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KILLING PREDATORS STANDS as one of the most age-old and enduring forms of wildlife management. Even now, myth and politics trump ecology. Is there a way out?
In 1963, a prestigious panel of biologists was appointed to review the U.S. government’s branch of Predator and Rodent Control. The panel looked into this bustling corps of civil-service hunters and trappers and poisoners, who on a budget of some US$6 million reported 191,000 animals vanquished that year. Their take included bears, bobcats, mountain lions, wolves, badgers, and foxes—along with a menagerie of lesser vermin. Chief among the dead were 89,653 coyotes, the tricksters of native legend, the lamb killers, and the arch-nemesis of the western livestock industry.
The examining committee, led by A. Starker Leopold, was not so favorably impressed with the government’s body count. In its resulting Leopold Report of 1964, the first in a series of top-level critiques and reprimands over the following decades, the committee charged the predator controllers with catering to the livestock industry, ignoring science, and wasting not only taxpayer money but also innocent multitudes of the nation’s wildlife. "It is the unanimous opinion of this Board," Leopold and company summed up, "that control as actually practiced today is considerably in excess of the amount that can be justified in terms of total public interest."
Forty-three years later, it appears that little but the name has changed. Federal predator control (now Wildlife Services) with its hunters, trappers, and poisoners
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Conservation magazine is published by the Society for Conservation Biology
Copyright © 2007 Society for Conservation Biology