There is an old joke about a man discovering his wife bent over searching hard for something on the kitchen floor.
“What are you looking for?” He asks.
“My Contact lenses! They fell out while I was reading on the couch and I cannot seem to find them.”
“On the couch? In the living room? Then why are you looking for them in here?” Asks her husband, very confused.
“The light’s better in here.”
Which happens to be one of my favorite jokes because it explains so much of what we do. Why we went to war in Iraq even though we were attacked by Afghanistan. Why we are upset when movie stars do annoying things that our friends do every day. And why we keep suing Wildlife Services instead of slamming CDFW for issuing mass depredation permits to everyone and their brother, whether they work for Wildlife Services or not.
Public Interest Groups Sue Plumas and Sierra Counties Over Taxpayer-Funded Wildlife Killing
Quincy, CA (March, 2, 2022) — Feather River Action! and Earth Island’s Project Coyote jointly filed a lawsuit on March 1 against Plumas and Sierra counties for violating the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to stop the illegal killing of wildlife without the legally required environmental review.
The lawsuit challenges the counties’ failure to conduct the CEQA review of its $76,623 taxpayer-funded contract with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Wildlife Services program. This contract authorizes Wildlife Services, a highly controversial federal program, to kill hundreds of animals in these counties every year without assessing the ecological impacts of widespread killing and without considering alternative non-lethal management strategies.
Each year, Wildlife Services indiscriminately kills millions of animals nationwide — approximately 80,000 in California alone — largely at the behest of commercial agriculture. Wolves, a protected species in California, are particularly at risk from USDA Wildlife Services’ activities, which killed 1,921 coyotes and thousands of other animals in Plumas and Sierra counties over the past decade.
This is where I remind folks that wildlife services only kills about half the beavers that are trapped in California each year. Private trappers happily pick up the rest. And that doesn’t even count landowners that quietly shoot their way out of a problem at night, permits be dammed.
Records indicate that in just one year, USDA Wildlife Services killed more than 1,100 muskrats in Plumas and Sierra counties. Muskrats play a similar ecological role to beavers, 247 of which were killed by local Wildlife Services employees over the past ten years. Wildlife Services operates across 35 of 52 California counties.
Across the country, Wildlife Services’ outdated program continues to rely on the use of indiscriminate and often inhumane tools to kill native wildlife including snares, poisons, and aerial gunning. Condemned by professional scientists with the American Society of Mammalogists since the early 20th century, this taxpayer-subsidized program continues to focus on lethal and non-selective killing practices despite widespread availability and efficacy of non-lethal methods and husbandry practices.
“In all my years of trying to work with Wildlife Services, I have yet to encounter any willingness from the program to consider the best available science demonstrating that nonlethal is the most effective way to protect livestock,” said Michelle Lute, PhD in wildlife management and national carnivore conservation manager for Project Coyote. “Instead, they consistently insist on retaining every archaic tool in their lethal arsenal even when it repeatedly endangers people’s children and companion animals and does little to protect livestock. Fortunately, California has CEQA, a law that protects people and the environment from a rogue program that should be named Wildlife Disservices.”
Hmm. Invoking CEQA to prevent wildlife killing is pretty bold. I don’t think it’s been done since our friend Mitch Wagner did it in the late 90’s with the beavers of Lake Skinner. At the time he was told by other wildlife groups not to push his luck and that cases were never won this way. But he did win. At the appellate level. Against Goliaths like Metro Water and Power and California Fish and Game. Ahem.
In 2016, wildlife advocates, including Project Coyote, successfully sued Mendocino County, requiring the county to perform a full environmental impact report of their contract with Wildlife Services pursuant to CEQA. Last year, Mendocino County ultimately chose to end its contract with Wildlife Services and instead pursue non-lethal strategies for wildlife management.
This follows Marin County, which ended its contract with Wildlife Services in 2000 and adopted a non-lethal cost-share program to assist ranchers with implementation of non-lethal methods, such as fencing and guardian animals, to reduce conflicts between wildlife and livestock. Non-lethal methods precipitated a 62 percent decline in coyote predation on sheep in Marin from 2002 to 2011, according to the Marin County Department of Agriculture.
Despite efforts by Project Coyote and Feather River Action! to urge the Plumas and Sierra County Board of Supervisors to follow a similar path and comply with CEQA by considering the destructive ecological impacts of their contract with Wildlife Services, the board chose instead to renew their contract with no environmental review and little to no consideration of effective nonlethal alternatives.
“Many of us were horrified to learn that our local taxes were funding this cruel and unnecessary killing program,” said Joshua Hart, spokesperson for Feather River Action! “While Plumas County is losing county staff due to stagnant wages, a publicly-funded killing program for private ranching interests continues to be fully funded by the Board of Supervisors year after year. Wildlife Services’ methods are cruel, unjust, and harm the ecological fabric of the Lost Sierra. Enough is enough.”
Of course. The shock value of the killing pays for a lot of attorney fees. Thank you Tom Knudson for your horrific exposes on these practices. But mostly trapping isn’t shocking. Or grisly cruel. It’s horribly pedantic, repetit and dull, perpetuated every day, for every possible reason, when ever someone doesn’t feel like wrapping trees or fixing a pipe.
Though these numbers are staggering, former employees allege that Wildlife Services routinely underreports the number of animals killed and does not include indirect deaths, such as secondary poisoning from the carcasses of animals that die from lethal sodium cyanide.
The plaintiffs are represented by Greenfire Law, PC, and Donald L. Lipmanson, Esq.
Here’s what I am waiting for. For someone to sue the California Department of Fish and Wildlife for issuing beaver depredation permits even though we’re facing drought and fire and species extensions. I keep waiting for the lawsuit that will say CALIFORNIA DESERVES ITS BEAVERS and you’re giving permission for 3000 of them to be taken away every single year.
But they keep suing Wildlife Services instead. Because the lights better in the kitchen,
