Alan C. Posted March 13, 2013 Posted March 13, 2013 Animal torture, abuse called a 'regular practice' within federal wildlife agency It was a productive day for Gary Strader when he pulled his vehicle up to a remote site in northeast Nevada and found nine coyotes caught in leg hold snares set by the federal government. As was routine, Strader, a former trapper with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, signaled his dogs to attack. His supervisor, who had accompanied him that day, watched and laughed as the dogs circled the coyotes and ripped into them, Strader recalled. "That was regular practice," said Strader, who in 2009 left Wildlife Services, a little-known program within the USDA. The program is tasked with humanely killing wildlife seen as a threat to the environment and livestock, as well as protecting the public from wildlife hazards to commercial planes at airports. "You let your dogs fight with them. That was part of the job," said Strader. "There's not a person in Wildlife Services who is not aware of it." . . . In October, photos were discovered on the personal Facebook account of Wildlife Services employee Jamie P. Olson. The images showed dogs snarling at and biting into live coyotes trapped in steel foot-holds, as well as pictures of coyote carcasses. The photos were allegedly posted in an album titled "work," but it remains unclear whether they were taken while Olson was on the job or not. . . . "They wanted every single coyote killed," he said. Strader said he was often tasked with hunting for coyote dens while working for the government in remote areas of Utah and Nevada. He described how he would lower his stethoscope into the hole and listen for breathing or whining from the coyote puppies. Then he would drop a phosphorus bomb into the den and cover its opening with dirt. "The bombs burn so fast and so hot that it sucks all the oxygen out of the hole," he said. "They suffocate." "I had to kill hundreds of coyote pups and pregnant females," Strader continued. "If you found a coyote den, you just bombed it." Strader, as well as several others, including a management source within the USDA, also charged that Wildlife Services employees often do not abide by trap-check laws -- meaning animals can be left for days in traps where they die from starvation or the elements. . . . Rex Shaddox, a Texas law enforcement officer who worked for Wildlife Services in the 1980’s, said he left the agency – which at the time was called Animal Damage Control – after a particularly disturbing occurrence. Shaddox said he and other workers were ordered to report to a city dump in Uvalde, Texas, to witness agency officials experiment with M-44 sodium cyanide on dogs from a local pound that were supposed to be euthanized. “We were told to watch as they held the dogs down and shot cyanide into their mouths, one by one,” he said. “I went home and cried that day. And then I quit.”
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