Trump Should Shut Down Wildlife Services to Save Animals and Taxpayer Dollars

Wildlife Services, a program within the United States Department of Agriculture, made headlines recently—and not for a good reason. Federal workers employed by the program recently killed a Mexican gray wolf that was wearing a tracker collar and thought to be pregnant. 

Wildlife Services called killing the endangered animal a "mistake." However, this isn’t the first time the program has made such a mistake, and it’s far from the worst thing its employees have done to animals. If the Trump administration wants to save animals and taxpayer dollars (and there is early evidence to suggest he is concerned with both), shutting down Wildlife Services should be a priority.

One of the program’s primary goals is to “provide wildlife services, protecting agriculture, wildlife and other natural resources, property, and human health and safety.” What this functionally means is that taxpayers are funding wildlife management for ranchers and farmers. And “wildlife services” typically means one thing: indiscriminately killing animals while wasting a lot of money. 

“Year after year, millions of dollars are wasted on killing wildlife instead of investing in long-term solutions that prevent conflicts,” stated Collette Adkins, carnivore conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Taxpayer-funded wildlife slaughter lets livestock operators and the agriculture industry ignore problems that lead to conflict instead of fixing them.” 

Wildlife Services costs American taxpayers $100 million every year to indiscriminately kill animals in the most brutal ways possible. And despite how it is touted, the program does little in the way of providing direct benefits to ranchers and farmers. 

An analysis of Wildlife Services work orders from Montana found that between 2019 and 2022, program employees killed approximately 11,000 animals. Only one of those animals was logged as a “threat” in the orders. That means that Wildlife Services killed more than 10,000 animals in one state in just three years, in most cases without logging any livestock that were killed or injured.  

Wildlife Services often employs helicopters and planes to gun down large numbers of animals all at once, which is in itself an entirely objectionable approach to wildlife management. If a predator is killing large numbers of livestock, killing all animals you see from the sky is the worst way you could handle the problem. However, killing large numbers of animals for no reason is the common theme at Wildlife Services.  

In 2023, Wildlife Services killed more than 375,000 animals. Reports revealed that this figure includes 68,562 coyotes, 430 black bears, 235 mountain lions, and many other predators. But predators that could actually pose a threat to livestock are not even the only species that the program targets—federal employees killed nearly 25,000 beavers, 658 river otters, 428 turtles, and several cats and dogs in 2023, too. 

Unfortunately, gunning animals down from the sky actually begins to look humane when examining other tactics Wildlife Services uses. Killing American wildlife using leghold traps, snares, and poisoning is common. The program has even used cyanide bombs, ensuring that the animals they targeted died long, slow, painful deaths. 

It is true that wildlife kills livestock every year. However, it is the rancher or farmer’s responsibility to protect their animals, not the federal government’s. Local and state wildlife authorities are also better suited to handle area wildlife conflicts than a federal employee would be. Innovative solutions from nonprofit and research organizations could also help protect wildlife while reducing livestock deaths without getting the government involved. 

Wildlife Services is cruel and wasteful. Ranchers do not need this program. Farmers do not need this program. Ending it would be a victory for wildlife and taxpayers. For those reasons, the Trump administration should permanently end the program.  

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