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> you cannot just let the situation unfurl without official intervention

I don't think anyone is arguing for wildlife control to completely stop. But people seem genuinely scared of these M44 ("cyanide bombs") devices that seemingly is placed both on public and private properties without any notifications to people around. The article uses the example of a family who had one of those devices planted near their house, eventually killing their dog and poisoning their kid.

Seems absolutely bananas that someone can plant devices like that without any notifications, and sleep well at night. What a absolute clusterfuck of a blunder.

In my experience communicating these kinds of warnings out to the public, especially in a way they'll actually see and notice, is a weak spot. Statistically this kind of thing is incredibly rare, and it makes it too easy for Federal employees to feel like communication is just a chore or a checkbox. I agree that part needs fixed.

In today's day and age, we can send amber alerts to phones. Do the same thing. We should also do the same for agricultural or commercial pesticide applications.

That would be a great solution. You'll hear no apologies from me for government backwardness about modern technology.

Or how about stop putting cyanide mines in your own country?

You can get in serious legal trouble for a “booby-trap” inside your own home, if a criminal accidentally is injured by it.

Placing one in a publicly accessible place without even notifying the people living in the nearest homes? Failing to notify occupants of permanent residences in the area shows there was no meaningful attempt at all to notify the public.

The whole thing just sounds like some overconfident bureaucrat’s bad idea to me.

What makes you think this isn’t allowing civilians to handle it? The idea that this is helping rests on that. If it doesn’t, it falls apart.

Civilians don’t even know this program exists! That’s part of the problem. If a non-law-abiding rancher gets mad he pulls out his gun and shoots a coyote - and there are lots of those. Maybe he doesn’t very much in 2020, because of education programs. But should this program get the credit?

For what you said to be true, you have to prove that these cyanide bombs are effectively controlling populations that need to be controlled - a huge stretch and exactly the claim that should be demonstrated by any defense.

It may not be controlling coyotes (vs something that doesn’t need to be controlled, like skunks).

It may be controlling some coyotes, but not enough to make a difference.

It may be controlling coyotes but actually worse than angry farmers would have - killing them without rhyme or reason, instead of after an offense.

This doesn’t look like a smart program that weighed the pros and cons and then went ahead with deployment judiciously. It seems questionable and dumb, which is why it’s also kind of a secret (often a very reliable tell).

Note that there are no university professors or believable experts saying, “this is a good program with a lot of data behind it.” If there is good science to be seen, it seems suspiciously hard to access.

It’s okay to be skeptical, dismissive even, of bad decisions without good data behind them- and it looks like that’s what we are seeing here.

> If a non-law-abiding rancher gets mad he pulls out his gun and shoots a coyote

Pretty sure it's legal to shoot a coyote on your own property, as long as you're not in a densely populated area.

The state of Utah will even pay you $50 per coyote you kill, up to 10 times per year. All you have to do is register on this website in advance: https://wildlife.utah.gov/predator-control-program.html

And maybe, you know, oversight, accountability, and most importantly: informed consent, by actual local law-enforcement and communities because no one gets to set bombs and then just walk away, for the same reason land mines are a war crime.

If you can't even vaguely guarantee it won't kill people (e.g. on private land at least an accidental baseball-over-the-fence distance away from the perimeter) your approach is most definitely illegal and you should be held accountable, and your agency's dealings revised.

I'd have to defer to your experience, but fire-and-forget cyanide bombs seem a bit radical and dangerous as "solutions" go...

I'd rather pay someone that can handle a rifle to hunt whatever needs killing -- as opposed to the cyanide bomb method that could (as outlined in the article) do more harm than good.

Ideally you'd be completely right. A professional with a rifle is far safer with less chance for unintended consequences (even if the chances are low regardless). Also incredibly expensive compared to what amounts to a spring-loaded poison trap (someone else in this thread linked the actual manual for the thing).

Given that nobody wants to pay what it'd cost to do invasive/native species control with a fleet of professionals shooting things one at a time (even for species where that's theoretically an option), worse alternatives are often used.

You seem to intuit that the risk/benefit is rather low. I'm not sure I agree: it seems like a sure thing that this program will eventually kill someone. It's not exactly evident that the efficacy of the program is high.

Even if the program is effective at control, it doesn't leap out at me that the attained benefit surpasses the risks and costs.

> Whether it's suburban coyotes killing off family pets (a big problem in my suburb at the moment) or rural clashes between ranchers and wolves, you cannot just let the situation unfurl without official intervention.

This is completely backwards. The solution to cats not being at the top of the local food chain is not to kill anything that would eat them, but to end their participation in the food chain. That cats aren't an apex predator is a good thing, because the destruction of native species they accomplish isn't enough to motivate their owners to keep them inside.

There's still a problem of small dogs being taken from a fenced yard.

Guy down the street from me had his 70lb pitbull killed. People don't think of coyotes as serious predators, but they truly are.

You're creating a strawman argument.

The primary discussion here isn't about managing species, it's whether or not it's acceptable to plant a bomb 300ft from someone's house without informing the residents.

Department of Interior would be better. USDA will do anything the farmers want without regard to other interests with a thing like this.

It's been a long term issue -- I think the situation has been basically the same since the 1970s.

Without suburban coyotes, the neighborhood Facebook groups would be stuck talking about fireworks and Taco Bell.

Simple solution: let ranchers shoot problematic species.

It's been suggested a lot. It might even work. It boils down to whether you believe rancher's incentives are ever going to reconcile with responsibly pruning dangerous species. Historically that hasn't worked out well.

That's what Australia does for feral pigs, and it works pretty well.

Right, but the ideal number of feral hogs is zero. The ideal number of wild wolves is not zero.

That isn’t a universally accepted opinion.

Feral hogs are an invasive species in the US that causes significant property and ecological damage while also not being a particularly good game animal. That ticks pretty much all the "we don't want this here" boxes that I'm aware of.

Who wants feral hogs?

Depending on the state, and depending on how problematic the individual animal is, you can. In many states you can shoot hogs whenever you want. Remember that whole thing where a bunch of twitter people who’d never been on a farm made fun of that politician for saying he had to shoot like 50 feral hogs at once? That’s a real thing - more than once I’ve been on an acquaintance’s ranch, standing up in the back of a truck or Polaris with an AR-15 chasing down dozens and dozens of hogs. They breed quickly and are very destructive! Texas tried to poison them and it didn’t work well enough.

Usually with other species like bears or wolves, you are only supposed to shoot them if they actually attack livestock (and sometimes not even then).

Family member in Texas goes hog hunting every year and always has sausage in the freezer. There are millions of them. Your story about the Polaris and AR-15 is spot on; this is possibly the only game animal for which an AR-15 is the perfect rifle.

Their story may be accurate but they misrepresented the politicians story, re seeking out vs being invaded by a wild pack.

They are definitely an invasive species, although the damage they do is mostly ecological and economic; they're not really dangerous to people directly. I've heard stories to that effect but I expect they're exaggerated.

In Colorado you can shoot anything you want if it is harassing your cattle, even family dogs. An example from my hometown:

https://www.steamboatpilot.com/news/da-will-not-press-charge...

Seems like an overreaction but some dogs behave very aggressively around cattle and other animals due to instinct. Its entirely possible that the dog was not responsive to commands, and was going after the cattle in a serious way. A 4 month old husky is not a tiny puppy. There's more to this story than meets the eye. I highly doubt the neighbor shot the dog without trying anything else first.

Where my parents live in the countryside, some people -- like kids visiting their parents for the month -- will bring their dogs and let them roam around. Dogs will form up in a pack of 2 or more and kill things on your property, like chickens. Or they'll instigate larger animals like the emus and end up biting/breaking the animal's ankle.

You can scare them away easily (dogs are generally skittish) but they'll come back.

I've also learned that some people are completely unreasonable when it comes to their pets, basically believing that "it's just a dog" and you're the asshole if you can't handle it being on your property.

Thing is that those species like coyotes or raccoons or deers are problematic simply because their populations have grown too big. You want to put their populations under the control, but not exterminate them completely. And that second part is where ranchers are not very good at, and then you end up having to install external controls to regulate the hunting and the whole thing becomes a lot more complicated and expensive for tax payers.

This idea is anti-economic. It has always ended in a very expensive mess by the unavoidable and huge collateral damages each time it was implemented

There are 2.79 million federal employees in the US. What's the probability that the average voter knows what any of them do all day? Democracy has no chance, we live under the rule of unchecked bureaucracy.