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For Immediate Release
Plan to Kill Predators of Sage Grouse Throughout Southern Idaho Put on Hold
BOISE, Idaho -- Faced with a lawsuit by four conservation organizations, the U.S. Department of Agriculture agreed to postpone a plan to kill foxes, badgers, coyotes, ravens and other species of wildlife in southern Idaho for one year. On April 17, the Committee for Idaho’s High Desert, Defenders of Wildlife, Idaho Conservation League and the Western Watersheds Project filed suit in the United States District Court for the District of Idaho, challenging a federal program that aims to kill predators throughout much of southern Idaho.
The conservation groups specifically sought a restraining order preventing the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services from implementing the newest part of their program - the elimination of animals thought to prey on sage grouse from large tracts of southern Idaho - until the judge ruled on their challenges to it. Yesterday, government lawyers agreed to voluntarily postpone their sage grouse predator elimination program until at least 2003.
"Faced with a strong legal challenge to their new sage grouse predator killing program, which suffers from weak environmental analysis and inconsistency with federal land management objectives, the Department of Agriculture wisely decided to withdraw this program for the time being," said Todd Tucci, Staff Attorney with the Land and Water Fund of the Rockies in Boise, Idaho. "This will allow our challenges to Wildlife Services’ overall predator killing operations in southern Idaho to be heard without our having to worry that local populations of predators are being wiped out in the meantime."
Wildlife Services will continue ongoing efforts targeting livestock predators across 30 million acres of southern Idaho, a program the conservation groups also challenge but have not asked to be halted during the lawsuit. Under this agreement, however, Wildlife Services will postpone their plan to poison, gas, snare, trap, shoot, and otherwise kill 75% or more of sage grouse predators in huge tracts of southern Idaho.
"We had no choice but to file this lawsuit to stop this poorly thought out and totally unjustified killing of thousands of animals across a huge swath of Southern Idaho," stated Justin Hayes of the Idaho Conservation League. "Trying to restore declining sage grouse populations by killing thousands of foxes, badgers and coyotes and ravens really misses the point -- sage grouse are in decline because of decades of poor land management."
"Wiping out predators under the guise of studying the sage grouse is a bad idea to begin with," said Mike Leahy, Natural Resources Counsel for Defenders of Wildlife. "This agreement gives us an opportunity to address the problems with this program in court before it is implemented and thousands upon thousands of animals are pointlessly killed."
"Our only concern now with the sage grouse predator killing program is that the State of Idaho will pick up the ball and try to kill all these badgers, foxes, ravens, coyotes, and more on their own," commented Katie Fite, Director of the Committee for Idaho’s High Desert. "We hope the agencies involved will not try to get around our lawsuit by simply having the state implement this program."
This marks the second year in a row this wildlife killing plan has been stopped through legal challenges. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and U.S. Forest Service, which participated in the environmental analysis of these programs and will authorize and oversee their implementation on public lands, are also defendants in this lawsuit.
