Raiding Party

During the final frenzied days of the 1985 session of Congress, Western ranching interests staged a sneak midnight rustling raid on the Interior Department and rode off into the dark with the 45-year-old predator-control program. This was the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service program that was used, when the ranchers could, to kill coyotes and other various declared menaces to the livestock industry. They packed up the $20-million annual program and took it over to the friendlier ranges of the U.S. Agriculture Department.

The livestock people were quite unhappy with the Fish and Wildlife Service in recent years because it had gone soft on conservation and made it difficult to kill critters that allegedly had been devastating the sheep flocks. The service had in fact taken the side of the animals after blatant poisoning with Compound 1080 and other assorted killers had resulted in death for a variety of wildlife never intended for execution. Scores of bald eagles, for instance.

The use of 1080, sodium cyanide and strychnine in the “control” of coyotes was banned or severely restricted by Richard M. Nixon as President. Only in the past year has the Fish and Wildlife Service under the Reagan Administration considered using 1080 again, albeit in extremely limited and controlled situations. Even that was not good enough for the stockmen. Sens. James A. McClure and Steven D. Symms, both Idaho Republicans, slipped the predator-control transfer language into three separate bills last month.

It was a master stroke of parliamentary shotgun tactics aided and abetted by the White House Office of Management and Budget and Agriculture Secretary John R. Block. There were no hearings, of course, and apparently no one at the Interior Department was consulted. Conservationists managed to get it out of the farm bill, but the amendment slipped through in the continuing spending resolution. And they call the coyote a wily fellow.

The transfer to Agriculture should be complete in about three months. By a stroke of irony, the control program will become part of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

Wildlife-protection groups have tried to kill the program for years. They think the midnight raid was so blatant that it might generate support for their cause. We hope so. In the meantime, a word to coyotes and other critters: Caution, the Agriculture Department may be harmful to your health.