Safety concerns raised about federal planes gunning for coyotes

Scott Sonner

Saturday, June 17, 2000 | 8:49 a.m.

RENO, Nev. - Conservationists long have opposed government efforts to kill livestock predators, arguing the program is inhumane to wild animals and upsets the balance of nature.

Now, trying to gain the upper hand in an annual budget battle in Congress, they are emphasizing the threat to humans as well.

A coalition of environmental groups says the aerial gunning program the Agriculture Department employs to kill coyotes and other predators poses an increasing, unnecessary danger to the hunters in small planes and helicopters.

At least 19 aircraft flying the low-altitude missions have crashed over the past 12 years, resulting in seven fatalities and 26 injuries. All seven deaths have occurred since 1996.

In the most recent crash June 1, a pilot injured his back and a gunner broke his nose when their small plane crashed near Austin, Nev., according to the National Transportation Safety Board.

Defenders of Wildlife and the Predator Conservation Alliance are among chief critics of the USDA's Wildlife Services program. The program spends as much as $10 million a year killing nearly 100,000 predators, mostly coyotes but also foxes, bobcats, badgers, bears and mountain lions.

"This program represents nothing more than a posse of high-tech federal cowboys on an uncontrolled lynching spree - all at taxpayer expense," said Wendy Keefover-Ring of the environmental group Sinapu based in Boulder, Colo.

"The accelerating rate of crashes underscores the complete lack of concern the USDA has for its own employees," she said.

Agriculture Department officials defend the program's safety and question their antagonists' motives.

"Critics are promoting the crash as a human safety thing, but actually what they want to do is stop killing predators," said Bill Clay, the former director and current associate deputy administrator for Wildlife Services in Washington D.C.

"Even with these accidents, our accident rate is lower than civilian aviation," he said.

The congressional budget battle was scheduled to resume in the House this week, but disputes over Cuba in the same agriculture spending bill postponed debate until later in the month.

"It is time for the government giveaway of lethal predator killing to end," said Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., who has tried for two years to cut program funding.

DeFazio, Reps. Charles Bass, R-N.H., and Connie Morella, R-Md., are pushing an amendment to maintain the program's budget at near current levels but prohibit any spending on destruction of wild animals for the protection of livestock.

Money would remain intact for other aims, from removing geese and birds from airport flight paths to combatting rabies.

The effect would "bar the use of taxpayers hard-earned dollars to conduct inhumane and indiscriminate predator control programs for the benefit of a few private ranchers," the lawmakers said.

Farm and livestock groups estimate annual losses to wild predators in the tens of millions of dollars.

Republican Rep. Joe Skeen, a New Mexico rancher who chairs the House Appropriations subcommittee on agriculture, is among champions of the federal program. He said radical environmentalists are appealing to emotion and employing scare tactics "to achieve their anti-consumer and anti-business agenda.

"These individuals are attempting to put ranchers out of business," Skeen said.

In 1998, more than 88,000 predators were killed in the overall program, which includes the use of poisons and leg traps as well as hunting. That included nearly 78,000 coyotes - about 26,000 of those bagged by aerial hunters.

The National Agricultural Statistics Service estimates ranchers lose about $17 million worth of sheep annually to predators.

"Without that program, the sheep men are out of business," said John Carpenter, a Nevada state assemblyman and former sheep rancher in Elko, Nev.

The USDA doesn't keep national figures anymore, but in Nevada alone, coyotes took 1,659 lambs and 780 sheep in 1998, the Bureau of Land Management said.

They made up the bulk of the $338,270 in livestock losses resulting from predators in Nevada that year, the BLM said. The coyotes also took 253 calves and one cow while mountain lions were credited with 85 lambs, 165 sheep, 12 calves and three cows in Nevada.

"Critics would have you believe we are trying to exterminate coyotes," said Clay, a wildlife biologist who once was the assistant state director for the agency in Texas, where more coyotes are shot than any other state.

"But we are not threatening statewide populations. We really have no effect on overall predator populations. Hunters take far more," he said.

The new concerns about aircraft safety are being raised by Sinapu, the American Lands Alliance in Oregon, Animal Protection of New Mexico, Biodiveristy Associates of Wyoming, the Utah Environmental Congress and Wildlife Damage Review of Arizona.

"These crashes are happening more and more frequently," said Caroline Kennedy of Defenders of Wildlife who serves on an advisory committee monitoring the USDA's efforts.

"The program has been under wraps for years," said David Gaillard of the Predator Conservation Alliance in Bozeman, Mont., "so simply shedding light on it whether it's from the wildlife perspective or the safety risks should go a long ways toward getting more public scrutiny of this expenditure."

The small planes and helicopters fly only 30- to 40-feet off the ground like crop dusters.

"Everybody is aware it is a little more dangerous than office work," said Bob Beach, state director for USDA's Animal Services in Nevada.

"It is like fighting a fire or police work. But they choose to do it. They wear helmets and special gear. They have special training. And it's not a danger to the public. Nobody but the people flying have ever been hurt," he said.

The most recent fatalities occurred when two were killed March 27 in Del Rio, Texas. There were no deaths last year, but in 1998 one person was killed near Lebec, Calif., and another died near Spanish Fork, Utah.

From 1972 to 1996, there was only one fatality, Clay said.

In March 1998, following the fourth fatality in an 18-month stretch, the USDA ordered an independent investigation of the aerial gunning program.

The investigation team recommended $4 million in improvements. But Congress has only provided enough to do about $1.2 million of that work, Clay said.

So far, the agency has hired a flight instructor-safety officer, a new position, along with a maintenance officer.

The agency has been hunting from the air since the 1940s but tripled the use of aircraft in 1972 when the use of strychnine and arsenic was outlawed.

"The alternative everybody agreed upon was aerial hunting," Beach said. "It is more expensive but more selective. These same groups that pushed for the airplanes instead of the poisons now say they don't want either."

Program supporters say there's more to it than livestock protection. More and more Animal Services crews are contracting with state wildlife agencies to help protect everything from deer and antelope to the sage grouse and desert tortoise.

The Nevada crew that crashed June 1 was headed to protect a relocated antelope herd during prime fawning season, Beach said.

But Keefover-Ring said the antelope herd would be better off without the government's help.

"Man should stop trying to manipulate the system and let things go as they have been for a millennium."