Before I share a link to and notes from the final installment of Tom Knudson's superb three part series, which appears on the cover of today's, Sunday May 6, Sacramento Bee, I will share some terrific news: another story by Tom Knudson that appeared on the front page of Wednesday's (May 2) Sacramento Bee reported that an environmental group, WildEarth Guardians http://www.wildearthguardians.org/ , has filed a lawsuit asking that the USDA's "Wildlife Services" agency's activities be halted "until it prepares a new, more comprehensive environmental impact statement."
WildEarth Guardians also has a web page where you can contact your congressional representative, request that they defund Wildlife Services’ lethal control budget, "and ask them to launch an investigation into this rogue agency immediately." Please go to http://tinyurl.com/7h3v7w5 to fill out the form sending a letter to your representative.
Today's front page Sacramento Bee article is titled, "Suggestions in changing Wildlife Services range from new practices to outright bans." It revisits information about the USDA's Wildlife Services agency provided in the first two articles:
"Since 2006, employees have trapped, shot and poisoned more than a half million coyotes and other predators, along with 300-plus other species, from non-native starlings and pigeons to red-tailed hawks, prairie dogs, beaver and other native birds and mammals. In the process, they have also accidentally killed more than 50,000 non-target animals, from domestic dogs to golden eagles to black bears."
It shares strong quotes from environmentalists such as Michael Mares, president of the American Society of Mammalogists:
"People want to see bears. They want to see wolves. They want to see mountain lions. It's part of the natural heritage of the United States... We should be stewards of the system, not wiping out species and damaging ecosystems."
It lets us know that both Democrats and fiscally conservative Republicans are critical of the agency.
This article also discusses the superior effectiveness of non lethal predator control methods such as electric fencing and guard dogs.
And we learn about the terrific work of Camilla Fox and Project Coyote, aimed at teaching people how to coexist with coyotes ( http://projectcoyote.org ).
It's another excellent article in a great series. Again, please read it at http://tinyurl.com/6vsd7hw
share it, comment below it, thank Tom Knudson for it at tknudson@sacbee.com, and send a letter to the editor at http://tinyurl.com/7uhq8mo .
Yours and the animals',
Karen Dawn
(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. You may forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts only if you do so unedited -- leave DawnWatch in the title and include these parenthesized tag lines.
Please go to http://tinyurl.com/254ulkx to check out Karen Dawn's book, "Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way we Treat Animals," which when it was published in 2008 was chosen by the Washington Post as one of the "Best Books of The Year!")
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Date: Sun May 6 19:55:33 2012
