Wildllife Services’ deadly force opens Pandora’s box of environmental problems, By Tom Knudson, Sacramento Bee
It seems the conservationist dream of creating the perfect planet is going a little awry: ”With rifles, snares and aerial gunning, employees have killed 967 coyotes and 45 mountain lions at a cost of about $550,000. But like a mirage, the dream of protecting deer by killing predators has not materialized.”
(Second of three parts)
Like the prow of a ship, the Granite Mountains rise sharply from the creamy-white playa of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.
Here, in rugged terrain owned by the American public, a little-known federal agency called Wildlife Services has waged an eight-year war against predators to try to help an iconic Western big-game species: mule deer.
With rifles, snares and aerial gunning, employees have killed 967 coyotes and 45 mountain lions at a cost of about $550,000. But like a mirage, the dream of protecting deer by killing predators has not materialized.
“It didn’t make a difference,” said Kelley Stewart, a large-mammal ecologist at the University of Nevada, Reno.
For decades, Wildlife Services, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has specialized in trapping, poisoning and shooting predators in large numbers, largely to protect livestock and, more recently, big game.
Now such killing is coming under fire from scientists, former employees and others who say it often doesn’t work and can set off a chain reaction of unintended, often negative consequences.
In biological shorthand: Kill too many coyotes and you open a Pandora’s box of disease-carrying rodents, meadow-munching rabbits, bird-eating feral cats, and, over time, smarter, more abundant coyotes. You also can sentence the deer you are trying to help to slow death by starvation.
So it cost $543 to kill each predator, but yielded zero results. Another program that was funded by borrowing the money from China. Nice going!!!
Among my friends there’s a saying: “What do you call anything that eats only plants? – Food.” In the case of deer, very tasty food. That’s why coyotes and mountain lions eat them, just the same as people do. You control deer populations by eating the deer (And occasionally not.), not by trying to control predator populations. Where I live we’ve known this for 60 years. Obviously someone in government hasn’t talked to people who understand conservation – and deer.
10-4, Rich.
It also annoys me that a government
would pay a half-million bucks to have
done what hunters would be happy
to do. Free. In fact, they’d pay serious
money to hunt the mountain lions.