Your tax dollars support wildlife slaughter

Today's post is dedicated to a little-known office in the U.S. Department of Agriculture that has been in the news lately due to some ill-advised Facebook posturing by one of its agents. Borrowing from my friend Jodi's practice on her excellent blog Heart Like a Dog, today I can't suppress a great big WTF about a Wyoming coyote trapper employed by the federal government who posted photos of his dogs torturing and killing a trapped coyote.

I wont post the photos here but you can see them at the links to the news coverage below. They reveal not just an indifference to suffering but a gleeful enjoyment of it that is nurtured by a certain element of American culture that would be right at home at a medieval spectacle of drawing and quartering. 

Have we evolved at all since then?

Any instance of animal suffering is intolerable but coyotes are just wild cousins of the dogs we love and I cannot fathom how it is that a large sector of the U.S. population--including a taxpayer funded federal office, "Wildlife Services," formerly known by the less euphemistic name Animal Damage Control--wants to exterminate them and even see them suffer.

Image courtesy of Predator Defense http://www.predatordefense.org/gallery.htm#thumb

When I worked for WildEarth Guardians in New Mexico I investigated this agency as part of my work to reform the Western public lands livestock industry. Many of the requests Wildlife Services receives to kill wildlife-- coyotes, wolves, prairie dogs--come from ranchers who see wild creatures as nothing more than competition to their stock. Using our tax dollars, Wildlife Services agents then go into the field and put out poison (which can be ingested by family dogs and of course any number of nontarget wildlife species), set cruel and undiscriminating leghold traps, shoot vast numbers of wolves and coyotes from helicopters, and gas mountain lion cubs in their dens. You can learn more about the 26 million animals killed between 2004 and 2011 at an annual taxpayer cost of $100 million here. 

The particular photos at issue were posted on Facebook by Jamie Olson, a Wildlife Services trapper from Wyoming who says he was only trying to impress his father with how well trained his dog was (to rip apart a coyote who was held immobile in a leghold trap). Fortunately, activists found the photos and demanded an investigation, and the Sacramento Bee is continuing its extraordinary ongoing expose on Wildlife Services with coverage of the incident. 

Image from Project Coyote http://www.projectcoyote.org/

To me it is absolutely irrelevant whether Olson was working for Wildlife Services when he took the photos, and it is irrelevant that Wildlife Services' official yarn is that it does not condone torture and all wildlife killing should be "humane." According to Gary Strader, a former Wildlife Services agent who turned into a whistleblower, such antics are commonplace among the people who work for this institution, and such an institution has no place among the entities we support with our tax dollars.

The fact is that the vast majority of American people love wildlife, and Wildlife Services still exists only because most people don't know about it. I have wished since I first found out about this office for some way to get the word out about what it does and generate a vast tide of public sentiment toward its reform. Perhaps these photos, and what they reveal about the depravity of an agency that hires the sort of person who tortures for sport, will generate that long-overdue momentum. 

And now that I have a blog and can post about it, and get all five of my readers to take action, well by jiminy change may be just around the corner!

I urge everyone to learn more and join efforts to defund and eliminate, or at least radically reform, this retrograde government subsidy to those who wish to destroy our natural heritage. WildEarth Guardians has a petition here and there is a Causes.com petition here, and the websites of WildEarth Guardians and Predator Defense offer more resources for getting involved.