Post Register editorial board members are Roger Plothow, acting publisher; J. Robb Brady; Marty Trillhaase; and Dean Miller.
Will nothing stop Wildlife Services (formerly the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service) in its quest to kill predators?
Scientific proof that eliminating predators doesn't protect other species, like game herds, apparently won't.
Wildlife Services is back in court, fighting to kill 11 different wild animals in the name of reviving sage grouse in southern Idaho. Targeted in this unprecedented campaign are red foxes, badgers, raccoons, skunks, ravens, crows, magpies, coyotes and possibly mountain lions and bears. The project covers 31 million acres.
Wildlife Services' tactics include the use of cyanide gas, banned more than a quarter-century ago by President Richard Nixon but now optional, slow-death traps, the killing of newborns still in their dens and shooting from airplanes.
Last year, the U.S. District Court issued an injunction against that predator-killing spree. The Committee for Idaho's High Desert, the Idaho Conservation League, the Western Watersheds Project and the Defenders of Wildlife brought the lawsuit against Wildlife Services.
The evidence behind that ruling was overwhelming.
Predators are not the reason for declining sage grouse populations, wildlife scientists testified. The problem is the sage grouse's habitat is disappearing - due to urban encroachment, farm practices that deny cover and food, weed invasion, loss of sagebrush and grazing conflicts.
Retired Idaho wildlife scientists Thomas J. Cade of Boise, a birds of prey specialist, and Ted Chu of Idaho Falls, former regional wildlife manager for the Idaho Fish and Game Department, showed how Wildlife Services relied on outdated research. The agency failed to confront complicated interaction of predators, which can limit their impact on species. Killing off coyotes, for example, allows the red fox to take more prey because the two compete.
Cade and Chu also testified the political appointees on the Fish and Game Commission for three years have been bent on a predator-killing rampage. They're acting on the unfounded assumption that game herds are being decimated by their natural predators. The Fish and Game Commission helped launch the Wildlife Services campaign.
The predator-killing strategy "is not supported by the professional biologist staff of the Idaho Fish and Game Department except under duress," Cade and Chu said. Fish and Game staff members keep quiet out of fear of their jobs.
The two experts also told the federal court what's really behind falling numbers of game herds. Don't blame predators for declining antelope or elk, they said. Blame Idaho's depredation law. The law forces Fish and Game to drastically reduce herds to protect ranchers reporting crop problems with game.
Antelope populations in the Big Lost River and Little Lost River drainages in central Idaho were severely cut after ranchers in those areas reported problems.
In southwestern Idaho this year, thousands of elk died in a huge transplant operation because ranchers complained of elk on their ranches.
Predators undoubtedly prey on these animals but predators have been around for centuries. Predator and prey balance each other. Predator control, at best, must be highly selective by area and short term.
But Wildlife Services is relentless. By Aug. 30, the agency will go back into the court, outlining why the injunction should be lifted.
Instead, Wildlife Services should simply drop the project.
It is unreasonable in scope and too broad in its choice of targets.
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