#bs culling

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The Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit today challenging the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to classify the world’s last wild population of red wolves as ‘nonessential.’

The red wolf is listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act and is among the most imperiled species in the world. Just 13 known wild red wolves survive in eastern North Carolina.

“It’s absurd for the Fish and Wildlife Service to conclude that the world’s last wild population of red wolves isn’t essential,” said Perrin de Jong, Southeast staff attorney at the Center. “It’s time for the agency to acknowledge that this persecuted population of endangered wolves is an irreplaceable part of Southeastern ecosystems. These severely imperiled animals deserve the highest level of protection.”

Today’s lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, notes that the Endangered Species Act defines an experimental population as ‘essential’ if the loss of the population would significantly reduce the likelihood of the species’ survival in the wild. Because the red wolf experimental population is the only wild population of the species, its loss would eliminate the species from the wild.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today released its final environmental impact statement and a draft Record of Decision for Colorado Parks and Wildlife to begin reintroducing endangered gray wolves.

The decision, if finalized, would allow the killing of wolves that prey on livestock, but it includes no requirement that livestock owners undertake nonlethal preventative measures.

“When the first wolf bolts out of a portable kennel into western Colorado’s cornucopia of elk and deer, it will start to right the wrong of federal wolf extermination a century ago,” said Michael Robinson of the Center for Biological Diversity. “After clinking our glasses in a toast to the wolves in their new home, we’ll closely monitor wolf management to ensure the budding population is allowed to thrive without persecution.”

The final environmental statement has just one substantial change from the draft: It limits the killing of wolves in response to “unacceptable impacts” to wild ungulates such as deer and elk to tribal lands — whereas the draft EIS would have allowed such killings anywhere in the state.

A program known as “Wildlife Services,” a unit of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has long operated secretively for a reason: Its actions are incredibly brutal and inhumane to animals, from familiar wildlife to endangered species — and even people's pets.

This program has been known to kill more than a million native animals every year — including coyotes, bears, beavers, wolves, otters, foxes, prairie dogs, mountain lions and birds — without any oversight, accountability or requirement to disclose its activities to the public. The program has contributed to the decline of gray wolves, Mexican wolves, black-footed ferrets, black-tailed prairie dogs and other imperiled species during the first half of the 1900s, and it continues to impede their recovery today.

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The Bureau of Land Management recently announced that it will no longer allow the use of “cyanide bombs” on its lands. The M-44 devices are often used to protect livestock from animals like foxes or coyotes.

Several environmental groups lauded the decision, saying it makes public spaces safer for people and animals.

“Cyanide bombs” are baited, spring-loaded traps that release deadly poison into the air when triggered. Wildlife agents – often from the U.S. Department of Agriculture – usually set them to control predators, especially in remote areas.

M-44s killed more than 5,000 animals last year, according to the USDA, and were deployed in 10 states, including Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada.

Colette Adkins, Carnivore Conservation program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said the devices are dangerous because of their indiscriminate nature.

“Anything that tugs on the spring-loaded device will be sprayed with this deadly poison, whether it's a kid, an endangered species or a target animal like a coyote. They really are just too dangerous to be used in public places,” she said.

This issue made national headlines in 2017 when a “cyanide bomb” killed a family pet and injured a boy in Idaho. Since then, several groups have been petitioning to end the use of M-44s on public lands.

Conservation groups have filed an appeal asking Gov. Jay Inslee to order the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission to draft enforceable rules that limit when the state can kill endangered wolves for conflicts with livestock.

The appeal, filed late Monday, seeks a reversal of the commission’s Oct. 28 denial of the groups’ formal petition for enforceable livestock-wolf conflict rules.

“The governor has already directed state wildlife managers to reduce wolf killing in response to livestock conflicts, but stronger action is clearly needed,” said Amaroq Weiss, senior wolf advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Despite Gov. Inslee’s clear orders, the state is killing more wolves than ever. With no rules in place to make wolf-killing a last resort, we expect things will get even worse.”

Since 2012, 53 state-endangered wolves have been killed in Washington for actual or claimed conflicts. Of those killed, 75% have been killed by the state on behalf of the same livestock-owning family, which fails to take adequate steps to protect its cattle. And 75% of those wolves killed have been shot for conflicts that occurred on public lands. Sixteen of the wolves, or nearly one-third of all those killed, were shot in just the past three years.

In 2019 Gov. Inslee asked that wolf managers “significantly reduce the need for lethal removal of this species.” In 2020 Gov. Inslee again directed state wildlife managers to amend their rules when he granted an appeal filed by wildlife conservationists.

Because the commission still has not adopted rules, wildlife groups filed a new wolf rulemaking petition in September. This week’s appeal seeks a reversal of the commission’s October denial of that rulemaking petition.

The groups proposed amending an existing rule to provide clarity to the agency, livestock operators and the public. Requested amendments would:

-Require livestock operators to use appropriate nonlethal methods to prevent conflict between livestock and wolves before the agency could consider killing wolves.

-Require the agency to develop mitigation plans for areas of chronic conflict.

-Establish standards for what constitutes effective range riding to best protect livestock.

-Prohibit killing of wolves on public lands or for conflicts that occur on public lands.

-Set basic limits on the number of wolves that could be killed and length of time a kill order could remain open.

Additional requested amendments would restore the “caught in the act of attacking” provision to its original form as it existed in the 2011 state wolf plan. Under the expanded version adopted in 2013, in more than two-thirds of the incidents the evidence has shown wolves were not in fact attacking when they were shot and killed.

On October 26th, the Idaho Wolf Depredation Control Board (IWDCB) approved allocating over $140,000 to private contractors for aerial gunning, trapping, and snaring wolves in Idaho. The decision was made with no opportunity for comment or public review.

Trevor C. Walch, operator of the Nevada-based Predator Control Corporation, presented three of the five hunting proposals and is poised to be the primary beneficiary of three of the contracts to be executed by the Idaho Wolf Depredation Control Board, totaling over $100,000. His extensive record of violating wildlife laws has been uncovered since the meeting. In Nevada, this record includes selling furs without a license and trapping practices that the Nevada Chief Game Warden labeled “blatant illegal behavior.” Walch left an elk calf and other animals in traps for over ten days to die of dehydration and starvation. In Wyoming, Walch has been investigated for unlawful aerial hunting over federal lands.

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Game Management Units 48 and 49 are home to the Wood River Wolf Project, which has been successfully working directly with ranchers, sheep herders, and community members in Blaine County since 2008 to promote coexistence with wolves and prevent livestock losses. The 2023 field season concluded in October, resulted in zero confirmed sheep losses to wolves amongst the 24,000 sheep in the 1,200 sq km (about half the area of Yosemite National Park) project area. The project regularly documents the lowest sheep losses to wolves in Idaho’s wolf range. Yet now, the state has targeted wolves in the Wood River Wolf Project’s area to be exterminated without cause.

Ranchers currently managing sheep in the Project Area were not notified of this decision. Since being notified of these proposals after the meeting, the Flat Top Sheep Company owners have withdrawn from the scheme and Lava Lake Land & Livestock’s owner and President Brian Bean has denounced the effort for its wasteful spending and risk of harm to the public. Bean points out that pack disruption through partial lethal control will likely cause more, not fewer, wolf conflicts with livestock as individual survivors; especially as inexperienced juveniles, spread across the landscape and no longer subject to pack social discipline, turn to killing livestock for survival.

“The collective expense of these wolf depredation mitigation programs exceeds the total value of livestock killed, statewide, in Idaho. Much of that expense is borne by Idaho taxpayers — for no good reason,” says Bean.

“Nonlethal deterrents work. Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, year after year, to kill wolves — at this point, often pre-emptively and without evidence that wolves have actually killed livestock — says a lot about Idaho politics, about the Idaho State Legislature, about Idaho politicians generally and about the Idaho Wolf Livestock Depredation Control Board itself which only funds killing wolves with nothing allocated to nonlethal depredation mitigation. Is this good governance and program administration? Emphatically not. Rather, it’s expensive, wasteful, vindictive, and immoral,” states Bean, concluding, “It’s also, unfortunately, very much today’s Idaho.”  

“The Wood River Wolf Pack in Blaine County is among those targeted by the Idaho Wolf Depredation Control Board, yet wolves here have the best record of living beside tens of thousands of sheep peacefully for 16 straight years. This year, ranchers in our project area reported no loss of sheep to the Wood River wolves with over 24,000 sheep present during the 2023 grazing season, making it one of the most successful years on record,” says Suzanne Asha Stone, IWCN Director. “By targeting this population of research wolves that are proving that nonlethal methods are more effective in protecting livestock than randomly killing wolves and other native carnivores, the state of Idaho is blatantly refusing to coexist with any wolves. Period.”

“These wolves live on our public lands that belong to all Americans,” she adds. “Our local community doesn’t want the state to kill our wolves. By enriching biodiversity and helping protect against catastrophic disease in elk and deer, they make essential contributions to a healthy ecosystem.”

In November, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) published a plan to cull nearly half a million barred owls across the lush old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest and California. 

But by killing these owls, the agency is hoping to save owls—albeit a different species of the bird. Officials plan to remove a portion of the abundant barred owl population over a three-decade span to clear up space and resources for the threatened northern spotted owl, of which only around 4,000 remain on federal lands. Native to the region, spotted owls have faced a number of threats in the past few decades, including forest loss due to logging and competition with the barred owl, which has been more successful at hunting and adapting to a variety of territories than its vulnerable avian cousin. 

Scientists are still not certain how or where the barred owls came from, but research shows that they began to expand their range westward concurrently with European settlement and as human-caused changes altered habitats in the Great Plains and northern boreal forest. As a result, many say the barred owls are an invasive species and must be removed to protect native species, reports NPR. 

However, the USFWS culling plan has triggered a spate of backlash since it was announced; just last week dozens of wildlife organizations published a letter condemning this effort and arguing that it “betrays a willful failure to anticipate the wide range of adverse consequences such a plan will invariably unspool.” 

The plan has also resurfaced a longstanding debate over what makes a species “invasive,” and how nonnative plants and animals should be treated within an ecosystem. Today, I am diving into the details of the invasive debate, and how it could affect wildlife management moving forward. 

What’s in a Name? The author Charles Elton was the first to use the term “invasion” to describe foreign plants and wildlife in his 1958 book “The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants,” reports The New York Times. 

Scientists have identified countless nonnative invasive species across the U.S.—from cane toads in Florida to fingernail-sized zebra mussels in the Great Lakes. In most cases, these species are introduced by humans who may accidentally carry them over on transit or intentionally release them. While many nonnative species are relatively harmless to an ecosystem, others can have catastrophic consequences; for example, feral pigs have destroyed crops and spread disease across at least 35 states in the U.S., according to the USDA. 

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“The words we use determine what courses of action are deemed acceptable and appropriate,” Bliss told me over email. “When we call something invasive, we may show less regard for their welfare.” 

Bliss pointed to certain inhumane methods to kill nonnative species such as traps once used in the Netherlands to kill muskrats by holding them underwater until they drown. Other researchers have also questioned the term “invasive.”

“It’s not that it can’t be descriptively true at times, there can be nonnative species moving into an area, causing damage, which is emblematic of the meaning of invasion,” William Lynn, a researcher at Clark University in Massachusetts who studies animal and sustainability ethics, told me over the phone. “But to label species ‘invasive’ simply because they’re nonnative or they’re immigrant species, or to blindly bandy about the term ‘invasive’ species when it’s not clear that that’s what’s going on, is the problem.” 

The Owl Conundrum: The northern spotted owl is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, meaning that the USFWS is legally required to protect it. This led the government to enact rules limiting the area that timber companies could log, sparking backlash from industry and residents in the region for its economic impacts. 

Now, the Service has deemed this cull a necessity in following through with this obligation. 

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The U.S. government has performed a barred owl culling experiment before, but at a much smaller scale than the new USFWS project. Over a decade ago, a team of researchers led by the U.S. Geological Survey killed more than 2,400 barred owls, and found that their efforts helped temporarily stabilize spotted owl populations over the next five years, according to a 2021 study.  

At that time, Lynn was a member of the government’s “Barred Owl Stakeholder Group,” which performed an ethics review before the project took place. 

Despite the groups’ “deep discomfort with killing barred owls,” they deemed it necessary to cull several thousand barred owls in order to save the spotted owl species, Lynn said. Overall, though, he said that the experiment “failed” because while it slowed the decline of the spotted owl, it did not act as a long-term solution.