WildEarth Guardians

Monday, February 6, 2017
New Report and Website Expose Barbaric Government Wildlife Killing Practices

WildEarth Guardians' Report and Website Dedicated to Ending the War on Wildlife
Contact: Michelle Lute, 406-­‐848-­‐4910, mlute@wildearthguardians.org

Additional contact:

Madeleine Carey, 505-660-0161, mcarey@wildearthguardians.org

Santa Fe, NM – Today, WildEarth Guardians released a report, War on Wildlife, which accompanies the recently launched End the War on Wildlife website day-lighting the federal government’s cruel and clandestine wildlife-killing program inaptly called "Wildlife Services.” Working under the U.S. Department of Agriculture, largely at the behest of agribusiness, Wildlife Services slaughters over a million native animals each year using cruel traps, snares, poisons, aerial gunning and other barbaric tools.

“Wildlife Services is not serving wildlife,” said Michelle Lute, wildlife coexistence campaigner for WildEarth Guardians.  “Instead the program uses public funds to kill native animals at the behest of agribusiness despite strong public opposition to such unethical, unscientific and wasteful actions. ”

The best available science shows that nonlethal methods to protect livestock work better than the lethal methods upon which Wildlife Services relies. Yet, Wildlife Services continues to use cruel and lethal tools across the West. Wildlife Services operates as one of the least transparent programs in government, regularly dodging interviews and congressional inquiries, keeping paltry and incomplete records, and failing to adequately account for its use of taxpayer dollars.

WildEarth Guardians’ new report and website are part of a larger effort to raise public awareness about Wildlife Services’ atrocities and call on state agencies and county commissions to end their contracts with the program and adopt non-lethal coexistence plans. The report and website provide information on Wildlife Services' brutal tactics, how the killing of so many native animals destabilizes healthy ecosystems, and recommendations for how to reign in the rogue program.

“The practice of slaughtering native animals on our public lands is rooted in outdated, disproven science,” said Madeleine Carey, greater Gila guardian for WildEarth Guardians. “Ending the war on wildlife will modernize wildlife management and ensure that native carnivores and other keystone species have room to roam.”

Reforming Wildlife Services so that the program uses the best available non-lethal tools will ensure that our public lands are safe havens for wildlife, people and companion animals. Traps, snares and poisons further endangered rare carnivores and other threatened and endangered wildlife and have no place on our public lands.