Government cyanide devices kill more than wild predators
SEATTLE — Fourteen-year-old Canyon Mansfield was walking his dog on farmland near his Pocatello, Idaho, home last week when he saw what he thought was an old fire-sprinkler head sticking up from the ground.
He tapped it and the spring-loaded device launched a powdery cloud, leaving his face and hair coated with an orange substance. He used snow to quickly wipe most of it away. Then he saw Casey, his 3-year-old yellow Labrador retriever, motionless on the ground. He tried to wake the dog, but within minutes, Casey was dead.
The culprit was an M-44, a device filled with a cyanide compound that the U.S. Department of Agriculture routinely uses near farms and rangeland to kill livestock predators. Critics call it a “cyanide bomb.”
The device, invented in the 1960s and later deployed across the West, is a hollow metal tube 5 to 7 inches long loaded with 0.9 grams of sodium cyanide powder and coated with odorous bait. When an animal bites it, the powder flies into its mouth, contacts saliva and forms deadly hydrogen cyanide gas. The animal is rendered unconscious almost immediately and dies within five minutes.
Last year, 12,511 coyotes were intentionally killed that way, along with 688 foxes and 10 feral dogs, according to the Agriculture Department, which defends the device as necessary.
But the government also reported the unintentional deaths of an additional 180 foxes, 57 raccoons, 30 opossums, 22 feral dogs, 21 skunks, three birds and a black bear — as well as seven domestic pets or livestock.
Predator Defense, an activist group in Eugene, Ore., that has been pushing for a ban on the devices, believes that tally of unintentional deaths is incomplete because many are not reported.
The Sacramento Bee reported in 2012 that U.S. records show more than 3,400 animals were mistakenly killed by M-44s between 2006 and 2012.
The USDA’s Wildlife Services said in a statement that the latest incident was the first “unintentional lethal take of a dog” by an M-44 in Idaho since 2014. The devices killed two dogs in Wyoming this month and a wolf was unintentionally killed by one in Oregon in February.
“Wildlife Services understands the close bonds between people and their pets and sincerely regrets such losses,” the statement said.
Wildlife Services spokesman R. Andre Bell said that “the government posts signs and issues other warnings to alert pet owners when wildlife traps or other devices are being used in an area for wildlife damage management.”
Still, Bannock County Sheriff Lorin Nielsen said the cyanide bomb was news to him. “I’ve been a sheriff here for 20 years and worked for the office for 39 years,” he told reporters, “and I’ve never heard of leaving around a device that emits poisonous gas.”
The Mansfield family said there were no warning signs where their dog was killed, a plateau about a quarter-mile from their home. Wildlife Services says the remaining M-44s in the area have since been removed.
There are no reported human deaths as a result of the cyanide devices, though people have been treated for nausea, vision impairment and other symptoms.
As for Mansfield, he is being monitored for any effects of having ingested the toxic compound.
“This is horrific,” his mother, Theresa Mansfield, told the Idaho State Journal. “This is like terrorism in my backyard.”