Wildlife Slaughter: Public Tax Dollars At Work

Wildlife Slaughter: Public Tax Dollars At Work

This interview between Derrick Jensen and Christoper Ketcham examines the U.S. government’s taxpayer-funded wildlife slaughter program. Ketcham exposes Wildlife Service’s use of poisoned bait, aerial gunning, neck snares, leghold traps (banned in 80 countries), and cyanide traps to kill millions of wild animals each year in the United States. This conversation originally aired on the show Resistance Radio.

Featured image: Wildlife Services employee or contractor holds a wolf killed by aerial gunning in Idaho. USDA photo.

Derrick Jensen:

My guest today is Christopher Ketcham. He’s a freelance writer for Harper’s, The New Republic, Vice, and many others. Today we discuss Wildlife Services – but before that – he has a new book out, a very good book, called This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West. That book is a product of 10 years of research and travel across the public lands of the west.

Chris, first off, thank you as always for your tremendous work in the world and second thank you for being on the program.

What is ‘Wildlife Services’?

Christoper Ketcham:

I devote two chapters in my book to Wildlife Services because they are such a heinous operation of the federal bureaucracy. Basically, Wildlife Services is a branch of the US Department of Agriculture. Specifically, a branch of the Animal, Plant and Health Inspection Service at the USDA; whose purpose is to slaughter wildlife to protect industry.

Now on western public lands most of that slaughter is conducted to benefit one industry; the livestock industry. What we’re talking about here is a killing machine of: aerial gunships, helicopters, airplanes, cyanide landmines distributed across the landscape, poison collars placed on sheep, and all sorts of traps designed to kill those animals deemed predators and pests by the livestock industry.

What do they mean by predators and pests? Well, the livestock industry generally asks Wildlife Services to kill out wolves by the tens of thousands, when the wolves threaten cows and sheep. Coyotes are slaughtered every year to protect livestock. Black beers, grizzly bears, cougars, and then a host of other animals that you wouldn’t think would make the death list for the livestock industry but do. Animals like beavers and prairie dogs.

You know both of these are keystone species in western ecosystems. Beavers because obviously they dam water, they create meadows, and they are incredibly important in arid land ecosystems for the simple fact of creating water retention in the uplands. Prairie dogs create habitat for many other species. Their burrows are said to allow water to more efficiently percolate into aquifers. Generally, when you see prairie dogs on the landscape in the west, you are looking at healthy grasslands.

The livestock industry wants to kill out beavers because beavers dam up water that stockman want to use to water the cattle and grow hay. Prairie dogs have to be eradicated in massive numbers because the prairie dogs are considered competitors for forage with cows.

And on, and on and on.

During the 20th Century it is estimated that Wildlife Services killed something like tens of millions of animals across the west to benefit this one industry: the livestock industry. It is a campaign of destruction, poisoning, and bloodshed that is paid for by the US taxpayer, to the tune of something like 150 million dollars a year.

04:55

DJ:

To be clear, taxpayers pay 150 million dollars a year to slaughter wildlife?

CK:

Yes. It is very efficiently done. We often castigate the US government for being inefficient. This is a well-run program, a smoothly-oiled machine of mayhem.

DJ:

You’ve talked about wolves and coyotes. I want to come back to that, but something I think about every time I throw out birdseed is that they also kill birds. It’s extraordinary to me that they kill birds who are feeding on the farms where they grow birdseed so I can have a bird-feeder in my back yard.

They kill lots and lots of, say for example, red-wing black birds, or is that a different organization?

CK:

That’s Wildlife Services. The bird kills are often done to protect agriculture. Not to protect livestock but cropland operations of all types. But they also slaughter birds that threaten air traffic. If you have large flocks of starlings or sparrows (whatever it might be), they may get caught in the engines of jets. Well, Wildlife Services will go in and make sure that those birds do not pester air traffic.

DJ:

Before we get back to wolves, coyotes etc., can we talk for a second about 1984 and just the name Wildlife Services? Is this not a beautiful name?

CK:

It is the perfect Orwellian name. Wildlife Services has its origins in the 1890s when it’s predecessor, called the Bureau of Biological Survey, would go around and identify, specifically wolves, that were considered a threat to stockman in the west.

The Bureau of Biological Survey really got its teeth into this business in Colorado, where the stock industry and wolves had gone head to head for many years. The stockman could not successfully eliminate the wolves. They turned to the US government for help to kill these wolves. So from 1905, we see the Bureau of Biological Survey is aiding the US Forest Service so that the forest rangers can go out and kill the wolves.

After 1931 Congress passed the Animal Damage Control Act that basically established the Bureau of Animal Damage Control – a far less Orwellian name right. That name at least sort of says what the agency does – controls animal damage, controls the animals.

In the 90s (I believe) Animal Damage Control got its name changed to Wildlife Services via some inventive bureaucrat who figured, “hey we are going to service the wildlife with a shotgun!”. So that’s the history in brief of the naming of Wildlife Services.

08:48

DJ:

Right now when I look out the window and I see a couple of bears, literally at this moment, and I know bears get killed a lot.

How does it actually work that an animal gets targeted for killing? Is this just routine, or does it usually take a request by the rancher? Are they basically acting as taxpaid servants of individual ranchers, or do they go out and kill the wolves, coyotes etc. prophylactically?

09:32

CK:

What happens is yes you can have an individual rancher who determines, through questionable means, that some of his livestock have been killed say by a pack of wolves ranging locally on the public lands nearby, or even on private lands. So, he calls up Wildlife Services, “I’ve got a problem. You’ve gotta come in an investigate”.

A Wildlife Services trapper will come in and do a quote “investigation”. Now I’ve written in my book about what these investigations amount to. They are in fact usually cursorily, incompetently done, and designed almost always to substantiate the initial claim of the rancher regardless of the evidence.

The rancher can say these cows died by wolves and the trapper will look around and say, “well it doesn’t look like there’s any evidence of a wolf attack, but we’ll call it a wolf attack anyways”. Thereafter, the whole machine starts going into gear and after that you’ve got aerial gunships prowling the area and you’ve got traps laid out.

These are steel leg-hold traps. They are extremely painful. When an animal gets trapped in these things there’s incredible suffering that goes on. Especially given that the trap-shut-times for Wildlife Services are not regulated. You can leave a trap out and just check it every week instead of every day or every other day as required by a certain federal statute.

This rancher who called in Wildlife Services usually gets satisfaction in that Wildlife Services is generally pretty good at tracking down and killing the wolves who supposedly did the crime. Even though, as I mentioned earlier, there’s often not much proof of that (so called) crime.

13:01

On the other hand, you have what’s called prophylactic killing. In which Wildlife Services will go out and just start hammering local populations, say of coyotes. This involves flying around, usually in an airplane, and just gunning down coyotes on sight. They call this prophylactic killing “preventative”. Whereas, killing that occurs after there is evidence, that’s called corrective. So, you’ve got preventative and corrective.

Most of the killing by Wildlife Services is preventative. In that there is no actual evidence of the pack of coyotes in question say having actually attacked anything. They are just killed preemptively. Because they might go after livestock some day in the course of their life.

At this point, you get, you understand, that this absurd. This is crazy. But this is how the system operates.

14:14

DJ:

That reminds of that famous line from a slaughter in France many hundred years ago. A town in France was going to wipe out a certain radical sect of Christians. They couldn’t figure out who was which sect and the person who ran the town commanded his troops, ‘kill them all and let God sort them out’.

It’s the same sort of thing.

CK:

Yup that is exactly the mentality.

DJ:

I want to go back to the wolves, but I want to comment something; when it is shown that the wolf killed a cow or a sheep, the ranchers get paid. Can you talk abut that?

CK:

Right, that is the depredation compensation program for want of a better phrase. Yes, the federal government will reimburse a rancher for the dead cow if it is proven that the cow was preyed upon by say a wolf or a cougar, or whatever predator, might be a grizzly bear or a wolverine. This incentivizes cattlemen to falsify their claims of depredation.

Cows and sheep are open-range animals. They are subject to all sorts of inclement weather conditions, rough terrain, and accidents: a cow falls off a cliff, gets caught in a slot canyon or struck by lightning, or just lost; a baby ewe gets lost and dies. There are many, many ways for livestock to perish on open range. But if you can show they perished from predators then you get paid. This is obviously a recipe for corruption of the system because of that incentivizing.

17:11

DJ:

Don’t they also get paid higher than market value for ones that have been shown to be a predator kill or purportedly shown?

CK:

No, I think they get paid full market value. For example, this could be a calf that was killed, but I think they would get paid for the full market value of the calf as if it were to have grown to full maturity for sale.

DJ:

My point on this is ultimately, this is something I’ve never understood. The only way I can understand this is a hatred of nature. That honestly if I were running cows, I don’t care if I sell it to a slaughterhouse of if I get money [from the government]. It doesn’t matter. It seems like it would be just a fine business. I wouldn’t care if my cows got eaten as long as I got paid. I don’t understand why the ranchers get to cry victimization when they’re getting paid for the dead cow anyway. That’s what I’m getting at. It makes no sense to me. From the rancher’s perspective it’s like, “yea I don’t care if wolves eat all of them. That means I just sold my entire crop of cows”.

18:32

CK:

Yea now look what we are talking about is not a cost-benefit analysis. There is a cultural ground from which these ranchers are reacting to predators. That culture is about domination of the natural world. The livestock industry’s always been about domination and control of nature, and subjugation of the western landscape: so that cattle can be safe in a place where it’s to arid really for this invasive species (Bos Taurus) that evolved in humid Europe. And where there are tons of predators that will kill the cows as they naturally should, because you know, wolves are going to prey on sheep. Always, it’s always been done.

When they see this predator come in and kill their cows and their sheep, it’s an offense to the moral order. To the cultural moral order of their universe. That, to a certain extent, explains the level of hysteria on the part of stockman when confronted with the presence of predators on the western landscapes.

20:08

DJ:

When we talk about ranchers on the western landscape, we are not generally talking about some homesteader running three cows. This is actually big business, right?

CK:

If you look at the number of permittees who take out a permit to run cows on public lands, most of the permittees are either corporations looking for tax breaks, hobbyists like Ted Turner (so rich people who view these cows as playthings), or mining companies that run cattle in order to also secure the water rights that come with cattle permits. So, for the for the most part we’re not talking about hard scrabble range clans, the little guy eking out survival on the public lands. Those people do exist, but for the most part, public lands ranching is corporate business or is the stuff of rich people.

Rich people who do own herds will contract with local cattlemen, local cowboys, to manage the range, the herd and the public land. These guys aren’t the real owners of the property, they’re just servants for the wealthy who actually own the cattle. It’s the ranch hands and ranch managers who’ll be the most pestiferous and most angry when confronted with predators on the public lands, because they grew up with the culture (public lands ranching culture) and in order to keep a job, while they serve the absentee gentry, the aristocracy who owns most of the cattle on public lands.

DJ:

You keep saying public lands and I think a lot of people in the west know this but maybe people in the east don’t, maybe even in the west don’t. We are not talking about a wolf or grizzly bear crawling up onto your porch and taking the sheep that is sitting two feet from your door. We are actually talking about people who are making a living off of grazing their cows or sheep on land that actually belongs to the public and is rented out to these corporations at sub-market values. We are talking about a huge subsidy even if they weren’t given the additional subsidy of killing predators.

23:33

CK:

Yea that’s right. Let’s make this clear, we are talking our land, the common land. Owned by every American citizen. In fact, a co-sovereign on these lands, for determining how they should be used, or not be used. How they should be protected and preserved. A lot of the so-called depredation on livestock does occur on public land in very wild places in the back country, far from people’s homes, far from people’s private land. And yes, Wildlife Services is yet another subsidy extended to the public lands ranching industry.

The total value of that subsidy, with all the inputs accounted for – everything from road maintenance, fence building, water diversions, to sub-market leasing rates for cows, to the operation of Wildlife Services – one estimate has the total subsidy for public lands ranching coming out to something like a billion dollars a year. One billion dollars. And the remarkable thing here is that public lands ranching only accounts for two percent of all the beef produced in this country. So, a billion dollars for two percent of the beef nationally.

At the same time, you have a regime of incredible waste and destruction to protect public lands ranching producing that meager two percent of beef. Wow, again this is just crazy when you think about it. But there it is, it is the fact of American life and it has been so for a long, long time.

25:38

DJ:

I want to mention something that happened I believe a year or two ago that has just horrified me even more than all the wolf killings. A grizzly bear killed some chickens in somebody’s ranchette in Montana and so they shot the grizzly bear. It blew me away because chickens are one of the most common creatures on the planet and grizzly bears are endangered. I used to raise chickens when I lived in Spokane and coyotes would get them once and a while. That’s the cost having chickens run free in coyote territory. It offended me on a whole other level that you would kill an endangered species because it killed a couple of pet chickens of somebody who’s wealthy enough to own a ranchette. To kill an endangered species, especially under those circumstances, seems horrific to me.

CK:

I agree. It’s a reflection of the deranged values of our society. No other way to put it.

DJ:

In Washington state, there has been every year multiple members or entire packs wiped out, and it is all to serve one ranching outfit. I’m sure there are others to serve as well, but every year for the last six or seven years, there’s a guy [Len McIrvin] who absolutely refuses to take any payment for any wolf kills and any time a cow dies, he wants the entire wolfpack wiped out. You’ll see sympathetic articles about him in the newspaper saying it is driving him out of business etc.

But I did a little research and the guy only claims to lose like two or three cows a year and he runs 4,000 cattle. Honestly if you can’t survive two cows out of 4,000 lost then you’re doing something wrong. In this particular case, they’re serving one guy who is wealthy enough to run 4,000 head of cattle.

Take any of that any direction you want to go.

Note: there’s less than 125 wolves total in Washington state according to news media.

CK:

One comment I can make among several that can be made, there is a simple fact that public lands ranchers are constantly promoting themselves to be the paragons of self-reliant business: that they are the hard-scrabble individual who is out on the range. Yet, they are constantly whining and complaining and calling in the federal government to help them out with the slaughter of these evil wolves or the other subsidies that we mentioned earlier.

Meanwhile, the actual rates of depredation are very low compared to the total number of cows going out on the range. For example, a former Wildlife Services tracker named, Carter Niemeyer, told me something like you have millions of beef cattle going out in the northern Rockys Range and something like a quarter of a percent of them are lost to predators. A quarter of a percent.

Again, the hysterical reaction of this Washington rancher [Len McIrvin] can be explained by a cultural background in which these wolves are seen as an offence against the order of things. And conveniently at the same time he can trick unwary journalists into believing that this is not just a threat to the moral order but an economic threat to his very survival. But both are just lies, convenient lies.

It is incredible to me that this tiny minority in the west, public lands ranchers, exercise such outsized influence on how we manage our lands. It’s really incredible. Talk about capture by a tiny minority against the interests of the broad majority.

31:51

DJ:

The people you talk to, in your experience, do the frontline workers at Wildlife Services, are they fueled by ‘it’s just a paycheck’ and the Upton Sinclair ‘it’s hard to make a man understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it.’?

Or do they think they’re doing a great thing, have a claim to virtue, or do they feel bad about killing so much wildlife?

CK:

I think it depends on the trapper. I’ve interviewed a number of ex-trappers and read documents and media coverage of trappers in the past, who had quit the agency in horror at what they had done. There’s as incredible variety of experience out there.

There are some trappers I think who are passionately engaged in killing predators to protect the livestock industry. Which is what they believe, they believe they are protecting the livestock industry. Hence their passion. These are people who grew up in small rural communities where livestock ranching was a way of life.

I interviewed a guy in Wyoming for my book. I just called him ‘Bob’ because he was very much afraid of being outed in his community and being even physically threatened if he spoke out against the ranching industry. He wrote a letter to Brooks Fahy, who is an activist who has for many years worked to expose Wildlife Services.

Bob wrote that he, “quit because of the unethical and brutal methods I was required to do as a trapper. A lot of stock people are the most bloodthirsty, animal-abusing people you could ever find.” Bob also said that he was, “all for defunding Wildlife Services as it is nothing more than a government subsidy for a bunch of murderous ranchers.”

When you hear that, that’s a guy who was a trapper for many, many years.

He goes on, “it’s the sheep men I can’t tolerate. They’re just bloodthirsty rotten. A coyote or wolf to them, just something to be killed. In the county I’m in (that is in Wyoming), the sheep men are brutes, bullies, either you do what they want, you kowtow to them or you quit or get fired. The ranchers think they’re your boss and they are. It’s a dirty deal and it’s been going on for a long time. Most of the guys at Wildlife Services aren’t as bad as they’re made out to be. But they’re pushed into a lot of things they don’t want to do.”

So, there you have it, I think that answers your question.

There are the guys who are themselves as bloodthirsty as the ranchers. There are others who are just getting a paycheck, and they’re like ‘goddam I don’t want to do this, but I need the money’.

DJ:

We have talked about the horrors of the cyanide, landmines and everything else. We are not simply talking about adults, but I have heard about denning. Killing entire dens of pups of various wildlife species.

CK:

Oh yes. The practice, I’m not sure if it’s still ongoing, but the practice for many years was to track down a coyote den where the pups were holed up and smoke them out. Set a fire around the mouth of the den and as the pups come out, they get clubbed or they themselves burn up. They also used a phosphorus compound called a den smoker.

Dick Randel was a Wildlife Services trapper in Wyoming, like the aforementioned Bob who I also interviewed. Dick Randel used this den smoker, “suffocating the pups was the theory” he wrote. “But they’d often scramble for cracks of light at the entrance. You could hear them howling when they hit the flames and burned alive. The pups ran into the chemical fire trying to get out and it would eat through their tissue, hiss and smolder right into their guts. And they were still clawing at the blocked entrance.”

That’s one of the practices, again paid for by the US government. Our government on our land. Guess we should be proud right?

37:27

DJ:

Just last week Wildlife Services was poisoning prairie dogs in Colorado. I’m presuming that where they kill blackbirds, they also use poison? How do we convey to people the utter horror of what is happening at public expense on public lands?

CK:

Think of those coyote pups having their guts burning from phosphorus compounds, and just think of that over and over and over again.

Then do you want to do something about it, call your congressperson and ask, “are you voting to allocate money to Wildlife Services operation year after year?” Because most congresspeople are. Call up the USDA and call up the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) that runs and oversees directly the Wildlife Services program.

Call up congressman Peter DeFazio of Oregon, who is one of the few representatives in Congress who has stood up to Wildlife Services. He has attempted to pass legislation to defund their programs and to substantially change the congressional mandate that Wildlife Services got with the Animal Damage Control Act 1931 – basically revise it if not repeal it.

I think the thing here is you have stockmen who are very politically engaged. They are constantly complaining to local officials, country officials, the county commissioners, their state elected officials, and their congressionals that, “these goddam predators are a problem”. You have a lot of people in officialdom listening to this very vocal constituency. What you don’t have opposing that vocal minority is the great majority of Americans who are aghast at these very cruel practices.

What you need is civic engagement. I repeat this over and over again in my book. You need a citizenry that is enraged and engaged. Until that happens, Wildlife Services will continue on and on slaughtering and killing with your money and with not much scientific basis for the killings. This is irrational killing.

41:10

DJ:

I have heard that killing coyotes paradoxically leads to coyote population explosions because they reproduce. Is that correct?

CK:

That’s in my book as well. I interviewed a guy, Robert Wilgus, of Washington State University, who looked into that. He found that if you disrupt pack structures of wolves and coyotes, you actually increase the amount of attacks on livestock. That is quite helpful to Wildlife Services right, so they kill more coyotes, that produces more depredation on livestock, meaning you have to come pack and kill more coyotes, which produces more depredation of livestock. It’s a closed circle where they always get more funding and there’s more killing to be done.

42:30

DJ:

It destroys local social structures and often older members of the predator community will keep crazy younger members in check. A great example happened earlier this year. I mentioned earlier that I see bears all the time, well there was a mother bear who showed up with a baby and she was around for a while and then the baby disappeared. Sometimes males will kill babies to bring the female into heat.

That was seeming kind of weird to me. Someone did some research for me and it ends up normally there will be females who have territory and then males have sort of a meta territory. A big male will make sure that other younger males don’t kill the babies. He’ll basically keep the youngsters in check. But if somebody shoots the old male, and then there’s chaos for a while, you’ll end up with younger males killing the babies.

So, the point is that if you had Wildlife Services come in and kill a pack leader or disrupt a pack, I’m just validating what you just said, it’s going to create chaos, which is going to create some more strange behavior that’s harmful to everybody around.

CK:

Well that’s exactly right. That is what Rob Wilgus found out. That the social structure disruption of predators – whether it be coyotes, wolf packs, local mountain lion populations, or as you remarked also black bear populations – leads then to all sorts of behavior that wasn’t occurring previously. For example, the adult mountain lions will indeed prevent younger mountain lions from going after livestock.

If you were going to approach all the slaughter with a scientific method, that doesn’t justify the slaughter, but it would at least make sense from a bureaucratic perspective. But they’re not even approaching it with a scientific method. It is just randomized violence meted out against predators without any ecological or behavioral understanding.

45:45

DJ:

Let’s pretend that you are able to do one thing and but not another. The thing you’re not able to do is eliminate public lands ranching on the west. You don’t get to do that. But you do get to completely defund Wildlife Services. What do you think would happen? What would that lead to?

CK:

I think you would have a lot of vigilantism. A lot of ranchers going out and killing these predators themselves.

The three S’s: shoot, shovel and shut up. I think you’d have widespread illegal distribution of poisons, such as banned thallium sulphate and sodium fluoroacetate (1080). I think you’d have a lot more sodium cyanide spread across the landscape. I think you’d find more carcasses of animals poisoned with those compounds. I don’t think that would accomplish much frankly, just getting rid of Wildlife Services.

You get rid of Wildlife Services then you also have to have an accompanying regime of enforcement for protection of predators. We don’t have that.

DJ:

You want people to call their congressperson and get engaged. If it’s not merely to dump Wildlife Services, are you suggesting this problem won’t be solved until public lands ranching is also eliminated in the west?

CK:

Yea that’s ultimately where we have to go with this. You really have to eliminate public lands ranching if you want to protect predators on a widespread scale in big ecologically-relevant landscapes. It begins with searing into your consciousness that image of the coyote pups’ guts burning with that phosphorus compound and go from there. Use that as your inspiration, because that’s what we’re really talking about when we talk about the livestock industry in the west.

DJ:

Thank you for that. I want to reiterate something you said earlier. Even if you got rid of all public ranching in the west, that’s only two percent of beef production in the US.

CK:

If you’re a meat eater, it’s not going to affect the price of steak. OK, you still get your hamburger.

DJ:

Which probably came from Georgia anyway.

CK:

Right [laughs]. One of the biggest public lands ranching states if Nevada. The little state of Maryland produces like five-ten times as much beef, some incredibly big figure I forget exactly. That much more beef than all the expanses of Nevada.

DJ:

This is as they say, really low-hanging fruit in terms of environmental reward for economic cost.

Is there anything else you want to say about Wildlife Services?

CK:

Just that they need to go. The only way to get them to go is for the public to make them go.

DJ:

Thank you so much for your constant advocacy for wild nature.

 

Ruin of the American West: An Interview with Chris Ketcham

Ruin of the American West: An Interview with Chris Ketcham

Featured Image: thousands of acres of Pinyon-Juniper forest bulldozed by the BLM in Nevada / by Max Wilbert / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Christopher Ketcham is a freelance writer for Harper’s, The New Republic, Vice, and many others. This video is an interview between him and Deep Green Resistance co-founder and author Derrick Jensen.  They discuss Ketcham’s new book “This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West.” It’s the product of ten years of research and travel across the public lands of the West.

 

On Ketcham’s website, he describes the cover of his book as follows:

As for the image under that vast Western sky of egg-shell blue, well it’s a bulldozer that pulls a naval anchor chain across a stretch of pinyon-juniper forest in Utah, tearing out the roots of the trees, laying waste to the ecosystem…so that money can be made for a privileged few who wear cowboy hats. One of the many examples of “land management” as practiced by the federal government. Multiply this scene by hundreds of millions of acres, imagine the various forms of “management” for the profit of the few, and you might get a sense of the scope of the ecological tragedy unfolding. This land is your land…or perhaps we should amend that to “was.” And the crazy part of it is that green groups who purport to be “environmentalists” are in fact abetting the destruction. Read my book to understand what’s really going on.

Browse all of Derrick Jensen’s Resistance Radio interviews at: https://deepgreenresistance.blogspot.com/p/derrick-jensen-resistance-radio-archives.html

Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel

We post regular videos on DGR strategy, ecology, interview from Derrick Jensen’s Resistance Radio, content from our podcast The Green Flame, and more.

https://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=deepgreenresistance

GET INVOLVED

“Stand with me. Stand and fight. I am one, and we would be two. Two more might join and we would be four. When four more join we will be eight. We will be eight people fighting whom others will join. And then more people. And more. Stand and fight.”
—Derrick Jensen

contact@deepgreenresistance.org

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR EMAIL LIST

We send a regular newsletter with summaries of DGR activity, news, analysis, and ways to get involved. Bypass social media censorship and sign up to get updates directly from us:

https://deepgreenresistance.org/get-involved/subscribe-dgr-lists

CONNECT

Help boost DGR’s message by following, upvoting, sharing, and spreading the word:

Reddit ► https://reddit.com/r/deepgreenresistance
Facebook ► https://facebook.com/deepgreenresistance
Twitter ► http://twitter.com/deepgreenresist

TRANSLATIONS

Help us caption & translate our videos: http://bit.ly/2HCIpvi

WHAT IS DEEP GREEN RESISTANCE?

Deep Green Resistance is a radical environmental movement, dedicated to shifting activists towards strategies that have a real chance to stop the murder of the planet. Our allegiance is first and foremost to the land around us; we fight for the salmon, the pine trees, and the songbirds, not the solar panels and space shuttles so many ‘environmentalists’ have fallen in love with. We in DGR don’t want a more sustainable nightmare. We want a living world.

Deep Green Resistance recognizes that industrial civilization is incompatible with life on this planet – and when our way of living conflicts with the needs of the land, our way of living must go. This transition to a healthy and just relationship with the natural world is a massive undertaking, one that won’t be achieved with individual lifestyle changes and a green coat of paint on the latest mountain-killing mining rig. Real change will take a revolutionary heart. Anything less is a recipe for failure.

Deep Green Resistance has a roadmap for that revolution. We call it Decisive Ecological Warfare. We’ve studied the most successful movements in history, from the Irish Republicans to Mandela’s Umkhonto we Sizwe, and applied the lessons they can teach us to the fight for Earth liberation. Our goal as aboveground activists is to promote this strategic resistance, with the goal of triggering cascading systems failure within industrial infrastructure. In this mission, we are guided by a strict code of conduct, a steering committee of seasoned revolutionaries, and, most of all, an unwavering dedication to the land on which we live.

HOW CAN I HELP?

In the midst of all this destruction, it’s easy to feel hopeless. But there’s one nice thing about living in such dark times – anywhere you look, there’s great work to be done. Deep Green Resistance isn’t afraid to make the connections between open-pit mining and police brutality, between rape and deforestation, between acidified oceans and settler colonialism. We are proud anti-capitalists, anti-racists, and radical feminists, with members working on everything from pornography and prostitution to indigenous land rights and prison reform.

Whether on the front lines or behind the scenes, there is room for you in this war. So get in touch! We have members across the globe and resources in multiple languages. Head to our website, check our Facebook, or send us an email and introduce yourself. We’ll help you learn more about DGR, find opportunities for volunteering, and apply for greater involvement. You’ll also be able to download a free ebook copy of the Deep Green Resistance book.

DGR is working to create a life-centered resistance movement that will dismantle industrial civilization by any means necessary. In order to succeed, we’ll need teachers, healers, warriors, and workers. If you’re tired of the false solutions and the feel-good failures, Deep Green Resistance is for you, whatever your skills. In a fight like this, we need it all.

Remember: Deep Green Resistance is an aboveground organization, meaning we don’t engage in violence or property destruction. If you feel your talents would best be put to use in more militant actions, please do not contact us. This will keep you safer, and help us be more effective. We will not answer any questions related to any underground that may or may not exist.

“Our best hope will never lie in individual survivalism. Nor does it lie in small groups doing their best to prepare for the worst. Our best and only hope is a resistance movement that is willing to face the scale of the horrors, gather our forces, and fight like hell for all we hold dear.”

– Lierre Keith, Deep Green Resistance

Lawsuit Filed Against Federal Wildlife-killing Program in California

     by Center for Biological Diversity

SAN FRANCISCO— Conservationists sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services program today over its outdated wildlife-killing plan for Northern California.

The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco federal court, seeks an updated environmental analysis of the program’s killing of native wildlife including coyotes, bobcats and foxes.

“Wildlife Services’ cruel killing practices are ineffective, environmentally harmful and totally out of touch with science,” said Collette Adkins, a Center for Biological Diversity attorney representing the conservation groups involved in the lawsuit. “It’s long past time that Wildlife Services joined the 21st century and updated its practices to stop the mass extermination of animals. Nonlethal methods for dealing with human-wildlife conflicts have been shown to work. We have no choice but to sue the agency and force a closer look at those alternatives.”

Wildlife Services is a multimillion-dollar federal program that uses painful leghold traps, strangulation snares, poisons and aerial gunning to kill wolves, coyotes, cougars, birds and other wild animals — primarily to benefit the agriculture industry.

Last year the program reported that it killed 1.6 million native animals nationwide, including 3,893 coyotes,142 foxes, 83 black bears, 18 bobcats and thousands of other creatures in California. Nontarget animals — including protected wildlife like wolves, Pacific fisher and eagles — are also at risk from Wildlife Services’ indiscriminate methods.

“Killing native wildlife at the behest of the ranching industry is morally unconscionable and scientifically unsound,” said Erik Molvar of Western Watersheds Project. “Carnivores play an important ecological role, and exterminating them upsets the balance of nature. We should leave the wildlife alone and change ranching practices instead.”

“Wildlife Services is acting in clear violation of the law,” said Tara Zuardo, Animal Welfare Institute wildlife attorney. “The agency cannot be allowed to continue haphazardly and cruelly kill thousands of wild animals in Northern California each year without weighing more humane alternatives.”

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires Wildlife Services to rigorously examine the environmental effects of killing wildlife and to consider alternatives that rely on proven nonlethal methods to avoid wildlife conflicts. But the wildlife-killing program’s environmental analysis for Northern California is more than 20 years old. According to the complaint filed today, Wildlife Services must use recent information to analyze the impacts of its wildlife-killing program on the environment and California’s unique wild places.

“NEPA requires that federal agencies use the best available science in analyzing the impacts of their programs, and we believe Wildlife Services has failed to do this and has in fact cherry-picked their science to meet their goals,” stated Camilla Fox, founder and executive director of Project Coyote. “Moreover, they must consider alternatives to indiscriminate killing and analyze the site-specific and cumulative impacts that killing large numbers of wild animals has on the diversity and integrity of healthy ecosystems.”

Today’s lawsuit is brought by the Center for Biological Diversity, Western Watersheds Project, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, Project Coyote, the Animal Welfare Institute and WildEarth Guardians. It targets Wildlife Services’ program in California’s North District, which includes Butte, Humboldt, Lassen, Mendocino, Modoc, Nevada, Plumas, Sierra, Shasta, Siskiyou, Sutter, Trinity and Yuba counties.

2.7 Million Animals Killed by Federal Wildlife-destruction Program in 2016

2.7 Million Animals Killed by Federal Wildlife-destruction Program in 2016

     by Center for Biological Diversity

WASHINGTON— The highly secretive arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture known as Wildlife Services killed more than 2.7 million animals during 2016, according to new data from the agency.

The multimillion-dollar federal program targets wolves, cougars, birds and other wild animals for destruction — primarily to benefit the agriculture industry. Of the 2.7 million animals killed last year, nearly 1.6 million were native wildlife species.

According to the latest kill report, the program last year destroyed 415 gray wolves; 76,963 adult coyotes, plus an unknown number of coyote pups in 430 destroyed dens; 407 black bears; 334 mountain lions; 997 bobcats; 535 river otters, including 415 killed “unintentionally”; 3,791 foxes, plus an unknown number of fox pups in 128 dens; and 21,184 beavers.

The program also killed 14,654 prairie dogs outright, as well as an unknown number killed in more than 68,000 burrows that were destroyed or fumigated. These figures almost certainly underestimate the actual number of animals killed, as program insiders have revealed that Wildlife Services kills many more animals than it reports.

“Despite mounting public outcry to reform these barbaric, outdated tactics, Wildlife Services continues its taxpayer-funded slaughter of America’s wildlife,” said Collette Adkins, a biologist and attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “There’s simply no scientific basis for continuing to shoot, poison and strangle millions of animals every year. These cruel practices not only fail to effectively manage targeted wildlife but also pose ongoing threats to other animals, including endangered species and pets.”

According to the new data, the wildlife-killing program unintentionally killed 2,790 animals last year, including badgers, bears, bobcats, foxes, muskrats, otters, porcupines, raccoons, skunks, turtles and more. Such data reveals the indiscriminate nature of painful leg-hold traps, strangulation snares, poisons and other methods used by federal agents.

Earlier this month a young, endangered male wolf known as OR-48, died an agonizing death in northeast Oregon after taking the scented bait from a cyanide trap put out by the federal wildlife killers. The program’s brutality has fueled growing public outcry and calls for reform by scientists, elected officials and nongovernmental organizations.

“The Department of Agriculture needs to get out of the wildlife-slaughter business,” said Adkins. “Wolves, bears and other carnivores help keep the natural balance of their ecosystems. Our government kills off the predators, such as coyotes, and then kills off their prey — like prairie dogs — in an absurd, pointless cycle of violence.”

The wildlife-killing program contributed to the decline of gray wolvesMexican wolvesblack-footed ferretsblack-tailed prairie dogs and other imperiled species during the first half of the 1900s and continues to impede their recovery today.

Lawsuit Filed to Protect Endangered Ocelots in Arizona, Texas From Government Killing

Lawsuit Filed to Protect Endangered Ocelots in Arizona, Texas From Government Killing

Featured image: Ocelot photo by Tom Smylie, USFWS. Fewer than 100 of these rare wildcats likely remain in the United States. 

     by Center for Biological Diversity

TUCSON, AZ The Center for Biological Diversity and the Animal Welfare Institute today filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to ensure that endangered ocelots aren’t inadvertently killed as part of the Department’s long-running program to kill coyotes, bears, bobcats and other wildlife in Arizona and Texas. The Department’s Wildlife Services program kills tens of thousands of animals in the two states every year using traps, snares and poisons.

“All the latest science shows Wildlife Services’ predator-control program is expensive, ineffective and inhumane,” said Collette Adkins, a Center attorney and biologist. “With fewer than 100 ocelots remaining in the United States, we’re trying to ensure that none will suffer and die in traps set for bobcats, coyotes and other predators targeted by Wildlife Services.”

Wildlife Services is required by the Endangered Species Act to consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on its activities that may affect endangered species, including its predator-control activities. Because Wildlife Services kills wildlife within the range of the endangered ocelot, and given the similarity in size between ocelots and many of the targeted predators, the Fish and Wildlife Service warned Wildlife Services in a 2010 “biological opinion” document that ocelots could be harmed by its use of traps, snares and poisons (including baited M-44 devices that propel lethal doses of sodium cyanide into animals’ mouths).

Since that 2010 opinion, ocelots have been spotted in several additional locations in Arizona, including the Huachuca and Santa Rita mountains. New evidence also indicates that Wildlife Services has failed to comply with the document’s mandatory terms and conditions, intended to minimize risk to ocelots. This new information requires the program to reinitiate consultation with the Fish and Wildlife Service to examine risks to ocelots and develop risk-mitigation measures. The complaint also alleges that Wildlife Services must use recent science to supplement its outdated environmental analyses of its wildlife-killing program in Arizona, which were prepared in the 1990s under the National Environmental Policy Act.

“The ocelot population is crumbling at the feet of Wildlife Services’ indiscriminate and haphazard wildlife-killing activities,” said Tara Zuardo, a wildlife attorney with Animal Welfare Institute. “With this lawsuit, we are sending a message to Wildlife Services that its tactics should not come at the expense of the future of this critically endangered species.”

To protect ocelots while the Fish and Wildlife Service completes the required analysis, the groups are seeking a halt to Wildlife Services’ animal-killing activities throughout the ocelot’s range in southern Arizona and Texas.

Background
The ocelot has a tawny coat marked by elongated brown spots with black borders. It can weigh as much as 35 pounds and stretch to 4 feet in length (including the tail). Ocelots seem to prefer dense cover but use a variety of habitats. Hunting mostly at night, they target rabbits, birds, fish, rodents, snakes, lizards and other small- to medium-sized prey.

The ocelot’s range includes Texas, Arizona, Mexico and Central and South America. Monitoring of collared individuals has shown that ocelots travel as far as 10 miles outside their home ranges. Since 2009 ocelots have been detected at least five times in Arizona, including a road-killed ocelot near Globe in 2010, a treed ocelot in the Huachuca Mountains in 2011, and a male ocelot photographed in the Santa Rita Mountains in 2014.

Since 1982 the species has been designated as “endangered” under the Endangered Species Act. Although never abundant, ocelots were historically killed incidentally during the hunting, trapping and poisoning of coyotes, bobcats and other predators. Habitat loss also contributed to the animal’s decline; only a fraction of the less than 5 percent of original native vegetation remaining in the lower Rio Grande Valley is optimal habitat for the cats. Now continuing habitat loss, collisions with vehicles and inbreeding resulting from small and isolated groups are keeping the wildcat’s population numbers low.

See more about USDA Wildlife Services at this award-winning film: