Born Free USA’s Coexisting with Wildlife campaigns focus on two main areas: “nuisance” wildlife control, which is primarily an issue in urban and suburban areas, and lethal predator control, which occurs more in rural or agricultural regions. We are a recognized leader in the fight against both of these cruel and unnecessary practices.
“Nuisance” wildlife control – in which people hire wildlife control operators to trap and kill animals in an attempt to mitigate conflicts – is a lucrative, growing, and largely unregulated industry with little accountability or even basic humane animal care and treatment standards.
“Animal damage” or “pest” control trappers – also known as Wildlife Control Operators, or WCOs – number in the tens of thousands across the United States. As urban sprawl increases, so do interactions between humans and wild animals. This has led to greater demand for WCO services, despite the fact that many conflicts between people and wildlife can be mitigated simple changes in human behavior.
Individuals and businesses contract with WCOs to resolve conflicts between humans and wild animals. State and federal wildlife agencies have traditionally left resolution of such conflicts to individual initiative, and allow people to hire private wildlife control businesses that typically charge a fee for wildlife removal services. Unfortunately, the emphasis by the WCO industry is often on lethal removal of animals. Many WCOs are former or current fur trappers who do urban wildlife damage control trapping on the side.
Oversight of wildlife damage control businesses has lagged behind the industry’s growth. State agencies have been hesitant to regulate the business practices of an industry they see as largely commercial in nature, although the wildlife control operators affect hundreds of thousands of wild animals annually. As a result, many states have almost no regulations providing proper oversight or defining humane care and handling of wildlife impacted by this trade.
The killing of native carnivores, or “predators” to benefit private interests is big business, and one of the government’s most shameful secrets.
Each year, nearly 100,000 native carnivores are killed by the federal government on public and private lands across the United States. This slaughter is carried out by the Wildlife Services program (formerly Animal Damage Control), under the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Lethal control is conducted primarily to protect privately owned livestock grazing on public lands, and also used to ensure “game” stocks for hunters or protect corporate-owned timberlands from being damaged by bears.
The primary methods used to kill native carnivores are cruel and indiscriminate. They include poisons, steel-jaw leghold traps, strangulation neck snares, denning (the killing of coyote pups in their dens), hounding, shooting, and aerial gunning.
Born Free USA is committed to using legislation, litigation, and public education to stop this wasteful and unnecessary subsidy and the inhumane methods employed to kill native carnivores.
March 05, 2024
