When Andrew Bardwell drives around the ranch he manages near Augusta, Montana, he keeps a rifle in the back seat of his pickup truck. Grizzly bears have started venturing into the property's thousands of acres more than in previous years, he says, threatening the herds of cattle that graze there.
But when he worries that a grizzly might have injured a cow, Bardwell doesn’t grab the gun and kill the bear himself. He reaches for his phone to ask for help from a man he refers to as his “government trapper,” who works for a U.S. Department of Agriculture program called Wildlife Services.
The USDA’s Wildlife Services program is a holdover from the 1930s, when Congress gave the federal government broad authority to kill wildlife at the request of private landowners. In that era, government-sponsored extermination programs for native wild animals, like wolves and grizzly bears, were common.
After the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, federal agencies were required to change course and start helping some of those wild animal populations recover. But today, Wildlife Services employees still kill hundreds of thousands of noninvasive animals a year, data from the agency shows. Even species considered threatened under the Endangered Species Act, like grizzly bears, are not exempt. So long as livestock or human life are threatened, federal rules allow Wildlife Services to kill those animals, too.
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Conservationist groups have long protested the program, saying the government is killing animals at the request of private livestock owners without first presenting enough evidence to show that the management methods aren’t harming the environment, as federal law requires.
“One of the biggest issues that comes up with Wildlife Services, and where we've beaten them in court multiple times in multiple states, is the controversy of the science,” said Lizzy Pennock, an attorney for the nonprofit WildEarth Guardians. “We need to get out of the framework of the 1800s and 1900s where it's like, kill any carnivores that might be inconvenient.”
Wildlife Services officials say that with the exception of invasive species, employees only kill wild animals that attack livestock or cause damage. But data obtained by NPR indicates the program often kills native wildlife that didn’t kill or injure livestock.
Wildlife Services killed wildlife that didn't kill livestock
NPR obtained and digitized thousands of Wildlife Services work orders from Montana, created from 2019 through 2022, and built a database that shows that the program’s employees frequently kill native wild animals without evidence of livestock loss. The documents reveal that during those three years, employees killed approximately 11,000 wild animals on Montana properties where no wildlife was recorded as responsible for killing or injuring any livestock. In those cases, only a "threat" from those wild animals was logged in the records.
The agency frequently used helicopters and planes to shoot large numbers of wild animals at a time, the documents show, a method activists consider cruel and scientists say can lead to local eradications.
Although some livestock organizations financially support part of Wildlife Services' work, individual livestock owners do not pay a fee when federal employees come to their properties. Employees are allowed to kill wild animals on those private areas as well as on public land, like state forests and parks.
Carter Niemeyer worked for Wildlife Services for 26 years as a trapper and as a supervisor of other federal employees in Montana. He said that killing wild animals that weren’t known to have caused problems with livestock was common when he worked for Wildlife Services.
“There was no effort or attempt made to get the specific animal,” Niemeyer said. “Essentially you're shooting a wolf or a coyote because it might kill a sheep or a calf next spring.”
By far, most of the thousands of animals Wildlife Services killed were coyotes, a species native to Montana. At one location, Wildlife Services killed 318 coyotes — the most killed in any single area in Montana over those three years, according to the records. The documents did not contain any reports of coyotes killing livestock at that location over the same period of time.
The records also indicate that a few livestock producers may have had an outsized impact on some predator species. Montana is home to approximately 1,100 gray wolves. Over a span of three years, Wildlife Services killed 71 wolves at just five locations. During the same time, wolves were documented to have harmed 61 cattle and sheep in those areas. Since there were roughly 2.5 million cattle and sheep in Montana, this indicates that 6% of the state's wolf population was killed for predation on just 0.002% of Montana’s livestock.
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Killing a large number of predators in the same place can eradicate them from an area, said Robert Crabtree, a canine ecologist and founder of the Yellowstone Ecological Research Center, a nonprofit that advocates for evidence-based conservation efforts in Montana.
“The ecosystem is vulnerable because it's easy for humans to take them out,” Crabtree said. “It amounts to local extirpation...local extinction.”
Besides using rifles shot from helicopters and planes to kill wild animals, Wildlife Services employees also deployed traps, snares, canisters of cyanide planted in the ground and guns shot from the ground. But shooting from helicopters was the most common method in Montana, records show, and it was efficient. On average, every time Wildlife Services employees flew in a helicopter and killed coyotes, they shot six of the animals. Sometimes, however, the results were more drastic. At one location, federal employees shot and killed 61 coyotes in under four hours while flying in a helicopter, the documents reveal.
“That’s a bloodbath,” said Collette Adkins, a lawyer who leads the Carnivore Conservation program at the Center for Biological Diversity. “That just seems like yahoos with rifles killing everything they see that moves. It’s horrible to imagine the amount of suffering involved there.”
Invasive species are the biggest target, Wildlife Services says
Wildlife Services refused multiple requests from NPR to interview employees for this story. Instead, a representative emailed NPR a statement that underscored that resolving conflict between wildlife and livestock is not the program’s only job today.
“In 2023, Wildlife Services and its cooperators protected more than 342 threatened or endangered wildlife and plant species from the impacts of disease, invasive species, and predators,” the statement read.
When Wildlife Services does respond to conflicts with wildlife, the statement highlighted, it mostly does so without killing animals. When animals are killed, most of them are not native species, like wolves, but invasive ones, like feral hogs and European starlings.
“Of all wildlife encountered in FY 2023, Wildlife Services lethally removed 5.14%, or approximately 1.45 million, from areas where damage was occurring. Invasive species accounted for 74.2% (1,079,279) of the wildlife lethally removed,” a representative wrote.
If the program does kill native wild animals, “Wildlife Services uses wildlife damage management strategies that are biologically sound and environmentally safe and strives to reduce damage caused by wildlife without impacting sustainable wildlife populations,” the statement outlined.
Some scientists NPR spoke with see it differently.
“It’s been scientific consensus since 1999 that indiscriminate killing is damaging,” said Adrian Treves, a professor of environmental studies and director of the Carnivore Coexistence Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Scientists have since shown that nonlethal methods of preventing conflict with wild animals, like setting up electric fencing and using guard dogs, can be effective, Treves said.
But over the past five years, Congress allocated less than 2% of Wildlife Services' wildlife management budget for its nonlethal livestock protection initiatives. Some ranchers NPR talked to in Montana, like Andrew Bardwell, said they tried nonlethal methods and they didn’t work for them. Others confirmed the initiatives were not a major focus for Wildlife Services.
“The culture isn't there; the resources aren't there,” said Hilary Zaranek, who is part of a multigenerational ranching family that owns three properties across southwestern Montana. “There was nothing to it that held water when it came to the realities on the ground.”
Treves added that Wildlife Services keeps important details about their operations private, which obstructs scientists like him from evaluating the program’s effectiveness.
The program does publish some data online in annual reports.
An NPR analysis of those reports shows that Wildlife Services killed more than 370,000 noninvasive animals across the country in the 2023 fiscal year. And over the past nine years, Wildlife Services killed 30 threatened grizzly bears and at least 1,500 gray wolves in states where they were otherwise supposed to receive protection under the Endangered Species Act, like in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
But the reports don’t reveal the names of the livestock owners that use Wildlife Services. That’s to protect the privacy of people in the agriculture industry, the agency has said. Wildlife Services also doesn’t disclose in those reports how many wild animals were killed by federal employees on public land.
Conservationists NPR spoke to said they oppose federal employees killing wild animals in wild places.
“If wildlife has a hard time anywhere, it shouldn't be in a wilderness area. That should be where they can be OK,” said Pennock, the attorney for WildEarth Guardians.
Conservationists — and some ranchers — say it's time for change
In June, WildEarth Guardians petitioned the Bureau of Land Management to write new rules that could restrict Wildlife Services from killing wild animals on public lands.
“That's not OK, both in the eyes of the American public and in science,” said Pennock. “That's just not how we move forward as a nation that has this incredible wildlife heritage that we want to preserve for future generations.”
Judges in Idaho and California recently required Wildlife Services to present evidence that demonstrated its management methods were effective before the program could continue killing coyotes and cougars in those states.
Even some ranchers interviewed by NPR say they believe it’s time for Wildlife Services to change.
Over the decades that Zaranek has been ranching in Montana, she’s seen a few Wildlife Services employees work responsibly, she said. But others take "extreme liberties" to kill wildlife.
“Wildlife Services has very much taken the approach of being buddy-buddy with the ranching community, which means do what the ranching community wants, which is kill stuff,” said Zaranek, as she walked off the dirt path to follow a small herd of cattle across a pasture.
Although she makes her living from livestock, Zaranek believes it’s time for Wildlife Services to be held more accountable for how the program kills wild animals that belong to the public.
“Until you address that, the only thing you're ever going to be able to do is blame the predator and kill them,” Zaranek said. “I want the status quo to change so much.”
To complete the data analysis, NPR referenced and compiled information from three datasets:
1. U.S. Department of Agriculture "Program Data Reports" that are publicly available here.
2. An excel spreadsheet of “conflict and take” reports, for Montana, from June 2019 - June 2022. This document was obtained via FOIA.
3. Scanned work tasks for Montana from June 2019- June 2022, acquired via FOIA.
The full data analysis is available here.
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