get us taxpayers to pick up three-quarters of the tab for their wildlife killing.

Wyoming spent $4,254,043, and taxpayers paid 36%
Washington spent $3,832,996, and taxpayers paid 57%
Oregon spent $3,628,846, and taxpayers paid 37%
Montana spent $3,077,910, and taxpayers paid 52%
Idaho spent $2,066,106, and taxpayers paid 75%

While Wildlife Services reports the amount paid for their deadly work, they do not reveal the reasons for removal or exactly what they did. That secrecy is one of critics’ biggest complaints. “Wildlife Services is one of the most opaque and obstinate departments I’ve dealt with,” said U.S. Representative Peter Defazio. “We’re really not sure what they’re doing.” Defazio—then the ranking member of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources—questioned the agency about its lethal methods and poisons. He’s still waiting for an answer.

Defazio is not alone in his wondering. In late 2013, the US Department of Agriculture’s Office of Inspector General announced that it would audit Wildlife Services. Tom Knudson, from the Center for Investigative Reporting, reported recently that the audit still hasn’t been released. When it will come out and what it will find is anyone’s guess, he says.

Knudson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning environment reporter, once asked to observe Wildlife Services’ lethal predator control in action on public land in Nevada. Their answer: NO. Knudson says he was shocked because, “Even the military allows reporters into the field on its missions overseas. Here at home, on land owned by all Americans, Wildlife Services does not.”

Wildlife Services has operated under various identities and hidden within different departments for more than 100 years. Some say it helped clear the West for our nation’s expansion. But times have changed and so have public attitudes about protecting wildlife. It’s time for Wildlife Services to stop the senseless carnage, to be open about what they do, and to focus on nonlethal control.

As always, I’d love to read your comments on this issue. I most appreciate comments free of cursing or threats.

To read Tom Knudson’s latest report on Wildlife Services: http://bit.ly/1baAr9k

Rick Lamplugh is a wolf advocate and author of the bestseller In the Temple of Wolves
To order an eBook or paperback: http://amzn.to/Jpea9Q
For a signed copy from the author: http://bit.ly/1gYghB4

Lawsuit challenges Wildlife Service’s killing of wolves

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Indian Country Today Media Network

The second lawsuit in three weeks has been filed against the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Wildlife Services program over the federally sanctioned killing of wolves and other wildlife.

Most recently the Western Environmental Law Center filed suit in U.S. District Court in Seattle on March 3 on behalf of five conservation groups, alleging that Wildlife Services has overstepped its authority in killing wolves to protect livestock. The agency’s efforts are based on outdated analysis of how to deal with wildlife, the complaint states, and more often than not the job is bungled—as with the shooting last year of the female leader of a wolf pack instead of another wolf that had been seen attacking livestock, Reuters reported.

“Wildlife Services’ activities related to wolves in Washington have been extremely harmful,” said Western Environmental Law Center attorney John Mellgren in a statement. “The science tells us that killing wolves does not actually reduce wolf-livestock conflicts, but Wildlife Services is continuing its brutal assault on this iconic animal, and it needs to stop.”

In mid-February, five conservation groups filed suit in U.S. District Court in Idaho over what they called the indiscriminate killing of wolves, coyotes and other wildlife, the Associated Press reported on February 13.

“The lawsuit notes that the federal agency in 2013 killed more than 200,000 animals, much of that number representing the killing of birds that can pose problems on cattle feedlots or dairies,” AP said of the Idaho lawsuit. “The agency in 2013 also killed 2,739 coyotes and 79 wolves.”

Both suits allege that Wildlife Services’ actions are antithetical to the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act, which mandates that federal agencies conduct thorough environmental analyses of the effects of their activities. The Idaho lawsuit also includes the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as defendants because the groups allege that it is inadequately enforcing the Endangered Species Act by not challenging Wildlife Services, AP said.

The Endangered Species Act protects wolves in the western two-thirds of Washington State, according to Reuters, but in eastern Washington, protection is up to the state. The same is true in both Idaho and Montana, Reuters said.

In western Washington, the Wildlife Service’s activities constitute negligence under the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires an in-depth environmental impact statement, said the Washington plaintiffs—Cascadia Wildlands, WildEarth Guardians, Kettle Range Conservation Group, Predator Defense and The Lands Council.

“The agency completed a less-detailed environmental assessment, but the document contains significant gaps and does not address specific issues that will significantly impact wolves and the human environment,” the groups’ statement said. “The EA prepared by Wildlife Services fails to provide data to support several of its core assertions. For example, Wildlife Services claims that killing wolves reduces wolf-caused losses of livestock, yet recent peer-reviewed research from Washington State University directly contradicts this conclusion, finding that killing wolves actually leads to an increase in wolf-livestock conflicts. The EA also fails to address the ecological effects of killing wolves in Washington, including impacts on wolf populations in neighboring states and on non-target animals, including federally protected grizzly bears and Canada lynx.”

Wolf culling is causing controversy in several states and at least one Canadian province.

Click HERE for the original article.

Woflandia: the fight over the most polarizing animal in the west

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From Outside magazine.

Twenty years after wolves were reintroduced in the Northern Rockies, many politicians would still love to see them eradicated, and hunters and ranchers are allowed to kill them by the hundreds. But the animals are not only surviving—they’re thriving, and expanding their range at a steady clip. For the people who live on the wild edges of wolf country, their presence can be magical and maddening at once.
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The switchbacks on the old logging road still held two-foot-deep patches of snow in late March, when we set off on four-wheelers to scout for wolf tracks in the Boise National Forest, north of Garden Valley, Idaho. The riding was easy lower down, where the hardpack traced the course of a snowmelt-swollen stream through a tight canyon. Spiny rock towers rose from the banks, disintegrating into forbidding walls of scree and timber. If you were an elk or a deer, it would be a tempting place to come for a drink, but you’d be taking your life in your hands. Wolves love a terrain trap.

As we climbed, our engines strained against the grade, mud, and snow. We were headed to a vantage point above a place called Granite Basin, where we could scan hundreds of acres of forest with spotting scopes. Zeb Redden, a 35-year-old soldier based in Fort Carson, Colorado, carried his girlfriend, Joni, on the back of his ATV. Zeb had paid Deadwood Outfitters, owned by Tom and Dawn Carter, $3,500 for the weeklong wolf hunt. I was along as an unarmed observer.

Zeb’s tricked-out, AR-15-style rifle was tucked into a scabbard built into his backpack. A couple of days before, I’d watched him drop to the prone position, press his cheek onto the stock behind his scope, and put a 7.62-millimeter round on a bull’s-eye-painted rock 600 yards away. He was deadly at long range, but he said he probably wouldn’t take a first shot at anything farther out than about 500 yards.

“I’m shooting jacketed hollow-point boat-tails, and at that distance they’ll just go right through. They won’t open up like they’re supposed to,” he’d explained. “If he’s wounded and beyond 500, I’ll keep putting lead on him. But if it’s a first shot, I’d rather get in closer.” I wondered if adrenaline would change his mind if we actually saw a wolf…..

……….
“Some people find it ironic that U.S. taxpayers paid tens of millions to restore Northern Rocky Mountain wolves under the Endangered Species Act, only to have hunters tart blowing them away as soon as they were delisted.”
……….

For the entire article please click here.

Bears and wolves find a voice in the wilderness

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By Kathleen Parker Opinion writer for the Washington Post:

If politicians preying upon your attentions this season fail to inspire, you might seek common cause with the beasts — the four-legged variety rather than those running for office.

Ballot initiatives aimed at protecting bears and wolves from hounding, trapping and other inhumane hunting practices are up for a vote in two states — Maine and Michigan.

Oh, be still thy twitching trigger finger. This isn’t an anti-hunting column; it’s a pro-humanity column. Ours. And the referendums, driven by the Humane Society of the United States, are aimed only at minimizing animal suffering and restoring a measure of decency and fair play in our dealings with creatures.

First the bears. Maine is the only state that still allows bear baiting, hounding and trapping. More than half of the 32 states with legal bear hunting allow hounding, a dozen allow baiting, and only Maine allows trapping for sport.

For clarification, hounding refers to the use of dogs that have been trained to chase bears relentlessly and then to corner or fight the poor beast. The bears have no choice but to turn to face a murderous pack or, exhausted, escape up a tree.

That’s when the hunter, who, thanks to electronic tracking equipment, has been able to follow at a leisurely pace and safe distance, points his rifle and shoots the bear from a tree limb. Frances Macomber, the cowardly hunter of Hemingway’s short, unhappy story, looks like a Maasai warrior by comparison.

Baiting means that a hunting guide strews rotting food in the woods and places a 55-gallon drum filled with jelly doughnuts, pizza, grease, fish guts and rotting beaver carcasses in a target spot. The “hunter,” who likely has paid a fee to the “guide” for a “guaranteed kill,” is provided a comfy seat to wait for the bear. Bam!

It’s ironic — or something — that the same state fish and wildlife agency folks who post signs warning tourists not to feed the bears will allow other tourists to feed them for about $2,000 to $4,000 a pop. New signage might read: Kill what you feed.

More…..click HERE for full story.