Monday, February 20, 2006

Guest Opinion: U.S. agency does dance of denial over killing wild animals

MICHAEL J. ROBINSON

Tucson Citizen

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's ironically named Wildlife Services has become as adept at political damage control as it is at killing wildlife.

Since its inception in 1885, and whilst changing its name nine times, the agency succeeded in exterminating gray wolves, red wolves, jaguars, grizzly bears, black-footed ferrets, California condors and even the lowly prairie dog and ground squirrel from the majority of their ranges in the United States.

Along the way, it has mastered not only the arts of poisoning, trapping and shooting wildlife from the air, but also the dance of denial.

Consider the findings of a 1930 congressionally chartered investigation into its poisoning program, conducted two years after the agency, then called the Bureau of Biological Survey, resolutely denied it would ever push any species into extinction.

One investigator found private trappers distraught that the government had poisoned almost all the badgers on whose fur they had long relied.

The Biological Survey's own biologist, Olaus Murie, found that his agency's hunters "took great delight in excruciating suffering of an animal" and had not "the slightest interest in non-game species."

The Survey kept these reports under wrap and the following year convinced Congress to increase its budget. Over the next two decades, the agency killed the last wolves in the arid West and began its program to eliminate the Mexican gray wolf in Mexico by sending American poison and personnel south of the border.

In 1964, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall's Advisory Board on Wildlife and Game Management investigated the predator killing program of the Fish & Wildlife Service - the Biological Survey's name then.

The board concluded that the government's killing of wildlife "has become an end in itself" and that "far more animals are being killed than would be required for effective protection of livestock."

It described the agency as a "semiautonomous bureaucracy whose function in many localities bears scant relationship to real need and less still to scientific management," noting that Fish & Wildlife had no standards for how much alleged agricultural damage in any area would prompt the agency to kill wildlife, and that its hunters routinely violated the agency's own rules on use of poison.

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