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Contract killers - Animal Damage Control program

Sierra - November 1, 1993

AS A PUBLIC SERVICE LAST YEAR, AGENTS OF THE FEDERAL ANIMAL DAMAGE CONTROL program destroyed more than 2.2 million wild animals, only slightly fewer than they had dispatched the previous year. Though 71 percent of the 1992 casualties were blackbirds, grackles, and European starlings guilty of eating farmers' grain or behaving as pests in urban areas, hundreds of thousands of other wild creatures were eliminated, among them coyotes, foxes, mountain lions, and wolves. Federal trappers and hunters variously "controlled" everything from Canada that pooped on golf courses to cattle egrets that sometimes made the mistake of roosting near airports, to beavers that caused timberlands to flood, raccoons that raided garbage cans, bears that foraged in dumps, and foxes that raided poultry farms.

Animal Damage Control, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, exists solely for the purpose of controlling wildlife when it comes into conflict with people. In practice, "people" usually means influential ranchers and farmers; "conflict" means economic loss from "varmints" that prey on livestock or from birds that plague crops; and "control" almost invariably means killing the wildlife blamed for that loss.

When it got rolling 60 years ago, ADC's first assignment was to conduct, at the behest of the lifestock industry, a pogrom against predators. Although it now operates nationwide, ADC is most entrenched in the West, where far and away its most well-funded and controversial function is its continuing war on allegedly troublesome predators that attack livestock, especially coyotes accused of killing sheep. (According to the USDA's latest data, close to half a million sheep and lambs in the United States are taken by predators each year, nearly 60 percent of them by coyotes in western states. These figures, however, are reported to the government by sheep growers, and are likely to be highly inflated.) By the 1970s, with ADC's help, the largest predators--grizzlies, mountain lions, wolves--had been wiped out in most of their natural range. Nevertheless, the conflict between politically powerful ranchers, especially sheep ranchers, and the less-well-connected predatory mammals that they target continues to rage on.

For the past 12 hours, environmental activist Patricia Wolff has been proselytizing all over Santa Fe, pressing the flesh and helping officiate at fund-raisers, all the while trying to answer my pesky questions. By 10 p.m., when she picks up on a conversation begun early in the day, she is dead-tired--and more apt than usual to shoot from the lip.

"I'll grant that he's sincere," she reluctantly concedes of fellow New Mexican Curt Mullis, "but that doesn't mean I have to like or respect him."

In Wolff's view, what Mullis does for a living is akin to child beating: he is the state director of ADC. Mullis, along with his counterparts in other western states, earns his keep by ensuring that any wildlife species that makes itself unpopular with the livestock industry is trapped, snared, poisoned, shot from a plane, gassed in its den, or otherwise disposed of in a damage-controlling way. Even if, as often happens, it isn't actually doing any damage.

As chair of the wildlife committee of the Sierra Club's Rio Grande Chapter and manager for a Santa Fe group called Forest Guardians, Pat Wolff's active on many fronts, opposing destructive development projects and watchdogging the Forest Service. But she leaves no doubt that ADC is the adversary she most loathes. "I've always loved animals," she explains. "When I first learned about ADC's war on wildlife and saw photos of animals being tortured and killed, it outraged me that a federal agency should be slaughtering wildlife for the benefit of the ranchers--with taxpayers' money."

Right then, she resolved to act.

Although it took many months to wrest the relevant data from ADC, she collected some pretty damning evidence about the way the agency does business in New Mexico. The educational backgrounds of the "biological science technicians"--more commonly known as trappers that ADC boasts of employing have been blacked out in the records Wolff acquired under the Freedom of Information Act, but under the heading of previous experience, such occupations as "mecanic" (sic), "Santa Claus," and "prairie dog poisoner" are listed. (The technicians need not possess college degrees, but are expected to understand biological principles and know how to use snares, traps, firearms, and poisons.) More important, the "selective methods of control" used by the technicians turn out, on the evidence of their own reports, to be neither very selective nor cost-effective. In one notorious case, ADC trappers-- working on public lands--spent almost 500 hours killing 56 wild animals, including 28 coyotes, a deer, several skunks, badgers, porcupines, and foxes--plus a hognosed snake (mysteriously listed as a "target species")--all in response to a rancher's claim that a coyote had killed one lamb worth $83. In another incident, 24 animals, including two inadvertently trapped deer, were destroyed in response to the "confirmed" kill of one lamb by a bobcat and one deer by a coyote. In a third, 11 "non-target" kit foxes gave their lives so that seven "target" coyotes might also die--even though the government trapper did not confirm any livestock loss.

Pat Wolff's campaign against ADC has not gone unnoticed by some of that agency's more ardent supporters. Harassing calls and a death-threat letter have come her way--unsettling experiences for anyone, and especially for a divorced woman living alone with a nine-year-old daughter. Those threats don't intimidate her, Wolff says, "because I have a lot of inner strength." Now, however, as the last of the day's fund-raisers draws to a close, it is obvious that her supply of strength is temporarily used up.

Still, she can't resist one last shot at ADC before calling it a night: "You know, when I first started dealing with them, all I wanted were a few reforms. But it wasn't long before I became really pissed off at their arrogance and intransigence. They don't want the public to know what they're doing."

A platinum-bright leghold trap hangs dramatically on the wall behind Curt Mullis' desk, making its own bold, emblematic statement--one that any wildlife lover would interpret as deliberately provocative. Yet when I talk with him one afternoon, Mullis seems, if anything, a bit defensive. A fit-looking, hazel-eyed man who could be a model for a Marlboro ad, Mullis reminds me of a type often encountered in the Vietnam era: a good soldier who believes he is being unfairly handicapped while trying to fight an unpopular war. When, glancing at the trap above his head, I ask him, "Does it ever bother you that animals as sensitive to pain as your own dog or cat should have their legs crushed by a thing like that?" he answers: "Yeah, well, I've thought about that. But you have a mission to accomplish, so you accomplish it."

When the subject of The Photo comes up, Mullis looks grim. A snapshot of the severed heads of 13 Arizona mountain lions killed by ADC was widely publicized in the news media three years ago, igniting a firestorm of protest. It was a catalyst in the formation of several organizations in the West that want ADC abolished. Mullis' voice is edged with bitterness when he recounts that the heads, preserved at the request of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (which until eight years ago had overseen .AIDC), had been covertly photographed by a disgruntled FWS employee whose motives, he claims, were more personal than environmental. But then he adds: "The Photo may have done some good. I've seen more change in the program in the last three or four years than I have in the rest of my career."

Although I believe Mullis believes ADC is improving--becoming more selective in its control methods, and more environmentally aware--I don't share his conviction. Ever since I started keeping tabs on ADC some 20 years ago, its leaders have been saying the same thing. True, the agency now pays more lip service to environmental protection. But out on the range, not much has changed.

Take, for instance, the way coyotes are hunted. Mullis explains that control of the animals is "species specific"--a euphemism that means the killing is wholesale, without regard to whether individual coyotes are taking livestock or not. In practice, however, it is not even very "specific" to the target species. Traps, snares, and poisons inadvertently dispatch many thousands of non-target animals. In addition, some predators other than coyotes, notably bobcats and foxes, are shot or trapped even though sheep growers themselves do not regard them as a serious problem. Like coyotes, they have the misfortune of being furbearers as well as predators, and in some states ADC is legally allowed to defray part of its costs by selling pelts.

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