The Government’s Dirty Little War on Wildlife: A Short History

Since 1885, the federal government has been involved in wildlife-killing campaigns designed to protect livestock growers. The only thing that changed over the years was the agency’s name. The Office of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy began testing poisons for rodents and predators in 1885. In 1905 the Bureau of Biological Survey took over predator and rodent control. By 1938, the Bureau created a separate division, the Division of Predator and Rodent Control (PARC) (Dunlap, 1983; USDA, 1994).

In 1931, Congress passed the Animal Damage Control Act. It mandated the Secretary of Agriculture to “promulgate the best methods of eradication [and] suppression [of] mountain lions, wolves, coyotes, bobcats, prairie dogs, gophers . . . for the protection of stock and other domestic animals . . . and to conduct campaigns for the destruction or control of such animals.” (7 U.S.C. 426).

In the early 1930s, wildlife activist Rosalie Edge condemned the Bureau for “inflaming hostility toward our bird and animal neighbors.” She dubbed the agency “the United States Bureau of Destruction and Extermination.” Edge found allies with a scientific organization, the American Society of Mammalogists. The Society, in a strongly worded statement, called the Bureau’s PARC, ‘the most destructive organized agency that has ever menaced so many species of our native fauna’ (Edge, 1934). In the 1920s and 1930s, poisoned baits were strewn across the West in the Biological Survey’s attempt to eradicate all predators for the benefit of livestock growers.

This governmental entity extirpated species like wolves and grizzlies from the lower 48 states. In her 1934 pamphlet, Edge described poisoning lines intended for predators. In one case, 700 miles of poison baits were strewn along on Idaho’s Lemki National Forest leaving a wake of dead predators. The Biological Survey’s annual reports crowed about these successes. A 1923 annual report declared, ‘not less than 75,000 coyotes were killed by the poisoning operations . . . many wolves, bobcats and a few mountain lions were also poisoned’ (Edge, 1934).

Non-predators suffered too. Edge wrote that farmers complained about prairie dogs, gophers, ground squirrels and field mice. The Bureau, according to Edge, dropped over three million pounds of poisoned grain on over fourteen million acres in the late 1920s (Edge, 1934). Poisons decimated the prairie dog ecosystem across the Great Plains. Songbirds and other non-targeted species ingested the poisoned grain, adding to the death toll and the ecological implications.

Slowly the Survey was forced to change. By 1930, scientists began to discover the importance of the role of predators in the ecosystem. Historian Thomas Dunlap suggests that it took a dramatic episode to shake the scientific establishment. In the winter of 1924-1925, a herd of deer on the northern rim of the Grand Canyon that had been “protected” from predators for two decades suddenly died in great numbers. The range, badly overgrazed, left the deer with little to eat. Declares Dunlap, “the range suffered damage which would take decades, if not centuries, to repair.” But the event indicated to scientists that predators played an important role in maintaining ecosystem integrity. (Dunlap, 1983).

In 1937, Adolph Murie began groundbreaking research on the ecology of coyotes in Yellowstone National Park. Rather than simply describing what coyotes ate, as older studies had done, he researched the effect of these canids on their prey. Later, Murie studied relationships between wolves and Dall sheep in Mt. McKinley National Park. Murie’s research ultimately undermined the notion that wolves and coyotes represented vicious blood-thirsty killers. Instead, his research found canids engaged in complex social interactions. Murie determined that predators removed weak, sick, young, old, injured and malnourished prey (Dunlap, 1983).

Other studies conducted around the nation confirmed Murie’s work. By the 1950s, both the scientific community and the public began to change their attitude about predators, writes Dunlap. Another historian, Lisa Mighetto, documents that even humanitarians at the turn-of-the-last century distinguished between “good” and “bad” animals. Predators, because they ate prey, or “victims,” were considered evil or ravenous. Ironically, she adds, humans who also ate meat, were historically not considered in the same category as predators (Mighetto, 1991). Mighetto argues that Farley Mowat’s book, Never Cry Wolf, published in 1963, and which depicted wolves as compassionate and social animals, greatly contributed to the public’s understanding of predators.

Meanwhile, the name of this persistent federal agency kept changing over time. In 1939, the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration consolidated all departments dealing with wildlife under the U.S. Department of the Interior. This agency took over the Division of Predator and Rodent Control and renamed it Branch of Predator and Rodent Control (USDA, 1994).

Then in 1964 A. Starker Leopold issued his famous report to Congress. The “Leopold Report” described widespread PARC abuses. The report emphasized indiscriminate wildlife killing through the use of traps and a variety of poisons (particularly Compound 1080, which would be banned under the Nixon administration in 1972). The hearing led to several reforms, including a restriction on the use of toxicants, extensive training for agency personnel, the establishment of an outside advisory panel, and, of course, a name change. PARC became the Division of Wildlife Services. (Leopold, 1964; USDA, 1994; Dunlap, 1983).

By now, the agency engaged in wildlife control over the past decades had adroitly extirpated less human-adapted carnivores (like wolves, grizzlies and jaguars) from the lower 48 states.

The Division of Wildlife Services title lasted until 1973, when it reverted to Animal Damage Control — a moniker it held for twenty-three years. In 1986, ADC was given back to the Department of Agriculture (USDA, 1994). In 1997, Animal Damage Control took back the name Wildlife Services in its attempt to foster a sense of professionalism with the public. Yet even today, Wildlife Services continues to practice its outdated mission of predator control.

Coyotes proliferated and increased their range three-fold across the North American continent since the end of the nineteenth century (Crabtree and Sheldon, 1999). Coyotes replaced wolves and other predators in ecosystems. In a word, killing coyotes did not reduce their numbers — a lesson Wildlife Services refuses to learn. Numerous coyote biologists have documented that they adapt quickly to persecution by changing their family structure and breeding habits. Moreover, they can survive on a variety of nutritional sources allowing them to live in even marginal ecosystems. In fact, coyotes mostly dine on rodents — an easily obtainable food source.

Today, despite reams of scientific research on coyotes, ranchers still receive tax-payer subsidized lethal predator controls — thanks to their friends in Congress. Rather than take responsibility for their livestock and use humane controls such as electric fences, night pens or guard animals, Wildlife Services provides ranchers with lethal welfare — a subsidy embroiled in a long-running controversy.

Seventy years ago, Rosalie Edge complained that politics trumped science and the wishes of the taxpayers. “The policies of this Bureau,” Edge wrote, “continue to be dominated and dictated by the unscrupulous and powerful congressional lobby of the sheep-raisers’ interests, which desires the extermination from the public lands of everything except their own sheep.”

The 2000 Congressional budget battles concerning the agricultural appropriations attest that nothing is new. The DeFazio-Bass-Morella amendment, which would have cut funding for lethal predator controls, failed by 30 votes. As a result, the budget remained intact. For fiscal year 2000, Wildlife Services received approximately $30 million in federal dollars, in addition to funding from other governmental and private entities. Approximately one-third of that $30 million went towards livestock protection programs — mostly to killing coyotes using a variety weapons: traps, poisons, snares, and of course, aerial gunning.

The federal government has, for the past century, used a vast arsenal of weaponry to appease ranching interests. This animal damage control agency changed its name constantly, it reformed slightly in the early 1960s, but essentially, it has failed to understand the complex role of predators in ecosystems. Moreover, culturally it persists in discounting any ideology other than its own. As we embark upon the new millennium, Americans must come to grips with a federally-funded governmental agency that kills its wildlife for a tiny handful of constituents on Western rangelands. The battle over predator control is now seventy years old. (As a stick of historic measure, it took women from the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 to 1920 to gain the right of suffrage — seventy-two years). We hope to end the work that a maverick wildlife activist, Rosalie Edge, so bravely began in the early 1930s.

Bibliography
Animal Damage Control Program Final Environmental Impact Statement. “History of Federal Wildlife Damage Control.” April, 1994: 8-12.

Dunlap, Thomas. “‘The Coyote Itself:’ Ecologists and the Value of Predators, 1900-1972.” Environmental Review (7) Spring 1983.

Edge, Rosalie. “The United States Bureau of Destruction and Extermination.” Emergency Conservation Committee Pamphlet. Edge manuscript collection, Denver Public Library, Western History and Genealogy.

Leopold, A. Starker. “Predator and Rodent Control in the United States.” A report to Congress. March 9, 1964.

Mighetto, Lisa. Wild Animals and American Environmental Ethics. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991.