In the final installment of the 3-part series, Tom Knudson investigates how the role of USDA Wildlife Services may change in the future. Should the agency be disbanded? Should it be reformed and given different responsibilities like controlling only invasive, non-native species? Should its predator control program be defunded?
There is obviously a problem with [...]
Continue Reading →This installment of Tom Knudson’s series in the Sacremento Bee investigates the efficacy of USDA Wildlife Services’ predator killing program to benefit wildlife. In short, it doesn’t, it generally causing more harm than good and could be having impacts on disease such as the plague due to the increase of rodents after control actions.
In [...]
Continue Reading →Tom Knudson of the Sacremento Bee has been working on this very important and eye opening series about USDA Wildlife Services for several months. I was contacted by him in December last year and we talked about several issues related to WS and their killing.
This first installment of three introduces people to the agency [...]
Continue Reading →George Ochenski tells how ranchers move the goal posts on Yellowstone bison issue-
Perhaps a hundred stories since we first wrote about the issues of the Yellowstone’s bison’s genetic purity, the seemingly pointless slaughter of Park bison that leave the Park, and many other issues, very slow progress has been made.
Bison perhaps can now [...]
Continue Reading →The Idaho Department of Fish and Game Commission will be taking public comment on all kinds of things on March 21, 2012 at their headquarters in Boise, Idaho. The public comment section starts their three day meeting where they will set rules for hunting and fishing in the upcoming year. One of the items on [...]
Continue Reading →Controversial bill, S1283, dies on a rare tie vote- but S1282, a similar bill, is still alive.
There aren’t many Democrats in the Idaho state senate, but all of them joined with about 40 per cent of that body’s Republicans to kill the effort to turn the Land Owner Appreciation law (LAP) into a possible [...]
Continue Reading →I think it’s safe to say that this couldn’t be called a trend, but last year a funding shortfall for USDA Wildlife Services shortened their coyote killing season by two months in Montana while at the same time the number of domestic sheep that coyotes killed ended up being lower by 1,900. The effectiveness [...]
Continue Reading →Brooks Fahy, of Predator Defense in Eugene, Oregon, has put together an account of Robert Norie, the owner of Bella the husky, and the ordeal they went through after Bella was caught in an unmarked USDA Wildlife Services snare set for wolves in Idaho’s Boise National Forest in August 2010.
Wildlife Services has been [...]
Continue Reading →Contained in the annual wolf report to be released later this week by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) are the findings of a panel formed to review livestock depredation investigations attributed to wolves. In at least three cases ODFW found that there was insufficient evidence to support a conclusion that wolves killed [...]
Continue Reading →Wolf delisting rider and most of the highly unpopular giveaways to polluters and abusers of our public lands are defeated-
The conference report on the 2012 appropriations bill for most non-defense expenditures has been finalized. Instead of merely appropriating more or less money for agencies many ideologically loaded amendments or riders were added, mostly by [...]
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