Conservationists Sue USDA For Killing Over 1 Million Wild Animals Every Year

The lawsuit hopes to bring attention to the government’s mass killing of wildlife, which critics say is often at the request of the agriculture industry.

A wildlife protection group is suing the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) after it was revealed that the government agency killed over 1.2 million animals across the U.S. last year. 

The USDA’s Wildlife Services is a multimillion-dollar federal programme that uses taxpayer dollars to “manage” wildlife. On average, around 1.5 million natives species are killed by the service each year, according to official figures. 

Around 60,000 coyotes, 25,000 beavers, and 400 black bears were among some of the animals killed last year. 

Now, environmental group WildEarth Guardians are suing the USDA to help bring public attention to the controversial programme and hopefully end its mass killings of native wildlife. 

The group’s lawsuit focuses on the 10,000 animals that the Wildlife Services killed in New Mexico last year. These include 4,000 prairie dogs, 3,000 coyotes, and 600 rabbits and hares.

WildEarth points out how the USDA’s preferred slaughter methods include leghold traps, strangulation snares, aerial gunning from helicopters and planes, poison gases, and sodium cyanide bombs [M44s] placed on the landscape.

Across the country, most of the animals killed by the Wildlife Services are in response to requests from the agriculture industry, says WildEarth. 

“Wildlife Services is infamous for the scope and cruelty of its killing campaigns across the nation,” said Chris Smith, a wildlife advocate for WildEarth Guardians. “To carry out such a horrific onslaught on native wildlife in the midst of a mass extinction event and a climate crisis, without any real knowledge of the impact, is utterly outrageous.”

“It’s astonishing to me that Wildlife Services has been killing millions of animals annually for the last century with taxpayer money, but with little public knowledge,” said Jennifer Schwartz, staff attorney for WildEarth Guardians. “This lawsuit aims to help shine the light on the agency’s actions and to get the government to reconsider publicly funding the extermination of native species when the current science shows removing top predators negatively affects entire ecosystems and that lethal control tactics are often inefficient and counterproductive anyway.”

---

More stories:

---

Species Unite

A collection of stories of those who fight the good fight on behalf of animals.

---