Wildlife Services

Malkie stood over the bodies a full minute without a word, then made a phone call with his back turned.

By two that afternoon, a white Federal pickup from Wildlife Services was on Irma's field road.

And a man named Pruitt, in a gray fleece, watched two younger men winch the bodies up a ramp in black plastic.

Wolf-dog hybrids, Pruitt said.

He thinks I hit my head.

Tell him you did, Cal said.

A week later Pruitt called from wildlife services.

He wanted to know whether the ranger had come across any more of those Wisconsin dogs.

And I spent...

The first portion of my career working for various state and federal agencies, including the Fish and Wildlife Service, most of my time was spent with the USDA Department of Animal Plant Health Inspection Service, Wildlife Services Division, which was kind of like wildlife conflict, but not like raccoons and chimneys, like landscape level, like Rabies work, bird strike mitigation, trying to keep geese out of jet engines, gulls, that sort of thing.

And so I don't work directly in that field anymore, but that's where I get a lot of my information from is the guys I went to school with, the guys I used to work with.

Um, so I lean on those guys a lot to get this information and, you know, and obviously the guys that are out in the field all the time, right? Like, um, I talked to a lot of guides and that, you know, they're out there every day.

For example, trap loan programs.

So landowners who are busy battling feral swine to try to protect their crop can participate in the trap loan program offered by NRCS partners and get access to resources and traps to help manage feral swine themselves, which is leveraging the success of our own Wildlife Services program in doing also direct operational support for and management of feral swine.

So they're very additive, if you will.

Louisiana Farm Bureau rice marketing specialist Mark Tull in Crowley says overall the rice market is looking good.

And they don't have a lot of funding coming locally to do this on their own.

So that's why they went out to Wildlife Services and to the state to try to get more funding.

We go to the, uh, state and we say, "We wanna join your funding scheme to get Wildlife Service on the reservation." Well, we can't.

The State of Montana will, will disallow us from joining that because then they'll be breaking federal law by us r- self-reporting who owns cattle on that land, or who owns land.

Wildlife Services operates in almost all the counties in Montana except for a couple, and it has to do with self-reporting your livestock, and then there's, like, a little fee that you pay.

Hmm.

And that fee then allows the producers in that county to call up and say, "Hey, I've got coyote problem," and Wildlife Services gets the helicopter in the air, and they go and try and tackle coyotes.

That's also helps pay for some of the range rider stuff in some of the areas.

"Reports demonstrated a pattern of behavioral escalation with the wolves showing less response to hazing and more acclimation to human presence," end quote.

And in late August and early September, the nine wolves were, quote, "trapped and humanely euthanized by the USDA's Wildlife Services division within the agency's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service." A spokesperson for the USDA said Wildlife Services program does not have a decision-making role in wolf decisions.

A USD- USDA spokesperson, excuse me, said in the statement, "We investigate and let the state know if it was probable or a confirmed threat.

If it wasn't, we also let them know that.