A lawsuit filed by the Center for Biological Diversity seeks to stop the U.S. Department of Agriculture from trapping and killing wildlife in Texas.
The suit filed this week in the San Antonio Federal Court also wants a reevaluation of the USDA’s Wildlife Services Program based on updated science. Among the concerns is the impact on the state’s population of mountain lions and black bears.
Talia DiBenedetto is a carnivore conservation staff attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, and she joined the show to talk about the issue. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Tell us about the Wildlife Services killing program at issue here. What is it intended to accomplish and how does it work?
Tala DiBenedetto: So this federal program spends tons of taxpayer money every year on the slaughter of the nation’s beloved wildlife, largely on behalf of private industry.
In Texas, Wildlife Services continues to kill native, ecologically important wildlife, relying on woefully outdated environmental assessments up to a decade old despite new, abundant, critical information on the impacts – in particular, to these sensitive mountain lion and black bear populations in the state.
Give us a sense of the kinds of practices used by USDA to control wildlife or kill wildlife.
Wildlife Services engages in a number of cruel and controversial methods to kill wildlife. This includes strangulation, snares, body-gripping traps which trap animals who then are stuck for hours and hours on end without access to food and water, who are stressed and struggle to get free, which they can harm themselves in that process, or even try to chew with their own limbs.
Texas also has the highest use of M-44 cyanide bombs in the country. This method is particularly dangerous.
Basically, these are devices that are inserted into the ground. And when animals bite down on them, it shoots cyanide powder up to five feet in the air. And these devices have killed countless dogs. They have harmed people and killed plenty of non-target animals.
Is your lawsuit’s contention that the program is simply killing more animals than necessary and needs to be changed? Or do you want the entire program shut down?
So our lawsuit, specifically, is looking at the agency’s killing based on flawed and outdated environmental analysis.
And so because this analysis was done so long ago and so much information has come out in the past decade on the state of mountain lions in Texas, as well as possible harms to black bears, the agency shouldn’t continue to kill wildlife relying on this faulty, outdated information.
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Well, give us some examples about what’s faulty. I mean, you mentioned you’re specifically concerned about the limited population of mountain lions and black bears.
But what about mountain lions? The state just last year established the first trapping restrictions and banned canned hunting. How does that USDA program affect mountain lions?
So the restriction on trapping only sets a 36-hour trap check. So Texas is the only state with a mountain lion population where mountain lions aren’t managed, meaning they can be killed at any time in any quantities. They don’t have the benefits of monitoring or reporting requirements.
And many studies have come out since the preparation of these last environmental assessments that indicate that the current rate of mountain lion-killing in Texas isn’t sustainable and that one resident population of mountain lions in particular – the Southern resident population – is in immediate risk of local extinctions.
Well, the changes you advocate would impact the way ranchers deal with predators that pose a threat to livestock. If your lawsuit is successful, what happens to those ranchers? And what about their concerns?
So some of the studies we point to in our complaint show that where mountain lions were studied, in particular in one area of Texas, had plenty of livestock available, and yet livestock made up little to none of the individual diets of mountain lions, despite that availability. And that predation on livestock depends on a number of other factors, including, importantly, local ranching practices.
And further, there are plenty of effective nonlethal ways to prevent predation without engaging in this rampant, cruel killing and harming the environment.
