An obscure arm of the federal authorities killed nearly 2 million wild animals final 12 months utilizing quite a lot of strategies, together with firearms, poisons, and traps that ensnare an animal’s neck, ft, or whole physique.
Carried out by the US Division of Agriculture’s euphemistically named Wildlife Companies division, the 2024 physique depend included over 2,000 inexperienced iguanas, nearly 1,700 red-tailed hawks, and 614 armadillos, in keeping with lately printed knowledge. The sub-agency even unintentionally killed one golden eagle, a species protected by federal regulation.
Wildlife Companies kills animals for all kinds of causes after they pose an inconvenience or hazard to people. A number of the deaths, as disturbing as they might be, have a sort of logic, like killing animals (even native ones) to guard endangered or threatened species, or eradicating birds at airports that may strike airplanes (although there are rising efforts to rehome, somewhat than kill, these birds).
However 4 species alone — coyotes, European starlings, feral hogs, and pigeons — accounted for over 75 p.c of the carnage, they usually have one thing vital in frequent. All of them come into battle with animal agriculture, and one of many major functions of Wildlife Companies is to kill animals on behalf of the meat and dairy industries.
“We had been the employed gun of the livestock business,” Carter Niemeyer, who labored in Wildlife Companies and associated applications from 1975 to 2006, advised me final 12 months. Niemeyer specialised in killing and trapping predators like coyotes and wolves who had been suspected of preying on cattle and sheep out on pasture.
Beef ranching takes up a lot land — greater than one-third of the continental US — that it’s not unusual for wild animals to make their approach onto the fields the place cattle graze, which is one cause why livestock producers are such an enormous consumer for Wildlife Companies. Over 100 million acres are additionally devoted to rising feed crops for cows, pigs, and chickens, comparable to corn and soy, a treasure for wild animals in search of meals. Many are killed in consequence.
This grim state of affairs displays a little-understood consequence of animal agriculture: Over many many years, large swathes of wildlife habitat within the US (and all over the world) have been cleared for or degraded by meat manufacturing. And when wildlife pose any risk to that manufacturing, they could be shot or poisoned by the US authorities.
Starlings, who prefer to dine on livestock feed, are sometimes poisoned with Starlicide, a poisonous chemical developed collectively by pet meals big Purina Mills and the USDA that slowly and painfully kills the birds over the course of hours by damaging their coronary heart and kidneys. Wildlife Companies killed over 1.2 million of them final 12 months. Many wild birds are additionally killed to forestall them from consuming fish from fish farms or spreading illness on the operations.
The killing of coyotes, wolves, and different main predators has lengthy been essentially the most controversial a part of the Wildlife Companies’ program, because the animals, often called “keystone species,” play a essential position of their ecosystems. Conservation teams, wildlife researchers, and a few former company workers say the risk these animals pose to grazing livestock is overblown. Ranchers have an incentive to assert that their animals had been killed by wolves as a result of the USDA financially compensates them for these losses. And inside Wildlife Companies, some former workers have complained, there’s a tradition of deferring to ranchers.
The USDA didn’t reply to a request for remark for this story.
Niemeyer has described the intuition accountable livestock deaths on coyotes and wolves as “hysteria.” The roots of such hysteria hint again to America’s early European settlers, who believed (wrongly) that the eradication of wolves was crucial for livestock manufacturing, in keeping with College of Wisconsin-Madison environmental science professor Adrian Treves.
The story isn’t all unhealthy. Regardless of its still-high kill depend, it’s value noting that Wildlife Companies nonviolently scares away much more animals than it kills, and it has managed to scale back its annual killings during the last 15 years (although the overall kill depend stays as excessive because it was within the early 2000s). The company in recent times has been investing extra in nonlethal strategies to maintain wildlife away from livestock and their feed, like guard canines, electrical fencing, audio/visible deterrents, hen repellent analysis, and fladry — tying flags alongside fences, which might scare off some predators.
However advocates and specialists say these efforts are removed from sufficient: “I’m cynical” about the opportunity of change, Treves advised me final 12 months.
The underside line: Whereas city and suburban sprawl are sometimes invoked as a number of the gravest threats to wild animals and their habitats, it’s actually agricultural sprawl — constructed to accommodate our excessive ranges of meat and dairy consumption — and the federal government drive deployed to guard it that the majority threaten America’s wildlife.