WASHINGTON D.C.Caught in a political trap, the USDA Animal Damage Control program is battling for survival. The ADC still has powerful friends, including western Senators of both major parties, but the forthcoming Farm Bill debate could kill it, after 65 years.
Conservative Republicans are queasy about the ADC because it's a federal subsidy for private enterprise: of the $19.6 million 1994 ADC budget, $10 million went to protect livestock.
Eastern politicians of both parties see the ADC as expendible because it does little for their constituents: $9.7 million97%of the livestock protection funds were spent in the 17 western states.
Environmentalists hate the ADC because it helps keep cattle on federally owned land. Animal defenders recognize the ADC as the agency that killed 778,678 wild predators last yearand 5,720 nontarget animals whose only offense was stumbling into a trap. ADC killing tactics, moreover, are particularly gruesome. Last year the ADC strafed 29,072 animals from aircraft, including 27,642 coyotes, 1,289 foxes, and 321 bobcats. Burned alive or speared in dens were 2,240 coyote pups and 1,244 fox cubs. Spring-loaded cyanide-firing traps called M-44s killed 23,217 coyotes, 2,203 foxes, nine bobcats, and a bear. Neck-snared were 10,515 coyotes, 1,409 foxes, 635 bobcats, 11 badgers, 17 mountain lions, and seven bears. Ninety-eight bears, 52 foxes, 37 mountain lions, nine coyotes, and one bobcat died in ADC leghold traps.
In short, the ADC isn't a cute, cuddly program. More than a few federal politicians see it as an easy cutand a way for Republicans to look a little more green while perhaps hobbling the Endangered Species Act and slashing environmental spending.
Fighting back with a media blitz, the ADC boasted in fall press releases that the ADC "tracked, relocated, or killed 42 million problem animals in 1994six million more than in 1993. The ADC claimed wildlife each year does $500 million in crop damage, kills 500,000 livestock, and costs $3 billion in medical care for infectious bites plus property damage caused by animal/car collisions.
Accepting the ADC party line, USA Today reporter Linda Kanamine in a page one expose cited as reasons for the purported "boom" in complaints the expansion of suburbs into former wildlife habitat, "20 years of animal protection measures" which "have boosted populations," and "recent droughts or snowpacks," that "have pushed animals into residential areas for food."
Ecology
But basic principles of ecology have more to do with it:
* Suburban sprawl displaces wildlife, by destroying habitatbut those animals usually don't survive. Some of the same species, however, tend to return a decade or more later, after ornamental trees and shrubs reach maturity.
* Prey species such as deer and Canada geese reproduce much more rapidly than predators, e.g. coyotes and foxes.
* Most so-called nuisance species help control others, as feral cats kill rodents and coyotes kill cats, deer nibble away the brush preferred by raccoons, and raccoons rob the nests of Canada geese. But a disrupted balance of nature is not quickly restored, and the restoration may include population explosions of various species before the controlling species arrive in numbers.
The press releases were drafted to emphasize growing attention to nonlethal solutions (at least wherever voters are around to see what the ADC does), and the $2.5 million spent to protect crops, $2.3 million spent to protect public health, and $2.9 million spent to protect property.
Not just coyote-killers
Spokespersons also noted that the ADC killed "only" 85,571 coyotes last year, one of the lowest totals since the agency was formed as successor to the agency which earlier wiped out wolves across much of the U.S. Bluntly, the ADC was formed to keep the wolf-killers on the federal payroll and pacify sheep ranchers, as wool prices plummeted with the onset of the Great Depression.
The ADC has massacred nearly 10 million coyotes since 1930, but while continuing to kill them en masse, now at least officially encourages other responses to coyote predation.
Arizona ADC director Richard Phillips and Redrock Wildlife Area master trapper Alton Ford shocked a recent conference on predator/prey dynamics, held in Silver City, New Mexico, with direct criticism of coyote-killing. Ford favored only selective trapping of individual coyotes known to kill livestock. Both Phillips and Ford argued that trying to wipe out coyotes only leaves more forage for wily survivors, who raise bigger litters. And Phillips concluded that killing coyotes just because they live near livestock is a strategic mistake.
"They might scare the hell out of you by staring at your sheep all day long," Phillips told an audience composed largely of ranchers, "but those animals might be keeping livestock killers out of the area."
Irony
Ironically, a less bloodthirsty ADC could protect some predators, in the present political climate. Unhappy with the declining level of killing, Wyoming director of agriculture Ron Micheli recently opened talks with ADC national director Bobby Acord toward possibly taking over nuisance wildlife management on federal landsif the feds will give them, in Wyoming ADC director Bill Rightmire's words, "more resources and less restrictions."
That could very well happen if the ADC is dismantled only to be replaced by block grants to the states for predator control. Currently the ADC is funded on a matching basis, with 51% of the livestock protection part of the budget coming from the federal treasury, 24% from state treasuries, and 14% from livestock organizations and individual ranchers.
While the current fiscal climate minimizes the likelihood that states would be given all of the money now going to ADC, they might get some moneyalong with exemptions from oversight requirements that tend to run up costs.
According to Wildlife Damage Review #7, Wyoming deputy director of agriculture Bill Gentle told a June meeting including Micheli, Gentle, and prominent ranchers, "If we have to do Environmental Impact Statements and meet all the other restrictions just because we take their money, then we haven't gained a thing."
(Wildlife Damage Review is published from POB 85218, Tucson, AZ 85754. Thorough statistics on ADC activity are published annually by The Predator Project, POB 6733, Bozeman, MT 59771.)