MANAGING WILDLIFE
Contract up for vote; local rancher calls for non-lethal methods
Since 2014, Gowan Batist, co-owner and manager of Fortunate Farm in Caspar and a fifth-generation sheep rancher, has utilized non-lethal methods to protect the farm’s 40 sheep grazed regularly on approximately 120 acres of land including their own, their neighbors and Jughandle State Park.
“With a large coyote population, we have had, over the years, several losses to coyotes. We didn’t want to shoot them so we went from hardscape fencing to electric mesh; we haven’t had a loss since then,” she says.
The farm’s first concern is to maintain a healthy habitat for wildlife; healthy lions need healthy deer. Identifying deer trails, they leave them intact and keep their sheep inside electric fencing during the prime hunting hours of dawn and dusk, dramatically decreasing mountain lion sightings.
Batist has five Great Pyrenees guardian dogs, and when she grazes her sheep at night she takes an extra tall fence she can easily carry in one hand and a charger and sets up a small night shelter, a boma, for her dogs and the sheep.
“I’ve never had a lion or bear attack in a night pen in six years,” she says.
In an emergency response—a predator attacking a neighbor’s animals, a bear in the trash—she hazes: puts on a tape of ’80s mu
sic or talk radio or sets up flashing, solar-powered motion lights to keep an animal away.
Regularly killing predators ignores the science, she says, and is counterproductive.
Mountain lions are territorial; killing one creates a vacuum and months later, more lions will vie for the new territory. Coyotes engage in responsive breeding; if a pack’s numbers are reduced, the survivors’ nutrition improves with easier access to food and the breeding female has a larger, healthier litter with more pups surviving.
“Livestock is a food of desperation for predators; the more you harass them and make life difficult for them, the more likely they are going to come into conflict with humans; it’s not their first choice, ever,” she says.
With a large population of wild animals including mountain lions, bears, coyotes, hawks and ravens, the farm has effectively kept their flock safe without having to use the services of the United States Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services, an agency, which according to National Geographic’s Special Investigations Unit report written in 2016, “is unaccountable and secretive, appearing not to be operating with any kind of science-based system to justify their lethal control against wildlife.”
According to an article published in the Revelator in 2019, “In 2018, Wildlife Services slaughtered 1.5 million wild creatures and 1.1 million invasive animals, following 2.3 million in 2017, 2.7 million in 2016 and tens of millions in the years prior.”
In 2014, a coalition of wildlife advocacy groups sued Mendocino County for failing to study the environmental impact of their contract with Wildlife Services. They subsequently began an Environmental Impact Report, and in 2016 the board suspended the contract with Wildlife Services.
In June 2019, Mendocino County released the EIR with an analysis of nonlethal program alternatives showing that there are many cost-effective, non-lethal methods for addressing human/wildlife conflicts.
Subsequently, the county Board of Supervisors recommended renewing the contract and expanding it to include cervical neck wringing, cervical dislocation and the use of CO2, all of which can cause extreme pain and suffering.
“We have been trying to convince them otherwise ever since,” says Carol Misseldine, senior director of the Humane Society of the United States and a steering committee member of Mendocino Non-lethal Wildlife Alliance, a group that has been working in collaboration with Project Coyote to urge the Board to permanently terminate their $170,000 contract with WS and use the money for education and implementation of non-lethal techniques.
In December 2019, Doris Duncan, executive director of Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue, made a presentation to the Board offering assistance to help the county establish non-lethal programs including private home pest abatement.
The Board voted to move forward with its contract with WS.
In 2013, Sonoma County ended its contract with WS following the lead of Marin County that did so in 2000 due to a controversy over the use of the deadly poison, Compound 1080. As a pilot project, WS implemented the use of a livestock protection collar placed on a sacrificial lamb or goat with two bladders of Compound 1080 attached, enough poison to kill up to nine adult humans.
“There was a huge public outcry over this and over other methods of killing wildlife,” says Camilla Fox, executive director and founder of Project Coyote.
Marin ranchers and wildlife advocates came together and adopted the Marin Livestock & Wildlife Protection Program, a cost sharing educational program to implement non-lethal methods such as electric fencing, the use of guard dogs and llamas, night corrals, fox lights, scare tactics and fladry, a line of rope mounted along a fence line with hanging strips of red nylon flags that frighten predators,
“Losses have decreased significantly,” says Fox. “There has been a huge shift nationally towards nonlethal methods and a recognition by WS that their traditional lethal and indiscriminate approach is not supported by the public or current science.”
According to a study published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment in 2016 that drew from systematically evaluated evidence for interventions against carnivore predators on livestock in North America and European farms, “Non-lethal methods were more effective than lethal methods in preventing carnivore predation on livestock generally; at least two lethal methods (government culling or regulated public hunting) were followed by increases in predation on livestock.”
The study concluded with the recommendation that “policy makers suspend predator control efforts that lack evidence for functional effectiveness and that scientists focus on stringent standards of evidence in tests of predator control.”
Some methods of killing employed by WS since 1915 include: shooting eagles from helicopters, dropping strychnine from planes, steel traps, wire snares, body-gripping traps, strangulation neck snares, leg snares (illegal in 80 countries), M-44s (mini-cyanide bombs that explode in an unsuspecting animal’s mouth, causing an excruciating death) and lacing dead carcasses with Compound 1080.
Between 1997 and 2017, WS trappers killed 181 mountain lions, 261 black bears, 235 gray foxes, 112 bobcats and 4,119 coyotes in Mendocino County, alone.
The contract with WS has also led to the death of many domestic dogs.
“So many times, it’s clearly a domestic dog, not a wild predator, that does the killing,” says Batist. “We have had three such massacres over the years. An electric fence will keep a dog out.”
According to a Willits
Superior Court transcript of July 2009, when Mendocino trapper Chris Brannon was questioned about the amount of free roaming dogs he has killed over the last 10 years, his answer was, “probably close to 400.”
“Based on a conversation I had this week, his dog killing apparently continues unabated. That’s what the county has been paying for with tax dollars,” says Misseldine.
Fox explains that when you take away a subsidy and service that ranchers and county governments have become dependent on for decades, culture, values, norms and behaviors come into play.
“It becomes very threatening to make that kind of shift,” she says.
With local and federal subsidies for the use of lethal tools provided, there is little incentive to adopt non-lethal methods.
“We subsidize the traps, the M44 cyanide devices, the snares; it’s a public subsidy for a private benefit and we continue to pay.
“We do not subsidize education for non-lethal methods, the use of electric fencing, guard dogs. Cost sharing on non-lethal techniques is effective; the methods are preventive in nature; a fence is in place; killing has to be done over and over again,” says Misseldine.
Batist says, “I pay out of pocket for ethical management while others who fail to do so create a problem and use tax dollars to provide a temporary Bandaid—killing a predator. They haven’t changed the conditions that created the problem; it’s going to come back again. How does that make sense?”
On Tuesday, the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors will be voting on its $170,000 contract with Wildlife Services. To submit a comment and attend the virtual meeting, go to: https://www.mendocinocounty.org/government/ board-of-supervisors/ agendas-and-minutes prior to Tuesday morning or call or email board members directly.