In Northern California, just a few counties away from where I live, biologists recently released beavers into the wild for the first time in nearly 75 years. These critters are critically important as nature’s engineers. Beavers transform ecosystems, building wetlands that provide wildfire breaks and rich natural habitat for countless other species, while also improving water quality. Yet Wildlife Services, a unit of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is killing them by the tens of thousands.
A 2022 study about rewilding the American West called beaver restoration “a cost-effective means” of repairing wetlands that provide homes for nearly three-quarters of wild animals in the United States. While scientists are calling for habitat restoration, Wildlife Services kills wildlife on our dime, largely on behalf of meat producers.
You see, Northern California is well known for its outdoor spaces, public lands, and natural beauty. But it’s also known for its agriculture. And it’s not just grapes and apples grown here. It’s beef, chicken, and eggs, too.
On this beautiful landscape, factory farms and industrial agricultural sheds are an eyesore and local pollutant. In the grocery store, producers market their wares as locally grown meat and dairy. As a result of their presence, these hills blessed with coastal fog and ancient redwoods are besieged by powerful ag lobbies that contract with the Wildlife Services program to kill the coyotes, mountain lions, bears, foxes, birds, and other native wildlife who they perceive as a threat to livestock production.
In 2023 the program killed 375,045 native animals across the country, including 305 gray wolves, 68,562 coyotes, 430 black bears, 235 mountain lions, 469 bobcats, 2,122 red and gray foxes, 5,054 black-tailed prairie dogs, and hundreds of owls, otters and osprey, along with tens of thousands of other birds and wildlife. It also killed 24,603 native beavers.
When I testified against Wildlife Services programs at a local board of supervisors meeting, the ag lobby derided us. Even with sound logic, evidenced-based science, and the rights of communities to native wildlife, they dismissed the value of bears and coyotes and lions, relying on fear-mongering mythologies of carnivores as villains that prey on children at bus stops.
But the reality is that agricultural destruction of ecosystems, predator-prey balance, and watershed pollution is the real threat, not scary stories about the big bad wolf.
Many food producers, including some meat producers, delight in the wildlife they share the land with. And they’re as outraged as we are about Wildlife Services. That’s why counties neighboring mine have committed to nonlethal management practices and wildlife coexistence. It can be done.
It’s well past time for the rest of the country to walk away from Wildlife Services too. The agency in charge of agriculture should not also oversee wildlife management. It’s a conflict of interest, at least until we shift our framework of how to build policies that support a just, sustainable food system. Instead, policies encourage overproduction at the expense of people and wildlife, and the average American eats three times as much meat and dairy and four times as much beef as the rest of the world. That’s not sustainable, and neither is the wildlife killing on behalf of those industries.
Given the wildlife and habitat destruction inherent to current meat production practices, the USDA should be working on a just transition away from meat and dairy overproduction.
Healthy wild ecosystems will never require the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of native wild animals, but they do require changes in western ranching and a reimagining of the American diet.
How You Can Help
- Ask your county supervisors to end contracts with or agree not to contract with the Wildlife Services killing program in your area.
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Build support for nonlethal wildlife coexistence in your area through gardening groups, at farmer’s markets and city and county policy meetings, and among farming communities.
For the wild,
