A USDA program that tortures dogs and kills endangered species
the March 2016 issue
The Rogue Agency
A USDA program that tortures dogs and kills endangered species
By Christopher Ketcham
When I went to Idaho in June 2014 to document what Wildlife Services calls “control actions,” I asked the agency if I could accompany its trappers in the field. I was told by a spokeswoman that this was not possible. She explained that “only wildlife-management professionals or persons directly involved are allowed on operations, in order to conduct a safe operation.”
I called up Lynne Stone, a wildlife advocate who lives in Ketchum, Idaho, to ask about probable locations for control actions in the state that summer. Stone had cultivated sources — which she refused to disclose — who fed her this highly guarded information.
We met in a café in Hailey, ten miles south of Ketchum. Stone told me that the killing of wolves by Wildlife Services was “merciless and indiscriminate.” In July 2012, for example, trappers discovered four wolf pups holed up in a culvert near Idaho City. The pups were killed immediately. The reason, according to Wildlife Services, was that a single sheep had been killed by one or several “offending” wolves from a pack in the area. “Wolves generally give birth around mid-April, so these four pups were likely just over three months old,” Stone told me. “They were totally dependent on their pack to feed them. How can three-month-old pups be ‘offending’?”
Stone had gotten word that a wolf named B450, a gray male that was the four hundred and fiftieth wolf to be radio-collared by the state’s Department of Fish and Game, was on the move in the Sawtooth Valley, forty miles to the north. In 2009, B450 had survived the destruction of his father, mother, brothers, and sisters, who were alleged to have attacked livestock near the town of Stanley, Idaho, and were shot by Wildlife Services trappers in airplanes and helicopters. For two years, B450 had wandered central Idaho alone, but in the spring of 2012 he found a mate, who bore him three pups. They formed a new pack. It was likely, Stone told me, that B450’s pack would encounter cattle and sheep grazing on the valley’s lush summer grass, and that Wildlife Services would be called in if the wolves opted to prey on the ready meat.
More:
http://harpers.org/archive/2016/03/the-rogue-agency/2/
