Mother Jones
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President Obama finally released his kill list, and it’s 46 pages long.
No, not the list of suspected terrorists targeted for extrajudicial killing—the Department of Agriculture’s tally of every animal it killed or euthanized over the last fiscal year. All 2,713,570 of them, from 319 different species.
The culling, conducted by the agency’s Wildlife Services division, is controversial. That’s because—much like the actual kill list—the USDA’s operations are shrouded in secrecy, prone to collateral damage, and symptomatic of an approach that often uses force as something other than a last resort. (A 2012 Sacramento Bee series explored the problems with the USDA’s methods in detail.) One of the problems with culling wildlife is that once you’ve gotten into the business of killing some animals to save other animals, it’s awfully hard to get out of it.
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The Government Killed 8 Eagles, 730 Cats, and a Million Starlings Last Year
