http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/energy-environment/343948-its-time-for-the-ag-industry-to-end-its-war-on-native
In Washington state, another family of wolves, the Smackout Pack, is now targeted for killing at the behest of the livestock industry. Even though wolves in Washington are so rare they are protected under the state’s Endangered Species Act, special loopholes allow the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife to use aerial gunning to kill wolves when they prey on livestock.
This isn’t the first time wildlife-rancher conflict has reared its ugly head in Washington. Just last year, department officials killed seven members of the Profanity Peak Pack, including a pup, leaving only four alive. As it turned out, the rancher had turned loose his cattle near the known den site for the wolves, and placed salt blocks to attract cattle to within 200 yards of the den, causing the conflict.
In both cases, the ranching operations were running private livestock on public lands. These lands are supposed to be managed for “multiple use,” defined by law to include wildlife and habitat, public recreation, healthy watersheds and other public values often degraded or eliminated by commercial livestock operations.
Neither cattle nor domestic sheep are native to the mountains and basins of the arid West. Their environmental impacts are severe — overgrazing that causes erosion and siltation that turns crystalline trout streams muddy and barren, increasing the spread of invasive weeds like cheatgrass that wipe out habitat for sage grouse and other wildlife through habitat degradation and unnatural range fires, and competing for habitat and forage with native herbivores like elk and deer.
Some 45 percent of Bureau of Land Management grazing lands measured in 2012 were not meeting Rangeland Health standards. While energy development and mining cause environmental train wrecks on a few thousand to a few million acres, livestock grazing is the chronic environmental disease that — like cancer — is slowly killing native ecosystems almost everywhere in the West.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is so entrenched in its desire to eliminate native wildlife that frightens ranchers that they have their own “rogue agency” dedicated to killing such wildlife. Operating under the Machiavellian name “Wildlife Services,” this agency has killed millions of birds and mammals since 2000, both predators targeted by the livestock industry as well as “non-target species” killed by indiscriminate traps, snares and poisons set out on the land to eliminate species that the ranching industry finds inconvenient to their operations.
