SPECIAL ALERT: STOP THE ANIMAL DAMAGE CONTROL
© Patricia M. Theison
Our tax dollars are being used to subsidize a federal program called Animal Damage Control (ADC). Every year millions of animals such as bears, foxes, muskrats, raccoons, beaver, many bird species, and even domestic dogs and cats are inhumanely slaughtered at our expense. The Animal Damage Control Act was created by Congress in 1931 to clear the western range of predators. The Act called for the ADC to provide "the best methods of eradication, suppression, or bringing under control on National forests and other areas of public domain or privately owned lands; mountain lions, wolves, coyotes, bobcats, ground squirrels, rabbits and other animals injurous to agriculture.. Until 1986, The Animal Damage Control was under the direction of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. During the last 20 years, conservationists and animal rights groups were gaining ground to eradicate the ADC. But pressure from Western ranchers influenced the Congressmen from the Western states to help rejuvenate the program by having it placed under the supervision of The Department of Agriculture. The Animal Damage Control has around 900 employees and an approximate annual budget of 35 million dollars and it gets another estimated 15 million dollars from state donations. More than four fifths of the ADC's budget is spent in the West.
The Denver Research Center and Pocatello Supply Depot spend approximately 8 million dollars to develop new traps, poisons, and other methods to kill wildlife. Some of the methods that the ADC has conceived to eradicate so called menaces to agriculture are barbaric and cruel. The ADC primarily uses leghold traps, shooting, aerial shooting from helicopters and small airplanes, denning (the killing of coyote and fox young while they are still in the den), a spring loaded device called an M - 44 that injects sodium cyanide into the mouths of any animal that pulls on scented baits, Compound 1080 - a poison so deadly that one pound of it can kill a million pounds of wildlife, and spraying a chemical detergent mixture on birds that strips them of their natural oil protection causing them to freeze to death.
Even though the ADC hunters and trappers are supposed to only go after predators that have actually killed livestock, they don't usually abide by the rules causing millions of innocent animals to suffer and die. They prefer what they call "preventative control" regularly on public and private lands instead of waiting for a predator to attack. In other words, their policy is " if it moves, kill it!" In one year alone, the ADC intentionally killed 4,453,842 blackbirds, 76,033 coyotes, 9,143 beavers, 5,348 raccoons, 1,163 bobcats, 6,729 egrets, 289 black bears, 178 domestic cats, and 151 domestic dogs. This isn't even 1/4 of the list of animals slaughtered in the name of "protecting agriculture".
