A division of the US government killed more than 1.75 million animals across the country, at a rate of about 200 creatures every hour, the Guardian reports, describing the practice as “barbaric”.
The British paper cited the annual toll of Wildlife Services, a department within the US Department of Agriculture, saying the killings spanned a Noah’s Ark of species, including alligators, armadillos, doves, owls, otters, porcupines, snakes, and turtles.
“European starlings alone accounted for more than 1 million of the animals killed. A single moose was shot, along with a solitary antelope and, accidentally, a bald eagle,” it said.
The slaughter has stoked the fury of conservation groups that have decried the killings as cruel and pointless.
“It’s stomach-turning to see this barbaric federal program wiping out hundreds of thousands of native animals,” said Collette Adkins, carnivore conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity.
Wildlife Services maintains that slaughter is necessary to protect agricultural output, threatened species and human health.
It targets certain species that it considers a threat to ecosystems, such as feral hogs and a type of giant swamp rodent called nutria, but it also, controversially, kills vast numbers of America’s native species.
Last year, 404,538 native animals were killed by the agency, a compendium of snuffed out life that included 324 gray wolves, 64,131 coyotes, 433 black bears, 200 mountain lions, 605 bobcats, 3,014 foxes, and 24,687 beavers, the Guardian reported.
Plenty of animals is killed unintentionally, too, with 2,746 unfortunate creatures, including bears, foxes, and dogs, exterminated by accident last year.
This is partly down to the methods used by Wildlife Services, which deploys leg hold traps, snares, and poisons to target animals. The agency uses a variety of other approaches too, such as rounding up and gassing geese or shooting coyotes from helicopters or aircraft, the paper added.
This approach has long been opposed by conservationists who argue the killings are indiscriminate and degrade America’s environment.
“Killing carnivores like wolves and coyotes to supposedly benefit the livestock industry just leads to more conflicts and more killing,” Adkins said.
Most contentious, the Guardian said, is the department’s use of M-44 cyanide “bombs” to kill certain animals. The devices, described by Wildlife Services as an “effective and environmentally sound wildlife damage management tool”, are essentially canisters placed in landscapes that eject a cloud of sodium cyanide when tugged at by animals. It will typically kill foxes, coyotes, and other targeted species within five minutes.
Activists say the US agency’s procedure is reminiscent of the 19th-century mass killing of the buffalo to starve the indigenous population as part of the government’s expansionism program.
The buffaloes, which once numbered more than 30 million in the Great Plains of North America, by the end of the 19th century were almost exterminated in order to starve the original native American inhabitants who were dependent on them for their food.
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The near extermination of the native buffalo helped the US federal government implement its land grab program.
Ironically, in 2016, then-president Barack Obama signed the National Bison Legacy Act, making the native North American buffalo, also known as the American bison, the US national mammal, joining the bald eagle in representing the US government.
Wildlife Services, which has a mission to “resolve wildlife conflicts to allow people and wildlife to coexist”, often acts at the behest of ranchers, state agencies, and airports to eradicate animals considered to be damaging to the environment, economic activity, or public safety.
In both 2008 and 2010, Wildlife Services killed 5 million animals, and as recently as 2019 it killed around 1.3 million native animals, a total much higher than last year, the Guardian said.
