The Forest Service has released a new proposal to permit government-funded trapping, cyanide poisoning and aerial shooting of predators in designated wilderness areas. The new proposal also reverses long-standing rules that prohibit aircraft landings and motorized use in wilderness areas, and it’s rubbing a lot of people the wrong way.
Wilderness, recreation, animal welfare and environmental groups are aghast at the proposal. They say that smoking fox and coyote pups out of their dens and clubbing them to death, setting traps that explode in a cloud of sodium-cyanide crystals and shooting wolves from helicopters are not activities most people expect to see in wilderness areas. These groups are also concerned about the safety of hidden cyanide traps, which are known to kill domestic pets and are a threat to children and hikers.
Unfortunately, though, most wilderness users and other members of the public are only just learning about the rule change. That’s because the Forest Service has not announced the proposal on its website and has not issued any press releases about it. In fact, unless you are one of few in the country who read the Federal Register every day, you probably never heard about it. (If you are one of those people, then maybe you caught it – on page 32,915 of the June 7 edition.)
To make matters worse, the Forest Service is now telling reporters that the rule change is just a “minor clarification” and a bit of “housekeeping” to bring the old rules up to date. But that position is both disingenuous and provably wrong.
The new rules (posted at predatorcontrol.org) would reverse the old prohibition on sodium-cyanide traps in wilderness areas. They would lift the policy that only specific, individual animals that have attacked livestock can be trapped and killed in wilderness areas, in favor of a new policy that permits an entire “local population” of animals to be killed. Worse still, that local population would not need to be implicated in livestock depredation because the new rule permits an ongoing program of wildlife killing, to be carried out whether livestock have been attacked or not.
The new rules would also permit motorized use in wilderness areas for the purpose of conducting this wildlife control program. And the rules reverse the requirement that the regional forester approve these control actions on a case-by-case basis.
Under the new proposal, it would be even permissible for local ranchers to enter wilderness areas on off-road vehicles or motorcycles to set sodium-cyanide traps to kill predators, so long as a locally based advisory group had determined that such actions were necessary.
That doesn’t sound like a “housekeeping” change to most people who use and care about wilderness areas and the wildlife living there. It sounds like a major overhaul.
Because these rules would create such a dramatic and sweeping change in the management of our nation’s most cherished landscapes, and because the rules have been developed so quietly, the Center for Biological Diversity has joined a coalition of wildlife and wilderness organizations to ask the Forest Service to extend the comment period on the new proposal past its current deadline of Aug. 7. Wilderness areas were established to be places where nature is left to run its course, where machines and roads are not permitted, and where Americans can find solitude and mystery away from the noise of urban life. Bringing off-road vehicles and helicopters into protected wilderness areas to poison, shoot and trap wild animals for the benefit of the livestock industry is an idea the public should oppose.
Erik Ryberg is a lawyer with the Center for Biological Diversity.
