Secretive Federal Agency Killing Pets With Poison Bombs

Across the American West lies an untold number of potent chemical weapons, tucked away and waiting to go off. There could be one on your favorite hiking trail, or on the loop where you walk your dog, or in the woods where your kids play. Packed with sodium cyanide, these spring-loaded devices blast clouds of poison gas five feet into the air. Once inhaled, the lethal toxins mount a multidirectional attack on your cardiovascular, pulmonary, and central nervous system. Death can come in a matter of minutes.

The weapons, known as M-44s, are placed by an under-the-radar federal agency called Wildlife Services. The agency was created to protect the livestock industry’s bottom line by killing off the competition: namely, wild predators. The so-called cyanide bombs do kill predators, but they can also kill anyone else unlucky enough to stumble upon them. And they have a hair trigger.

Wildlife Services, which falls under the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is well known in conservationist circles. Most people, however, have never heard of it. For the uninitiated, a glimpse into the taxpayer-funded killing machine can be jarring.

In the past eight years, Wildlife Services killed nearly 21 million animals as part of its mission to oversee “the eradication and control” of species “injurious” to human endeavors, particularly ranching. While agents’ preferred means of killing is by air, with gunmen in helicopters and planes, M-44s were used to intentionally kill more than 88,000 animals from 2014 through 2022 — the period for which the agency has data available online. The total amounts to roughly 30 poisonings a day for much of the past decade.

M-44s are part of “a broad strategy that also uses non-lethal methods, and that is informed by ongoing wildlife biology research,” Wildlife Services spokesperson Ed Curlett said in an emailed statement to The Intercept. Curlett added that 98 percent of the agency’s poison devices are placed on private lands and “only when the private, municipal, state, or federal landowner or manager requests assistance and enters a written cooperative agreement.”

According to Wildlife Service’s data, an additional 2,200 animals were killed unintentionally over the 2014 through 2022 period, including endangered species, domestic livestock, and pets like the Mansfields’ dog.

by Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept | Read more:

Image: Brooks Fahy
[ed. I've worked with various State and Federal wildlife agencies my whole career and never heard of these guys. However, I'm not sure their objectives and methods are as sinister as this article suggests. From their FY 2022 Program Report:]

In FY 2022, APHIS encountered about 21.5 million animals causing damage, or threatening to cause damage, while responding to calls for assistance and dispersed nearly 20 million of these animals unharmed from urban, rural, and other settings. APHIS dispersed 91.4% of the animals encountered. However, nonlethal methods cannot resolve all wildlife related conflicts. Of all wildlife encountered, APHIS lethally removed 8.6%, or approximately 1.85 million, from areas where damage was occurring. Invasive species accounted for 79% (1,466,580) of the wildlife lethally removed. Additionally:

• The invasive species removed included 1,175,244 European starlings, 136,791 feral swine, and more than 11,000 brown tree snakes in Guam.
• 60,279 were native Northern pike minnow that APHIS removed to protect federally threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead in the Pacific Northwest.

In instances where lethal control was necessary, APHIS worked to donate as much animal meat as possible. In FY 2022, APHIS donated nearly 150 tons of deer, goose, and other meat—more than 1 million servings of protein for people in need—and over 20 tons of meat for animal consumption to animal rehab centers, zoos, and other facilities, making full use of this resource from wildlife damage management work.