FOCUS: Ryan Devereaux | Secretive Federal Agency's Days of Killing Pets With Poison Bombs May Finally Be Ending

 

 

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FOCUS: Ryan Devereaux | Secretive Federal Agency's Days of Killing Pets With Poison Bombs May Finally Be Ending
Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept
Devereaux writes: "Banning the cyanide bombs - planted throughout the American West in service of the livestock industry - has been the Mansfield family's mission."   

Lethal Control

A film examining the legacy of predator control practices by the Federal Government including the the continued use of lethal sodium cyanide devices.

Banning the cyanide bombs — planted throughout the American West in service of the livestock industry — has been the Mansfield family’s mission.

Patches of snow dotted the ground when Canyon Mansfield stepped outside on March 16, 2017. The hill behind the 14-year-old’s home in Pocatello, Idaho, was not particularly large. At the summit, Mansfield would only be 300 yards from his house, and yet, he treasured the visits.

With its sweeping mountain view, the hill was Canyon’s refuge. His 3-year-old yellow lab, Kasey, was his constant companion there.

The two set off as usual that afternoon. Kasey was thrashing one of his toys when Canyon spotted a sprinkler-like object protruding from the ground. He ran a finger along the device. Suddenly, he heard a pop, and an orange cloud burst forth. Canyon lunged back as the front of his body was doused in chemicals. The burning began immediately.

As Canyon grasped for snow to irrigate his eyes, he heard Kasey grunting near the device. He called to him, but he didn’t come. He stopped what he was doing and ran to him. Dropping to his knees, Canyon watched as Kasey writhed in spasms. Frothing at the mouth, the dog’s eyes turned glossy. The boy didn’t want to leave, but he knew he needed help. He sprinted down the hill for his mother.

Canyon’s father, Mark Mansfield, a family doctor, was at work when the boy called for help. He raced home as fast as he could. Pulling into the property, Mansfield rushed to Kasey and positioned himself above the dog, prepared to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Canyon stopped him. It’s poison, Canyon said.

Kasey was dead, and Canyon’s head was pounding like never before. Toggling between his training as a physician and his horror as a parent, Mansfield struggled to sort out his son’s symptoms from the trauma he’d just experienced. He told Canyon to get into the shower immediately.

While his son cleaned up, Mansfield called the Bannock County Sheriff’s Office. A bomb and hazmat team were dispatched. Longtime Sheriff Lorin Nielsen was at a loss, trying to answer what felt like an absurd question: Who would plant a bomb in Pocatello?

Cyanide Bombs

Across the American West lies an untold number of potent chemical weapons, tucked away and waiting to go off. There could be one on your favorite hiking trail, or on the loop where you walk your dog, or in the woods where your kids play. Packed with sodium cyanide, these spring-loaded devices blast clouds of poison gas five feet into the air. Once inhaled, the lethal toxins mount a multidirectional attack on your cardiovascular, pulmonary, and central nervous system. Death can come in a matter of minutes.

The weapons, known as M-44s, are placed by an under-the-radar federal agency called Wildlife Services. The agency was created to protect the livestock industry’s bottom line by killing off the competition: namely, wild predators. The so-called cyanide bombs do kill predators, but they can also kill anyone else unlucky enough to stumble upon them. And they have a hair trigger.

Wildlife Services, which falls under the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is well known in conservationist circles. Most people, however, have never heard of it. For the uninitiated, a glimpse into the taxpayer-funded killing machine can be jarring.

In the past eight years, Wildlife Services killed nearly 21 million animals as part of its mission to oversee “the eradication and control” of species “injurious” to human endeavors, particularly ranching. While agents’ preferred means of killing is by air, with gunmen in helicopters and planes, M-44s were used to intentionally kill more than 88,000 animals from 2014 through 2022 — the period for which the agency has data available online. The total amounts to roughly 30 poisonings a day for much of the past decade.

M-44s are part of “a broad strategy that also uses non-lethal methods, and that is informed by ongoing wildlife biology research,” Wildlife Services spokesperson Ed Curlett said in an emailed statement to The Intercept. Curlett added that 98 percent of the agency’s poison devices are placed on private lands and “only when the private, municipal, state, or federal landowner or manager requests assistance and enters a written cooperative agreement.”

According to Wildlife Service’s data, an additional 2,200 animals were killed unintentionally over the 2014 through 2022 period, including endangered species, domestic livestock, and pets like the Mansfields’ dog.

After losing Kasey, the Mansfields went on the offensive, suing Wildlife Services and traveling to Washington to spearhead legislation banning the use of M-44s. The hill behind the family’s home is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, an agency of the Department of the Interior. Idaho, at the time of Canyon’s poisoning, had banned M-44s on public land, but they remained legal on private land and on public lands throughout much of the rest of the country.

Surely, thought Mark Mansfield, the near-death of his child would motivate lawmakers to stop government agents from planting poison bombs everywhere. He was wrong.

The 2019 introduction of “Canyon’s Law” — a bill prohibiting M-44s on public land nationwide — went nowhere. “I don’t care if you’re red, blue, purple. I don’t care if you’re rural or urban. It just seems like a no-brainer,” Mansfield told me. “But somehow this still goes on. I’m shocked. I thought it would be a done deal within months. Call me naïve.”

Four years after it was written, Canyon’s Law was reintroduced last month by Reps. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., and Steve Cohen, D-Tenn. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., introduced companion legislation in the Senate.

After years of setbacks, advocates in the Mansfields’ corner believe the tide may finally be turning against M-44s — thanks to the emergence of an unexpected but critical ally. During a congressional hearing on Canyon’s Law last summer, the Department of the Interior submitted a statement outlining its M-44s position. “The Department is concerned that these devices pose a risk of injury or death to unintended targets, including humans, pets, and threatened and endangered species,” the statement said. The Department had “no technical objections” with the proposed bill “and would work to implement the legislation, if enacted.”

Brooks Fahy, the executive director of Predator Defense, a national wildlife advocacy group, was shocked. While the Department of Agriculture manages 193 million acres of public land in the U.S., the Department of Interior manages 245 million. The scale alone made the statement highly significant. That the largest land management agency in the country would take a critical position on the issue was unprecedented. “This is remarkable,” Fahy told me. “They weren’t prompted. We didn’t have a clue that they even knew this hearing was going on.”

Sensing an opportunity, Predator Defense and the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity rallied organizations focused on wildlife preservation in the West. With more than 70 allied groups joining them, the groups filed a formal petition last month, on the heels of the reintroduction of Canyon’s Law, calling on the Department of Interior to ban the use of M-44s on its lands.

Success won’t come easy though. Behind the M-44 lies a well-connected industry that’s influenced the government’s predator killing program for generations, one that’s unlikely to relinquish its bombs without a fight.

Years of Hell

Mark Mansfield had to figure out two things after his son was poisoned: What was the toxin, and who was responsible?

Luckily, one of the sheriff’s deputies had worked as a federal trapper. He suggested contacting Wildlife Services. Nielsen, the sheriff, had never heard of the agency and had no idea that it was mining his county with spring-loaded poison sprayers.

Mansfield, too, was puzzled. He was even more taken aback when Todd Sullivan, the Wildlife Services supervisor who planted the device, showed up at his house.

“He killed my dog and he had nearly killed my child,” Mansfield said. “At that point in time, there was a lot of stress. It was very difficult for me not to, you know — whatever.”

The family was kept inside while Sullivan escorted law enforcement up the hill. Unbeknownst to the sheriff’s department, Wildlife Services had planted 18 cyanide bombs throughout Bannock County. Sullivan had placed the M-44 that poisoned Canyon and killed Kasey in plain view of the Mansfields’ backyard, a second device 60 feet from the first, and two more elsewhere in the neighborhood.

The public land behind the Mansfields’ home abutted private property, where a local sheep producer had leased an allotment to raise his stock. In an interview with a Bannock County detective, Sullivan said he meant to plant his bombs on private land, in accordance with Idaho law, and while he had the means to differentiate between jurisdictions, he didn’t. The Wildlife Services supervisor also admitted that there had been no livestock predation cases in the area. He was simply trying to “get a jump on the season” by poisoning any coyotes that might pass through.

In his thousands of hours in the emergency room, Mark Mansfield had never dealt with a sodium cyanide poisoning. He called specialists around the country to gather as much information as he could. It did not look good. As one toxicologist explained in a 2019 interview, sodium cyanide’s effects on the human body are similar to those of sarin gas, an internationally banned chemical weapon used in war zones.

Canyon’s pounding headache worsened with admission to the ER. He experienced nausea and vomiting on a near-daily basis. His hands and feet went numb. The worst of it lasted more than a month, but the long-term effects, from migraines to mood changes, lingered for years.

“Finally, about 2020, he was back to his baseline,” Mansfield said. “It was three years of hell for his parents and more so for him.”

A Family Fights Back

In the days after Canyon was poisoned, his father received an unsolicited call from Fahy, the Predator Defense executive director. “A lot of people helped us,” Mansfield said. “But he was the one who explained it to us.”

Fahy’s first encounters with Wildlife Services began in the 1970s, when the agency was still known as Animal Damage Control. Working as an investigator for the Humane Society in Oregon, he encountered the mummified remains of snared coyotes and orphaned pups at dens in rural areas throughout the state. He started Predator Defense a decade later as an animal hospital before transitioning into advocacy.

Fahy had witnessed the physical damage Wildlife Services’ traps can do but found the agency’s arsenal of poisons more unsettling. “You can’t remove it,” he said. “That poison is in their system and watching an animal die slowly, whether it be from sodium cyanide or strychnine or compound 1080, is extraordinarily disturbing.”

Fahy can rattle off cases going back years. There was the Wildlife Services trapper who scattered M-44s around a Christmas tree farm. And the one who hanged coyote carcasses on a family’s fence after killing their dog. And then there was Dennis Slaugh.

A heavy equipment operator from Vernal, Utah, Slaugh had little in the way of money but took great pride in the work he did for the county. That ended following his brush with an M-44 in 2003. Plagued with daily vomiting, diminished breathing, and soaring blood pressure, the 61-year-old was forced to quit his job. Wildlife Services denied any fault in the matter and claimed that Slaugh exceeded the statute of limitations to file a claim of wrongdoing. Unable to work, the medical bills piled up as Slaugh’s health deteriorated.

“They took my life away,” Slaugh said in a 2020 documentary. “And now I can’t hardly change a light bulb. It’s all from this cyanide. It just took everything away from me.”

As the years went by, Fahy collected case after case of M-44s killing pets and harming people across the West. Never once, he said, did he encounter an incident in which Wildlife Services, per the M-44 use restrictions required by the Environmental Protection Agency, contacted local medical providers to inform them of devices planted in their area. Signage was another problem. A trapper may place a single sign at one entrance on a large plot with several entry points, or they might not place one at all. Both were common in the investigations Fahy undertook.

Fahy had never seen a case quite like the Mansfields’ where a child came so close to death. He shared everything he knew with the family. In June 2018, the Mansfields filed suit against Wildlife Services, accusing Sullivan of failing to follow a slew of regulations meant to govern the placement of M-44s, including the placement of warning signs.

The Justice Department initially responded by blaming Canyon and his parents for what happened, before admitting Wildlife Services’ negligence and agreeing to pay the Mansfields $38,500 to settle the case in 2020.

Thick as Pudding

Despite the national coverage the Mansfield case received, Wildlife Services has clung to M-44s as “an effective and environmentally sound wildlife damage management tool.”

In the wake of Canyon’s poisoning, the agency published a brochure justifying the devices’ use. “Our use of M 44 devices strictly follows EPA label instructions, directions, and use-restrictions; applicable Federal, State, and local laws and regulations; and agency and program directives and policies,” it said. “Our personnel do not use M-44s on any property unless the land’s owner or manager requests and agrees to our assistance. We must have a valid written cooperative agreement, agreement for control, Memoranda of Agreement, or other applicable document signed by the landowner or authorized representative to place any M-44s.”

After years of bad press, Wildlife Services is acutely aware of its reputation as the “hired gun of the livestock industry.” The source of the oft-repeated description is Carter Niemeyer, formerly one of the agency’s most productive trappers and today one of its sharpest critics.

Niemeyer is the author of “Wolfer,” an account of his quarter century as a Wildlife Services supervisor in Montana from 1975 to 2000. The veteran trapper believes the agency has important elements to its portfolio, and that many of its East Coast operations are quite professional. But in the West, he argues, existential ties to the livestock industry still reign. Unwillingness to relinquish M-44, he says, is an artifact of that bond.

“The very existence of Wildlife Services is dependent upon the livestock industry and all of the cooperators,” Niemeyer told me. “Their lobbying power makes or breaks Wildlife Services. If the cattlemen and sheep men lost their faith in Wildlife Services and didn’t do this insistent, persistent, powerful lobbying that they do, Wildlife Services would be dead in the water and probably disappeared.”

One of the starkest examples of that power came in 1998, when then-Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., introduced a bill to cut Wildlife Services’ budget from $50 to $10 million by taking an axe to its predator killing program. DeFazio was a longtime critic of the program, often telling reporters that Wildlife Services was more secretive than the intelligence agencies he worked with on the House Homeland Security Committee. His bill passed, but in a highly unusual turn of events, it was subjected to revote less than 24 hours later. The American Farm Bureau was in a fury. Overnight, agriculture lobbyists convinced 38 members of Congress to change their minds. The proposal died the following day.

“They were against the ropes, and it was all over,” Niemeyer said. “And in the last minute of the last hour of the last second, the livestock industry lobbyists somehow got to enough congressmen to turn the whole thing around and get that budget back when we’d pretty much heard that it was a done deal.”

Niemeyer never used M-44s and didn’t like them. The trappers who worked for him mostly felt the same. They were dangerous, required lots of paperwork, and trappers had plenty of other tools to do their jobs. “I was not disappointed if a guy didn’t want to use him,” Niemeyer said. “I didn’t blame him. I wouldn’t have either if I was in their shoes.”

There was one problem.

“My walking orders as a supervisor was to make sure the men used them,” Niemeyer said. “There was a real push from higher levels of the livestock industry to push for their registration and push for their use. Some of the sheep men, some of the notorious ones I remember, they figured that if you got snares, put ’em out. You got traps. Put ’em out. And for God’s sake, if there’s M-44s and you got a bunch sitting there in your cabinet, put ’em out.”

In its 2019 brochure on M-44s, Wildlife Services pointed to tens of millions of dollars lost every year by ranchers due to livestock killed by predators. Those numbers, Niemeyer pointed out, reflect survey data, self-reported by ranchers. They are not independently verified.

Though Niemeyer’s Wildlife Services tenure ended more than 20 years ago, the livestock industry’s continued support for M-44s is evident today on the webpage of the American Sheep Industry Association, which represents more 100,000 sheep producers nationwide. The site features a dedicated “Fact versus Fiction” page on the issue of M-44s. Among the fictions listed is the notion that cyanide bombs present a risk to the public.

At this point, Niemeyer argued, clinging to M-44s is as much about symbolism as anything else. “Kinda like the old give ’em an inch, they take a foot,” he said. “If they take our M-44s, next year they’ll take our snares, and then the year after they’ll take our traps.”

There’s a material angle as well. In addition to federal funding, Wildlife Services relies on the financial support of “cooperators” to keep the lights on. In the case of its predator program, the cooperators are often agricultural interests.

“They’re thick as pudding,” Niemeyer said. “That lobbying power of the ag industry is what keeps Wildlife Services afloat. I wouldn’t call it a criminal, but they’re buddies. They needed us and we needed them, and that’s how it keeps going on to this day.”

For Dennis

Six years on, it’s impossible to measure the full impact that the poisoning had on Canyon, said Mansfield. “You’re not really going to have a control group on kids nearly killed by cyanide,” he said. “So anything and everything that ever happens to him, mentally and or physically, you say, ‘Oh, I wonder if cyanide has anything to do with that?’ It’s a haunting thought that comes up every single time.”

The family’s goal remains the same: getting Canyon’s Law passed. They are hopeful that the latest round of efforts will be the final push they have been waiting for.

Following Canyon’s poisoning, Idaho issued a statewide prohibition on the use of M-44s pending an environmental assessment that remains in effect today. Fahy, the Predator Defense advocate, had little time to celebrate.

In February 2018, he picked up the phone to learn that Dennis Slaugh passed away. The official cause was an acute myocardial infarction. Listed among his “conditions contributing to death” was “Cyanide Poisoning/Exposure From M44 Device 2003.” The words on Slaugh’s death certificate contradicted a claim on Wildlife Services’ brochure the following year — repeated on American Sheep Industry Association’s fact versus fiction page — which read: “No human fatalities have been associated with Wildlife Services’ use of M-44s.” When asked about the death certificate, Wildlife Services pointed to a 2008 federal investigation that purportedly cleared the agency of any culpability in Slaugh’s death.

Fahy was devastated. He, Slaugh, and Slaugh’s wife Dorothy had traveled to Washington together a decade before, urging lawmakers to act on M-44s before somebody was killed. Slaugh had never visited a city like D.C. before. He didn’t know what to expect, and he didn’t know what was happening inside his body — why, for example, he needed to pause periodically to vomit as he passed through the halls of the Capitol.

Looking back at a photo from the visit, Fahy notes the way Slaugh held Dorothy’s hand, squeezing it tightly. “He was scared,” Fahy said. He watched Slaugh’s slow and agonizing deterioration in the years that followed. His death was the outcome Fahy had dedicated his life to preventing.

“It literally ripped my guts out, the whole thing, what they got away with,” Fahy said. Approaching 70, Fahy has had his own health scares — a consequence, he believes, of internalizing decades of secondhand trauma. With Slaugh’s death, however, he vowed to continue their fight. Unlike Canyon’s poisoning, where at least there was some measure of accountability at the local level, he said, “with Dennis, Wildlife Services got away with it.”

“I find it unbelievable that there are people that could have treated him like that,” Fahy said. “Nobody stood up for him. They just walked right over him.”

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FOCUS | Wildlife Services: 'The Hired Gun of the Livestock Industry'

 

 

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FOCUS | Wildlife Services: 'The Hired Gun of the Livestock Industry'
Colin Tiernan, The Spokesman-Review
Tiernan writes: "They shot them down from the sky. It happened two winters ago in Adams County, but the federal government won’t say where. A pilot and gunner did it from a plane while flying low over wheat stubble on the Palouse or some desolate expanse in the Scablands." 

They shot them down from the sky.

It happened two winters ago in Adams County, but the federal government won’t say where. A pilot and gunner did it from a plane while flying low over wheat stubble on the Palouse or some desolate expanse in the Scablands.

The winds would have been calm. It was cold that day, around freezing, according to National Weather Service records. They could have started early in the morning, when wildlife is out and about and easy for a sharpshooter to see.

Exactly who wanted the animals dead and how much the killing cost is a mystery, but on Feb. 24, 2021, a little-known agency within the U.S. Department of Agriculture killed 67 coyotes to protect cattlemen’s herds.

Wildlife Services kills and disperses animals. It was founded to aid ranchers and farmers but its role has grown over the decades. Today, the agency also prevents birds from hitting airplanes, rodents from damaging buildings and predators from eating young salmon, to list a few of its responsibilities.

In its own words, Wildlife Services provides “federal leadership and expertise to solve wildlife conflicts to allow people and wildlife to coexist.”

Many livestock producers say Wildlife Services helps them stay in business. Predators cost ranchers more than $200 million in losses every year, according to the Department of Agriculture.

“When you talk about dollars that predators cost us, personally for me it’s huge,” said Dr. Jill Swannack, a veterinarian and rancher who serves as president of Washington State Sheep Producers.

Wildlife Services didn’t make anyone available for an interview, but public affairs specialist Tanya Espinosa said in an email that the agency’s methods are “biologically sound, environmentally safe and socially acceptable.”

Conservationists tend to disagree.

Brooks Fahy, executive director of Predator Defense, has spent the past 30 years trying to dismantle Wildlife Services.

He learned about the agency while running a wildlife hospital in Oregon. People kept bringing him pets that had been caught in Wildlife Services’ traps or poisoned by M-44 devices – often referred to as “cyanide bombs.”

Fahy said Wildlife Services’ methods are scientifically unsound, inhumane and little more than a taxpayer-funded subsidy for agriculture.

“It’s a federal program that, on behalf of ranchers, kills predators to supposedly protect livestock,” he said.

Carter Niemeyer, a wolf expert and biologist who spent 26 years as a Wildlife Services trapper and supervisor, said some of the agency’s work is valuable. Unlike Fahy, he has no issue with killing specific animals that repeatedly cause problems.

But Niemeyer also calls Wildlife Services “the hired gun of the livestock industry.”

“We just spend way too much time overkilling carnivores,” he said. “I would term it needless killing. That’s what it is.”

Wildlife Services has an almost $200 million annual budget and kills nearly 2 million animals every year, including tens of thousands in Eastern Washington.

Yet despite its macabre work, few members of the general public know the agency exists.

Sristi Kamal, deputy director of the Western Environmental Law Center, said Wildlife Services is one of the most opaque agencies in the federal government.

“They are shrouded in mystery,” she said.

Animal damage control

American governments have been sponsoring wildlife killing for agriculture since the 17th century.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1640 passed a bounty law that promised hunters 40 schillings per wolf. Dozens of bounties, for various species, still exist today. The Foundation for Wildlife Management – funded in part by the Idaho Department of Fish and Game – reimburses expenses for wolf hunters.

The federal government started killing animals on its own in the early 1900s. Different agencies have had the job over the years, and they’ve undergone occasional rebrands. Before 1997, Wildlife Services was called Animal Damage Control.

Fahy said the renaming was an attempt to keep the agency out of the public eye.

“If you asked 99.99% of the public what Wildlife Services was, they wouldn’t have a clue,” he said. “And if they were to guess, they would guess it’s an agency that helps wildlife.”

Even though it keeps a low profile, Wildlife Services receives substantial taxpayer funding. In 2021, the most recent year with data available, the office had a $189 million budget.

Details on that budget are scarce.

Approximately 46% of the funding came directly from the federal government. The rest comes from other federal agencies, state and local governments and private businesses.

Wildlife Services doesn’t offer much detail on where its money goes, either. It spent $76 million on human health and safety, $53 million on agriculture, $37 million on property and $23 million on natural resources in 2021.

While pinpointing Wildlife Services’ spending is a challenge, the bulk of its budget pays for killing and scaring away wildlife.

The agency stresses that it relies on nonlethal approaches whenever possible. In 2021, it dispersed 25 million animals, including 10.6 million starlings, 3.5 million ring-billed gulls and 1.5 million lesser snow geese.

Wildlife Services uses a lot of loud and bright dispersal tools. Firing blanks and setting off pyrotechnics – firecracker-like devices – are common techniques. Other options include lasers, car horns, waving arms, paintballs, dogs, drones and human effigies – aka scarecrows.

Fahy and Kamal support nonlethal strategies, but they and many conservation groups say Wildlife Services should do more to avoid indiscriminate killing.

In 2021, the agency killed 1.8 million animals nationwide and 165,616 in Washington.

More than half of all animals killed throughout the U.S. were invasive species. Poisoning starlings and shooting feral pigs, two species that wreak havoc on North American ecosystems, doesn’t inspire much public outcry.

But wildlife advocates strongly oppose the killing of native animals.

For instance, Wildlife Services in 2021 killed more than 64,000 coyotes, 400 black bears and 24,000 beavers. Those figures include 614 coyotes, 32 black bears and 119 beavers in Washington.

Kamal and Fahy generally oppose the killing of carnivores, which is often done to decrease predation on calves and lambs. Predators control prey populations, they point out, and removing them disrupts native ecosystems.

Conservationists, though, acknowledge the necessity of some lethal removals.

Keeping birds away from airports is one of Wildlife Services’ less controversial jobs, even though it can entail killing uncommon native species.

For example, the agency killed two badgers in 2021 for Fairchild Air Force Base. Wildlife Services also killed four long-billed curlews – chihuahua-sized birds with preposterously long bills – for threatening aviation safety at an undisclosed location in Grant County.

Steve Holmer, vice president of policy for the American Bird Conservancy, said his organization doesn’t view lethal removals at airports as “a conservation concern.”

“Aviation safety is a real issue,” he said.

Bird strikes

On Jan. 15, 2009, an Airbus 320 took off from LaGuardia Airport and began its journey to Charlotte, North Carolina.

A few minutes after takeoff, the Airbus hit a flock of Canada geese. The plane’s engines sucked in some of the birds and shut down, leaving the jet without power at 2,800 feet.

Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger III landed the plane safely in the Hudson River and all 155 passengers survived. “The Miracle on the Hudson” made Sullenberger a national hero and inspired a Clint Eastwood film, starring Tom Hanks.

But for pilots, the incident is an important reminder of the danger birds pose to aircraft.

Wildlife Services works with hundreds of airports, including the Spokane International Airport and Fairchild Air Force Base, to avoid bird strikes and other wildlife collisions.

The Spokane International Airport didn’t respond to requests for comment, but airmen at Fairchild said keeping wildlife away from tankers and helicopters is critical.

“Anything that is going to hit the aircraft is a hazard,” said Capt. Brad Daniel, a KC-135 pilot and flight safety officer for the 92nd Air Refueling Wing. “Even small birds – at high speeds and hitting the right component – could be a threat.”

Maj. Brett Neilson, a helicopter pilot and flight safety officer with the 36th Flight Rescue Squadron, said hitting a bird can be catastrophic for a chopper.

“You take a goose in your lap at 100 mph, that could be fatal,” he said.

The best way to avoid collisions is to make the base inhospitable for birds, Daniel said. The Air Force tries to limit pools of standing water and mow grass to discourage nesting.

Still, Wildlife Services kills thousands of birds every year for airports. The agency in 2021 killed 38 animals for the Spokane International Airport and 328 for Fairchild Air Force Base.

Fahy said he understands that bird strikes are a real safety issue, but argues Wildlife Services could do more to keep wildlife away from airports.

Daniel and Neilson said lethal removals are unavoidable when other tactics fail and praised Wildlife Services.

“For our purposes,” Daniel said, “they’ve been amazing.”

Dam birds and fish

Figuring out where Wildlife Services kills animals isn’t always easy.

In Freedom of Information Act requests, the Department of Agriculture redacts anything that could reveal the location of an agricultural operation. The department says it can’t release addresses because federal law prohibits sharing locations of farms or ranches that provide information “in order to participate in programs of the Department.”

That makes it hard to know precisely who uses Wildlife Services. Only a few addresses, often belonging to airports, show up in public records.

The Grant County Public Utility District’s address is one of the few that pops up in Eastern Washington. The electricity provider hires Wildlife Services to disperse and kill predators that eat spring chinook salmon and summer steelhead.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration requires the Grant County Public Utility District to protect those endangered species while they make the 58-mile trip on the Columbia River between the Priest Rapids and Wanapum dams, northwest of the Hanford Nuclear Site.

“It’s our task to enhance or improve their survival through our section of the river as they migrate to the ocean,” said Tom Dresser, the public utility district’s fish and wildlife manager.

Passing through dams and turbines leaves fish disoriented and vulnerable. Thousands of young salmon and steelhead get picked off in tailraces, the sections of river immediately following a dam.

Gulls, common mergansers and double-crested cormorants are all adept at fishing for salmon and steelhead. Wildlife Services kills hundreds of those birds in Washington annually.

Northern pikeminnows, a native species that has flourished since the installation of dams throughout the Columbia River basin, eat millions of salmon and steelhead while the fish swim to and from the Pacific Ocean. Wildlife Services caught and killed more than 75,000 pikeminnows in 2021, all in Washington. The Bonneville Power Administration even funds a pikeminnow bounty program.

Dresser said Wildlife Services tries to scare away birds when possible. The public utility district has stretched wires above the tailraces as well, in an attempt to keep birds out.

Killing native birds to bolster salmon populations has spawned legal fights, however. Fahy said he’s “absolutely against” killing one native species for the sake of another.

Dresser said some lethal removals are needed to aid endangered fish.

“We’ve seen predation rates as high as 15%, 18% of our tagged fish as part of research studies,” he said. “It can be a very large percentage of the population without some type of active and passive control efforts.”

The coyote controversy

Wildlife Services’ detractors mostly criticize its efforts to help agriculture, especially the livestock industry.

The agency kills predators that can eat chickens, lambs, calves and other farm animals. In 2021, the agency killed more than 600 bobcats, 300 wolves and 200 cougars.

In the Evergreen State, cougars and wolves are managed by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. Fish and Wildlife has killed eight wolves and 114 cougars in the past two years.

Wildlife advocates emphasize that carnivores are an essential component of healthy ecosystems. Removing them can cause prey populations, like deer and rodents, to grow out of control.

“It creates more problems in the long run,” said Timothy Coleman, director of the Kettle Range Conservation Group.

Wildlife Services is probably best known for killing coyotes.

It kills tens of thousands of them every year in more than a dozen ways. Aerial gunning from a small plane, with shotguns, is the most common technique.

Catching coyotes in neck snares, shooting them from the ground and poisoning them with cyanide capsules are also standard methods.

While the job can be grisly, many ranchers say it helps keep them afloat.

The Washington Cattlemen’s Association declined to comment but Swannack, who raises sheep near Lamont, in Whitman County, said Wildlife Services is “a huge boon and benefit to the sheep industry.”

Swannack said predation is her second-biggest cost after feed. Coyotes attacking lambs is a major problem, she said.

“Our take on coyotes is they’re fine as long as they don’t eat sheep,” she said.

Swannack said ranchers do what they can to avoid killing predators. Fencing, flashing lights and loud noises can help. Guard dogs are effective. Some sheep producers will place a llama or donkey with their herds as a protector.

If none of that is enough, Wildlife Services is needed, Swannack said.

“When we can’t handle it ourselves, we can hire them to help us get rid of problem animals,” she said.

Jami Beintema, who has 40 sheep on 33 acres in Ellensburg, said Wildlife Services might have saved her flock last spring when she and her husband couldn’t figure out what was killing their ewes.

“I lost five registered, beautiful, very, very pregnant ewes in a really short time frame,” she said.

Beintema said she did her best to protect her sheep. She put them in a pen at night. She had cameras and a motion detection system that shined a spotlight on predators when they got close. But they still found a way to get in.

A Wildlife Services agent found the weak point in Beintema’s pen, trapped a female coyote and killed it. Beintema hasn’t lost any animals since.

“I don’t kill coyotes just because I see one,” she said. “We’ve killed one in 20 years.”

Kamal disagrees that killing predators is necessary, especially when Wildlife Services isn’t targeting a specific problem animal. She also noted that the agency only puts a small fraction of its budget toward expanding its nonlethal program.

Espinosa said Congress since 2020 has provided dedicated dollars for nonlethal approaches. In the past three years, Congressional funding for nonlethal methods has gone from $1.38 million to $4.55 million.

Wildlife advocates argue killing predators is an ephemeral solution. Studies have shown reducing populations causes female coyotes to produce more pups.

“Killing coyotes just makes more coyotes,” said Samantha Bruegger, executive director of Washington Wildlife First. “We’re killing coyotes to kill coyotes, we’re not killing them for long-term solutions.”

Fahy said if producers lose livestock, they should invest more heavily in sheds, guard dogs and other preventative measures. Taxpayers shouldn’t have to subsidize wildlife killing, he said.

“This isn’t rocket science,” Fahy said. “If you’re doing it the right way, you’re not going to have a problem.”

Swannack responds by noting that she pays Wildlife Services directly for its work. She also says criticizing Wildlife Services for being taxpayer-funded is a weak argument.

“Why does the government pay for anything?” she asked. “We have a government for the betterment of the people. I think it would be easy to argue that having a food supply is to the betterment of the people.”

Niemeyer, who helped lead the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services’ wolf reintroduction effort in the Rockies, said he believes killing predators is frequently “senseless.” Ranchers lose far more animals to disease and bad weather than carnivores, he said.

Looking back on his career with Wildlife Services, Niemeyer said he was “misguided” and thought he was making the world a better place by removing predators.

“I’ve seen the error of my ways,” he said.

He doesn’t think the agency is going anywhere.

“People have been going after Wildlife Services since the ’50s and ’60s,” Niemeyer said. “Cats have nine lives, Wildlife Services has hundreds.”

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RSN: Charles Pierce | The Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows Texts: This Damn Case Just Gets Stranger by the Hour

 

 

25 March 22

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Charles Pierce | The Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows Texts: This Damn Case Just Gets Stranger by the Hour
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "A substantial portion of conservative Washington will believe - and act on - anything."

A substantial portion of conservative Washington will believe—and act on—anything.

Please check your entries. If you had, “Spouse of Supreme Court Justice Cheers Coup Attempt,” you’re a winner. Please pick up your Trump steaks at the cashier’s window and come back to see us again real soon.

From the Washington Post:

The messages – 29 in all – reveal an extraordinary pipeline between Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni, and President Donald Trump’s top aide during a period when Trump and his allies were vowing to go to the Supreme Court in an effort to negate the election results. On Nov. 10, after news organizations had projected Joe Biden the winner based on state vote totals, Thomas wrote to Meadows: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!...You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”

To which Meadows replied:

“This is a fight of good versus evil,” Meadows wrote. “Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”

Meadows better hope that George Terwilliger, superstar DC attorney, is the King of Kings. Otherwise, he’s liable to do enough time to balance out his lost time in DC.

This damn case gets stranger by the hour. The congressional committee looking into the events of January 6 seems to have had Ginni Thomas in its sights for a while. After all, they picked through almost 2,400 of Meadows’ text messages to get these 29 between Meadows and Thomas to release to the media. And that adds more than a little je ne sais quoi to another of the texts that has come to light.

Thomas replied: “Thank you!! Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now… I will try to keep holding on. America is worth it!”

It is unclear to whom Thomas was referring.

Oh, but let’s guess, shall we? Is it possible that Ginni Thomas’ best friend might be seriously ill and incommunicado at the moment? And if so, what did they talk about back then?

It has become increasingly plain that the movement to overthrow the 2020 election results involved a substantial portion of conservative Washington, and also that a substantial portion of conservative Washington will believe—and act on—anything.

The first of the 29 messages between Ginni Thomas and Meadows was sent on Nov. 5, two days after the election. She sent him a link to a YouTube video labeled “TRUMP STING w CIA Director Steve Pieczenik, The Biggest Election Story in History, QFS-BLOCKCHAIN.”

Pieczenik, a former State Department official, is a far-right commentator who has falsely claimed that the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was a “false-flag” operation to push a gun-control agenda. The video Thomas shared with Meadows is no longer available on YouTube. But Thomas wrote to Meadows, “I hope this is true; never heard anything like this before, or even a hint of it. Possible???” “Watermarked ballots in over 12 states have been part of a huge Trump … military white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states,” she wrote.

Thomas and Meadows shouldn’t worry about the former president*, though. He’s fallen back on the strategy that has worked for him his entire public career: the completely meritless lawsuit. From CNN:

The lawsuit names a wide cast of characters that Trump has accused for years of orchestrating a "deep state" conspiracy against him -- including former FBI Director James Comey and other FBI officials, the retired British spy Christopher Steele and his associates, and a handful of Clinton campaign advisers.

"Under the guise of 'opposition research,' 'data analytics,' and other political stratagems, the Defendants nefariously sought to sway the public's trust," says the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Florida. "They worked together with a single, self-serving purpose: to vilify Donald J. Trump."

Over 108 pages, the lawsuit rails against many of Trump's political opponents and highlights the grievances that he has complained about for years. It claims Democrats and government officials perpetrated a grab bag of offenses, from a racketeering conspiracy to a malicious prosecution, computer fraud and theft of secret internet data. The lawsuit asks for more than $24 million in costs and damages.

The road goes on forever, and the party never ends.

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President Joe Biden speaks during a news conference at the NATO summit at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Monday, June 14, 2021. (photo: Patrick Semansky/AP)

Biden Travels to Poland as the Country Struggles With Ukrainian Refugee Influx
Shannon Pettypiece, NBC News
Pettypiece writes: "President Joe Biden on Friday traveled to southeastern Poland where he met with U.S. troops and aid workers assisting refugees in a country on the front lines of the humanitarian and military crisis unfolding in Ukraine."

The president met with U.S. troops before a scheduled meeting with aid workers assisting refugees in a country on the front lines of the crisis unfolding in Ukraine.

President Joe Biden on Friday traveled to southeastern Poland where he met with U.S. troops and aid workers assisting refugees in a country on the front lines of the humanitarian and military crisis unfolding in Ukraine.

“What you’re engaged in is much more than just whether or not you can alleviate the pain and suffering of the people in Ukraine. We’re in a new phase, your generation, we’re at an inflection point,” Biden told the troops.

Biden spoke with the U.S. troops in Rzeszow who began arriving at the military base there last month as part of U.S. deterrence efforts against Russia. The president made small talk and shook hands with a group of service members, whom he called the “finest fighting force in the history of the world," at one point sitting down to join them for a slice of pizza in the mess hall.

"You are the organizing principle around which the rest of the world, the free world, is moving," Biden said. "We’re in the midst of, and I don’t want to sound too philosophic here, but you’re in the midst of a fight between democracies and oligarchs."

The troops are based less than 100 miles from where Russian missiles struck a Ukrainian military post this month. The service members have been carrying out training exercises with their Polish and British counterparts, familiarizing themselves with the local terrain and Polish equipment.

The White House has firmly ruled out any possibility of sending U.S. troops to Ukraine, but has been bolstering the U.S. troop presence in Europe over the last two months to demonstrate Washington's commitment to defending NATO territory.

Before he returns to Washington on Saturday, Biden will meet with Ukrainian refugees, followed by a major address on the state of the war in Ukraine and where he sees it heading, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Friday.

In a meeting with aid workers, Biden said he regretted that he wasn't able to travel to Ukraine to see the situation first hand, seeming to indicate it wouldn't be safe for him to enter the war-torn country.

Biden was joined in his meeting with aid workers by Polish President Andrzej Duda, who thanked the American leader for his visit and the help the U.S. has provided. But Duba said there is more help Poland needs. Biden and Duda will meet again on Saturday.

“The suffering that’s taking place now is at your doorstep," Biden said.

Poland has borne the brunt of the refugee crisis, with more than 2 million Ukrainians having flooded into the country. While Poland has welcomed the refugees with open arms, allowing them to work, and providing them with health care and schooling for children, the massive influx in just a month has begun to strain cities like Warsaw, where the population is estimated to have grown by 300,000.

“Poland is among the top countries that feel the most at risk over this ongoing invasion. You had bombs going off not far from their border,” said Barry Pavel, who was a defense policy adviser in the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “This is a really, really important stop.”

Biden is visiting Poland after a series of meetings with world leaders Thursday in Brussels, where he sought to rally other countries to do more to support Ukraine and punish Russia.

Before departing Belgium, Biden noted how Putin has used Russia’s energy resources to “coerce” its neighbors, and announced measures — alongside European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen — to reduce Europe's dependency on Russian energy.

“I know that eliminating Russian gas will have costs for Europe. But it’s not only the right thing to do from a moral standpoint, it’s going to put us on a much stronger strategic footing,” he said before heading to Poland.

On Saturday, Biden also plans to meet with Polish President Andrzej Duda and deliver an address about the need for sustained unity and resolve in the face of the Russian aggression, Sullivan said.

The White House announced it would allow as many as 100,000 Ukrainians to enter the U.S., with a focus on those who are most vulnerable. The administration also plans to allocate more than $1 billion toward humanitarian assistance and $11 billion over the next five years to address worldwide food security threats after the disruptions to the Russian and Ukrainian agricultural industries.

The U.S. has provided $123 million to help the countries bordering Ukraine deal with the crisis, including $48 million to Poland, with U.S. officials working to set up programs that provide refugees with temporary assistance for food, accommodations and medical care, along with legal aid and mental health support, the White House said.

The White House on Thursday announced a package of new sanctions against Russia that would apply to more than 400 Russians and Russian entities, including the Duma and more than 300 of its members and more than 40 defense companies.

It also said it would take additional steps to prevent Russia from trying to prop up its economy, such as making it clear that any transactions involving gold related to banks there are prohibited, and calling on corporations to no longer conduct their activities with Russia in a business-as-usual manner.

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U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)

Republican Attacks on SCOTUS Nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson Show "Total Bankruptcy" of the GOP
Jessica Corbett, In These Times
Corbett writes: "As the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday began its fourth and final day of hearings for U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, criticism of how Republican senators have conducted themselves - and what that behavior reveals about their party - continued to grow."

Critics say the “childish political theater” is intended to keep the Republican base “in a constant state of frothing-at-the-mouth” so they show up at the ballot box.

As the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday began its fourth and final day of hearings for U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, criticism of how Republican senators have conducted themselves — and what that behavior reveals about their party — continued to grow.

“What should have been a historic moment for the first Black woman to be nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, has become a scene of childish political theater, thanks to Senate Republicans,” Tayo Bero wrote Thursday for The Guardian.

She noted that not only is President Joe Biden’s first nominee to the high court “already being held up to far more scrutiny than any white man in her position would be, but the line of questioning from across the aisle has devolved into the absolutely ridiculous.”

The nominee’s response has been widely praised, with Alliance for Justice president Rakim H.D. Brooks saying that “while it has been challenging to watch Republican senators repeatedly disrespect Judge Jackson this week, it gave us an opportunity to observe Judge Jackson’s remarkable judicial temperament. At all times, she has comported herself with grace and dignity.”

While also applauding Jackson for remaining composed “in the face of intense and often ludicrous lines of inquiry,” Bero asserted that “the bad-faith questions, the baseless accusations, the time-wasting” from GOP senators all make clear that “Jackson’s interrogators do not see her as an equal, and are determined to undermine her however they can.”

Bero also agreed with Paul Waldman’s conclusion, in a Tuesday opinion piece for The Washington Post, that this week’s hearings have “become yet another forum for Republicans to claim victim status, given the absolutely central place this occupies in their political project.”

According to Waldman:

As conservatives have learned well in recent years, in the right circumstances, adopting the stance of victimhood can be thrilling, particularly if you don’t have to suffer any actual victimization along the way. You can take the normal unpleasantness that comes with politics — having people disagree with you, or watching as a figure you admire gets criticized in ways you consider unfair — and turn it into something noble, profound, even epic.

Are people calling me a jerk for something repugnant I said? I’m not a jerk, I’m a victim of cancel culture, persecuted for my devotion to free expression! Are people opposing my legislation to ban books and target the families of transgender kids? I’m a victim of the woke mob! Proclaim yourself a victim and not only do you become the hero of the story, you can claim moral absolution for your own grimy choices.

“It all culminates with Brett Kavanaugh, the victim to beat all victims, his name invoked again and again,” Waldman wrote, referring to former President Donald Trump’s second nominee to the court whose 2018 confirmation hearings featured credible sexual assault allegations.

Suggesting Thursday that “people should notice what kinds of nominees senators feel empathetic towards,” The Nation ’s justice correspondent, Elie Mystal, recalled that in 2018, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R‑S.C.) got emotional “in his defense of prep school bro Brett Kavanaugh, after he was accused of attempted rape by a credible, named witness who gave testimony before the Senate,” and this week, Sen. Ted Cruz (R‑Texas) “even derisively referred to the attempted rape allegations as an inquiry into his ‘teenage dating habits.’ ”

Graham and Cruz aren’t the only Republicans under fire for what Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, condemned as “vile antics” at Jackson’s hearings. Comments from GOP Sens. Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.), John Cornyn (Texas), Tom Cotton (Ark.), and Josh Hawley (Mo.) have also garnered widespread attention and criticism.

As Thom Hartmann summarized Wednesday for Common Dreams: “Lindsey Graham throws his trademark hissy fit and storms out, John Cornyn tries to sound erudite and fails, Marsha Blackburn outs herself as a fanatic, Ted Cruz thinks Black judges should vet children’s books about racism, and Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton just end up making fools of themselves.”

Hartmann argued that GOP senators had two goals for the hearings:

The first was to smear the Democratic nominee in a way that will guarantee that — over the next 24-hour news cycle — the name “Judge Jackson” will repeatedly occur in the same headline or sentence as “child porn,” “critical race theory,” or “terrorists from Gitmo.”

The second was to craft a short soundbite of their own performance art that Fox “News” and other hard-right media can play on a loop. White Republicans dressing down a Black woman? Perfect for conservative hate media.

…This is happening because the Republican Party is no longer interested in governing. They’ve become the mouthpiece for a faction of business and great wealth, and beyond that have no commitment to rebuilding or improving this country in any meaningful way.

The GOP’s priority is “doing anything they can to increase corporate profits (regardless of the harm to consumers, competition, or the planet) and to keep taxes low on their morbidly rich donors. And to winning the so-called ‘culture wars,’ ” he wrote. “All the sturm and drang about race, porn, drugs, religion, and gender identity” is a strategy that “keeps their base in a constant state of frothing-at-the-mouth” so they continue to show up at the ballot box.

As Joan Walsh, a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, put it: “This hearing reveals the total bankruptcy of the Republican Party.”

Noting that some of the “ridiculous, offensive questions” for Jackson came from Republican 2024 presidential hopefuls, Walsh wrote Wednesday that “too many GOP senators seemed hell-bent on turning her into a friend of child pornographers and pedophiles.”

“It was not hard to suss out a theme the afternoon of the first day: What used to be a fringe theory espoused by QAnon cultists, linking top Democrats (with no evidence, obviously falsely) to the vile abomination of child sex trafficking, has now become a GOP mainstay,” Walsh pointed out. “Polls show that half of all Trump supporters believe it; the 2024 wannabes see a key constituency.”

Sheryll Cashin, a law professor at Georgetown University and Politico Magazine contributing editor, also concluded that GOP senators acted with elections in mind.

“Republicans had an opportunity with Jackson’s nomination to do the right thing,” she wrote Thursday. “And yet this brilliant, even-handed jurist who has ruled for and against presidents and prosecutors was cast as a soft-on-crime, child-predator-enabling, critical-race-theory believing, left-wing activist by the GOP’s most arch political performers.”

“Why would Republicans do this when Jackson’s confirmation would not upset the current 6 – 3 conservative-leaning tenor of the court?” Cashin continued. “My guess is that dividing and conquering to win elections at any cost [has] become muscle memory for far too many members of Congress.”

While engaging in a “dangerous character assassination,” Republican panel members “offered the disturbing optics of mainly southern, white men lecturing, interrupting, and sometimes yelling at a gracious, poised Black woman,” she noted. “If no Republicans vote to confirm this eminently qualified Black female to the highest court, it will send a searing message about what the GOP has become.”

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From left, Camille, Alexandra, Leon and Homero Rey at their home in Potomac, Maryland. Leon, 9, is transgender, and his family moved from Texas to protect his rights. (photo: Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

GOP Lawmakers Push Historic Wave of Bills Targeting Rights of LGBTQ Teens, Children and Their Families
Kimberly Kindy, The Washington Post
Kindy writes: "Nationwide, GOP lawmakers have filed nearly two hundred state bills this year that seek to erode protections for transgender and gay youth or to restrict discussion of LGBTQ topics in public schools."

Nationwide, GOP lawmakers have filed nearly two hundred state bills this year that seek to erode protections for transgender and gay youth or to restrict discussion of LGBTQ topics in public schools.

The explosion of legislation is in part the culmination of efforts by a trio of conservative organizations, which are helping state legislators write and promote the bills. One of the most active — the Alliance Defending Freedom — has a decades-long history of fighting LGBTQ rights, including in battles to preserve state laws criminalizing consensual sex between gay adults, court records show.

Today, at least 166 measures to restrict LGBTQ rights are still pending in state legislatures across the nation — nearly quadruple the number of similar bills introduced just three years ago, according to data from Freedom for All Americans, an LGBTQ advocacy group.

Members of the LGBTQ community say the unprecedented legislative efforts are aimed at dismantling the hard-earned and tenuous civil rights of a vulnerable population and are causing psychological damage to children who are already struggling.

“This wave of bills has been staggering,” Florida state Rep. Anna Eskamani (D) said in an interview. “These painful state-level fights are proof positive that discrimination is still a very real threat that directly harms members of our most vulnerable communities, including and especially young people who are transgender.”

Lawmakers who are sponsoring the bills say parental authority is being undermined, sometimes in conflict with religious tenets taught at home, and they believe educators and health-care workers are attempting to convert children to becoming transgender or queer.

“Christian parents don’t think the schools should be evangelizing children into sexual ideologies they don’t agree with,” said Oklahoma state Sen. Rob Standridge (R), who introduced a bill this year that would enable parents to remove LGBTQ books from school libraries. “So that’s what the bill is about, to try to get schools to stop doing that … I’m empowering the parent that is directly affected by what they see as overriding their beliefs.”

Detailed tracking of this legislative movement can be difficult. This is due in part to lawmakers’ practice of not mentioning the words “transgender” or “LGBTQ” in bill text, either intentionally to escape detection or because they do not acknowledge the legitimacy of transgender or queer identity, advocacy groups and experts say. However, several LGBTQ organizations have teams of lawyers who track the bills, including Freedom for All Americans, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Human Rights Campaign.

About 75 of the new bills call for bans or severe restrictions on classroom discussions, curriculum and library books that mention LGBTQ issues, mostly but not exclusively in primary grades, according to Freedom for All Americans, which has among the most conservative legislative estimates among advocacy groups. Some of these bills are vaguely worded, making it unclear whether educators or students could even mention their own sexual or gender identity — or that of their parents — on school grounds. This issue has led critics to dub Florida’s bill, which passed the state legislature on March 8, the “don’t say gay” act.

Nearly 50 other bills seek to ban transgender youth from playing competitive school sports on teams that don’t align with the gender they were assigned at birth.

At least 29 seek to ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth, which primarily involves hormone therapy to delay the onset of puberty or to begin the process of transitioning. Some of the measures also seek to make it a crime to provide such care to children and young teens, or to make it a crime for parents to sign off on such care. (The American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical groups endorse the treatments, saying such care saves lives.)

There are also dozens of other bills focused on restricting LGBTQ rights, including at least 15 “bathroom bills,” which in 2016 kicked off this legislative movement by pushing to ban transgender students, and sometimes faculty, from using school bathrooms consistent with their gender identity.

Nearly two-thirds of the bills focus on transgender rights. There were 18 such bills introduced in 2019, compared with more than 100 last year. The number introduced so far this year has again surpassed 100.

The bills have found especially fertile ground as the GOP seeks to energize its base for midterm elections in a time when party leaders have shown new willingness to openly attack gay and transgender rights — a movement that runs counter to wider public sentiment on LGBTQ rights, according to several recent surveys. A Public Religion Research Institute survey released last week showed nearly 8 in 10 Americans support laws to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public accommodations. The survey also found that 68 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage, a rise from 54 percent in 2014.

Michael Boucai, a law professor at the University at Buffalo who specializes in family law and gender and sexuality law, argues that the new bills are aimed to please partisan interests rather than to spark real debate about how to best help LGBTQ children.

“The laws are being drafted in such an extreme way, and with such potentially opportunistic motives, that is very easy for the left to reject them. The right doesn’t really want a debate on these issues,” Boucai said in an interview. “A lot of these bills involve parents’ rights to control their children’s health care and education, which has been galvanizing for a large segment of the American population, particularly among conservatives leading up to and going through the pandemic.”

For many parents of LGBTQ children, the wave of new bills have already had a significant impact on their lives. After watching a wave of anti-trans legislation cresting in the Texas Capitol last fall, Camille Rey decided to move with her husband and three children, including 9-year-old Leon, a transgender boy, from Austin to Potomac, Md.

“None of us should have to feel persecuted by our own government. None of us should have to feel like political refugees in our own country,” Rey said in an interview. “That’s literally what I feel like. I moved my whole family because of politics.”

Starting a landslide

In early 2020, as Republican Idaho state Rep. Barbara Ehardt worked to craft a ban on transgender athletes competing on public school sports teams, she turned to the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian conservative legal organization.

The Arizona-based advocacy group, founded in 1993, leverages the power of a national network of Christian lawyers for its legislative efforts and legal battles. It reported $78 million in assets in 2020 and has received funding from Christian, family and financial foundations. In recent years, it battled in court against abortion rights and in favor of religious practices in schools and drafted language for anti-transgender “bathroom bills” later used in multiple states.

Now, the group helped Ehardt craft the nation’s first successful ban on transgender female athletes.

“The Alliance Defending Freedom said, ‘We think we can strengthen this, maybe do something different,’ and then they shared with me some other language,” Ehardt said in an interview. “I thought it was definitely stronger and definitely better.”

That bill, which became law two years ago, helped set off a landslide of copycat legislation, with Ehardt traveling the country to testify in support of the bills — and with the Alliance Defending Freedom helping other legislators craft new bills to limit LGBTQ rights, according to lawmakers and advocates. Measures similar to Ehardt’s bill have since become law in at least 10 other states, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

The group has played a similar role in the proliferation of dozens of other anti-LGBTQ bills filed around the nation this year — helping lawmakers craft legislation and providing legal support.

Last year, it formed a coalition with two other conservative nonprofits, the Heritage Foundation and the Family Policy Alliance, that published a list of positions on transgender and gay rights that have repeatedly surfaced in the restrictive new state bills. It was released a month after President Biden signed an executive order in January 2021 in support of LGBTQ rights.

The website for the coalition, Promise to America’s Children, also invites lawmakers to provide their email addresses so the group can send sample bill language, which has since appeared in dozens of measures.

In the past, the Alliance Defending Freedom has taken some of the most aggressive stances in the fight against LGBTQ rights. It filed a Supreme Court amicus brief in the landmark Lawrence v. Texas case — and joined in another brief — which both unsuccessfully argued in 2003 in favor of the state’s right to maintain sodomy laws, court records show. High-ranking leaders of the organization have also publicly supported efforts in other countries to criminalize same-sex sexual acts. It also has defended parents’ right to have their LGBTQ children undergo conversion therapy, which uses psychological, physical, or spiritual interventions in an effort to make a person heterosexual or cisgender.

In a statement to The Washington Post, the group described its efforts regarding criminalizing LGBTQ sex as a “limited engagement” on the issue and said it is based on its “belief that marriage between on man and one woman is the best institution for human flourishing.” It also said it believes that the issue of whether to criminalize LGBTQ sex should be left to states.

As for conversion therapy, Alliance Defending Freedom said it “supports everyone’s freedom to seek the counseling they choose without interference from the government.”

The coalition of conservative nonprofit groups, which say their work on recent anti-LGBTQ state bills is aimed at restoring traditional family values, declined interview requests from The Post. The Alliance Defending Freedom said it is routinely involved in helping craft legislation, noting that groups like the ACLU regularly do the same.

“It is standard practice for lawmakers to work with groups with expertise as they craft and introduce legislation. This is true across the ideological spectrum,” the statement said. “ADF is regularly invited to draw upon our constitutional expertise to provide input into forthcoming bills.”

The Family Policy Alliance said that the political movement is driven by parents.

“In the wake of COVID, with children engaged in remote learning, parents gained a new window into what their children were learning in the classroom,” the group said in a statement. “For some parents, this revealed curriculum which not only taught viewpoints about sex and gender with which they disagreed, but taught them as fact to young children.”

LGBTQ advocates, though, say the groups — and smaller organizations with similar goals — have played a central role in elevating the legislation. Some groups have boasted of their fundraising and influence on these measures. Officials from the American Principles Project, a conservative think tank, described on Stephen K. Bannon’s “War Room” show a $750,000 “grassroots advocacy” campaign it organized to urge Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to order the state to investigate parents of trans children who have received gender-affirming medical care.

Cathryn Oakley, the state legislative director and senior counsel for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ advocacy group, noted that many of the same groups had previously pushed bills to stop same-sex marriage and enact nationwide transgender bathroom and religious exemption laws.

“We had a flurry of those bills, 2017, 2018, 2019, but they weren’t really causing the kind of dramatic impact that opponents of equality wanted them to have, in terms of instilling fear about what LGBTQ+ equality could mean,” Oakley said in an interview. “So, they switched to targeting trans kids.”

Like Ehardt, other lawmakers behind more recent bills have publicly credited the groups with helping to achieve success. South Dakota state Rep. Fred Deutsch (R) introduced in 2020 a bill to ban gender-affirming medical procedures for transgender youth, after he attended an event hosted by the Heritage Foundation.

Deutsch said that, in crafting the bill, he sought out transgender youth and spoke to them as part of his research. The initial draft, he said in an email message, “was developed organically in the living room of my country home in South Dakota, surrounded by miles of corn fields.”

He then got input from the Alliance Defending Freedom and asked the Heritage Foundation if he could share the bill draft at an upcoming conference.

“Apparently people at the conference shared the draft with legislators from other states, since in the months following the conference, legislators from other states contacted me,” he wrote in an email.

Like Ehardt’s legislation, Deutsch’s medical-care bill was the first of its kind in 2020. Although it did not pass, it has been replicated and introduced in dozens of states. So far, at least two states have enacted such laws — Arkansas and Tennessee.

Morissa Ladinsky, associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said those laws will force physicians like her who care for transgender youth to chose between violating the Hippocratic oath or breaking state law.

“To cease a course of successful medical therapy … is in grave violation of a huge tenet of medical ethics. It’s called medical abandonment,” said Ladinsky, who works in a state with a pending transgender medical care bill. “So, do I violate a major, major ethical tenet of health-care delivery, or do we risk a felony conviction? It’s a place no physician ever saw themselves being in.”

There’s no one reason these bills have found particular traction this year, advocates and experts said. Oakley said that pandemic burnout has led many Americans to tune out legislative sessions.

“I do think that to some degree, these attacks have flown under the radar because of the pandemic and because of the insurrection,” she said. “I don’t think that this has permeated their consciousness in the same way that previous attacks have permeated their consciousness.”

Hannah Willard, vice president of government affairs for Freedom for All Americans, said the bills are also a reaction to recent civil rights gains made by the LGBTQ community.

“You don’t get progress without backlash,” Willard said in an interview. “So it’s not a coincidence that we’re seeing these anti-trans bills in the states at the same time as we’re seeing growing support. They can feel like contradictory trends, but really they are two sides of the exact same coin.”

A wave of legislation

From coast to coast, bills that would drastically impact gay and trans children have advanced this year with startling speed.

In Alabama, the Senate passed a bill in February that calls for penalties of up to 10 years in prison and a $15,000 fine for anyone who provides gender-affirming care to a child or teenager. This includes hormone treatments that delay puberty, which are reversible.

In Idaho, a bill passed the House this month that would allow librarians to be jailed for up to a year and fined $1,000 each time they are found guilty of disseminating material that is “harmful to minors.” A meaning for this standard is not defined in the bill. Examples provided during legislative hearings included books that had LGBTQ themes or characters.

And in Florida, the “don’t say gay” bill would ban public schools from teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through the third grade, and says educators at all grade levels should refrain from discussing LGBTQ issues that are not “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students,” which is left open to interpretation. Parents who believe an educator has violated the law may sue.

When Texas lawmakers did not pass a transgender medical care ban, Abbott in February asked the public to turn parents in to state officials if they have provided gender-affirming medical care to their trans children so they can face criminal investigations and potential charges. Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) have called such care “child abuse.”

Paxton said in a February opinion that parents and guardians should be blocked from signing off on all transgender procedures — including hormone therapies — “[b]ecause children are legally incompetent to consent,” and said that hormone therapies can sometimes affect fertility and therefore “infringe on the child’s fundamental right to procreate.”

The ACLU has sued in an attempt to stop the investigations, and advocates have decried the state’s move as perhaps the most aggressive attack on trans youth in this multiyear campaign.

“They have gone after trans kids in every conceivable dimension,” Oakley said. “They’re trying to take their parents’ support away, they’re trying to take doctors’ support away, they’re trying to take teachers’ support away, and they’re trying to take their teams and coaches away.”

So far this year, six of the bills have been approved by five state legislatures — four of which specifically curtail the rights of trans children and their families, according to Freedom for All Americans.

The advocacy group said at least a dozen pending bills would also require medical care providers and educators who learn of a child’s LGBTQ status to notify parents. Many of these provisions to “out” transgender and other LGBTQ youth are not expected to survive.

The rise in the extreme penalties the measures call for — and the polarizing debates surrounding them — have started to garner the attention of major corporations and the general public. It’s not yet clear whether this could change the course of future state legislation, experts said.

This month, more than 170 major U.S. corporations, including PepsiCo, Johnson … Johnson and Macy’s, have signed a statement condemning the bills. Other large companies have felt a backlash in recent months, most notably Disney. CEO Bob Chapek formally apologized to employees this month for the company’s silence on the Florida bill restricting LGBTQ topics in elementary schools, announcing it would pause all political donations in the state after financial contributions showed the company gave to lawmakers who championed the legislation.

Court challenges to block the laws — including one in Arkansas that bans gender-affirming medical care for trans youth — have been successful in four instances but are being appealed by state officials, according to the ACLU. Several other lawsuits are still pending, the group said. Some Republican officials have also pushed back on the measures, with governors in both Indiana and Utah recently vetoing transgender sports bans.

The Biden administration is also now stepping in, vowing to take steps to block state actions that might discriminate against LGBTQ youth and their families — something the Trump administration did not do. Earlier this month, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra condemned Abbott’s directive to investigate transgender parents and said his agency “will use every tool at our disposal to keep Texans safe.”

Whether the bills have succeeded, failed or are pending, parents and children caught up in the political drama say it has taken a psychological toll.

In Florida, Todd and Jeff Delmay — a gay married couple — say they worry for their 12-year-old son, Blake, because it’s unclear if the proposed “don’t say gay” law would prevent their son from being able to openly talk about his home life at school.

“I can’t imagine not being able to see your parents accepted like other parents because it makes you feel other,” said Todd Delmay, who testified against the Florida bill.

“It doesn’t matter how different your family is. It’s still called family,” said Blake, who expressed similar concerns and said he is also worried about being bullied. “You need to be able to talk about your family.”

Rey said her family’s decision to move from Texas was driven by the knowledge that even if a bill fails this year, a similar or new bill targeting transgender rights probably will be brought back next year. She said staying to continue battling the bills would have been too taxing on her family.

“There were parents who were fighting beside me who had fought two years earlier when the bathroom bill had been introduced,” she said. “This was their life. I didn’t want this to be my life. I had a different life in mind. I have a different life in mind for Leon.”

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Kathy Peltier, the daughter of Leonard Peltier, in Burbank, California, on March 17. The banner was made for a march of several hundred Native American activists and supporters from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., in 1978. (photo: Allison Zaucha/NBC News)

Leonard Peltier, Imprisoned Native American Activist, Has New Message for Biden in Clemency Push
Erik Ortiz, NBC News
Ortiz writes: "Leonard Peltier, the Native American activist who has been imprisoned for nearly half a century for the murders of two FBI agents he has always maintained he didn't commit, is hopeful he'll have a chance to clear his name before he dies."

Peltier, 77, has been held since 1977 for the deaths of two FBI agents. He maintains his innocence, and supporters say he deserves to be released on compassionate grounds.

Leonard Peltier, the Native American activist who has been imprisoned for nearly half a century for the murders of two FBI agents he has always maintained he didn't commit, is hopeful he'll have a chance to clear his name before he dies.

Peltier, 77, wants President Joe Biden to review his case and grant him clemency so he won't die in prison.

He's not looking for a presidential pardon, because it would be granted for a crime he insists he is innocent of.

Instead, he wants a new trial.

“If I get into court, if the judge is fair, how are they going to answer all of that?” he said of evidence that was withheld from the 1977 proceedings. “I want to get a trial."

Recent calls from Peltier's supporters and family for him to be released have noted his failing health, including a recent bout of Covid-19.

"They're going to try and make me die here," Peltier said by phone Wednesday from his federal prison in Central Florida, his first media interview since 2016. "I have a last few years, and I got to fight."

Peltier's family says he is struggling with diabetes, hypertension, partial blindness from a stroke and an abdominal aortic aneurysm and that he tested positive for Covid in late January at the Federal Correctional Complex Coleman’s high-security facility.

Peltier said he was vaccinated against the coronavirus before he tested positive and that his chest, neck and head had hurt for a few days. He got a booster shot after he left 10 days of quarantine, he said.

The roughest part, he said, was being isolated and not receiving adequate care. He felt "cold," and "the food was bad," he said, adding, "That was worse than getting Covid."

Having spent years in prison mulling over his case and the various legal rulings, Peltier said there is evidence he'd like to present to show he didn't fire the bullets that killed the agents in a chaotic shootout on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in June 1975.

"My lawyer said if I were tried today, they would never get away with it," he said.

His attorney, Kevin Sharp, a former federal judge, said Peltier has exhausted his appeals and that there remains no actual process for him to get a new trial unless federal prosecutors decide to reopen the case.

"They wouldn't do that, because there's no evidence to convict him on," Sharp said. "He was convicted on aiding and abetting murder, but who did he aid and abet? His co-defendants were acquitted based on self-defense."

Over the decades, criminal justice reform advocates have continued to highlight his arrest and conviction, saying it symbolizes systemic problems with how Native Americans are treated in the justice system, as well as imprisoned at higher rates by the federal government compared to other racial groups.

Human rights organizations and prominent political and religious figures, including Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama and other Nobel Peace Prize recipients, such as Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu, are reported to have called for Peltier's release.

Peltier's case has drawn scrutiny from those living on the Pine Ridge reservation, as well as members of his tribe, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Other Native American activists and groups also believe Peltier is innocent and was made a scapegoat by the federal government in its pursuit to hold someone accountable for the agents' deaths.

But he has consistently been denied parole — in 2009, federal prosecutors said he was "an unrepentant, cold-blooded murderer" — and he isn't eligible again until 2024. In October, 11 members of Congress petitioned the Biden administration to grant clemency based on compassionate grounds.

Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., a clemency supporter, said he spoke with Peltier by phone after he learned Peltier had Covid. Grijalva's office said last month that Peltier described "difficulties receiving adequate medical attention and gaining access to basic needs, like water."

The Justice Department's Bureau of Prisons declined to comment on Peltier's case, citing privacy and security reasons. It said that it makes "every effort" to ensure the safety of inmates and that at Coleman, every inmate is given access to drinking water, adequate medical care and food.

Sharp said he believes Peltier's age, health and recent illness make him a prime candidate for release and that his clean and nonviolent prison record also indicates he isn't a threat to the public.

The number of inmates with Covid at federal prisons reached its peak around the time Peltier contracted the coronavirus, with close to 10,000 of them testing positive, according to Justice Department data. Active cases have dropped to about 100 this week, but Sharp believes Peltier is still at risk.

"Leonard Peltier is incapable of protecting himself. And if you're not going to do it, BOP, let him go home," Sharp said, referring to the Bureau of Prisons. "This is where justice and mercy meet. Grant him clemency and send him home."

It's unclear how familiar Biden is with Peltier's case, which has spawned hundreds of pages of FBI files; several books, including his own memoir, published in 1999; and the 1992 documentary "Incident at Oglala," which was narrated by Robert Redford.

The FBI said in a statement Thursday that it remains "resolute against the commutation of Leonard Peltier's sentence" and that "we must never forget or put aside that Peltier intentionally and mercilessly murdered these two young men and has never expressed remorse for his ruthless actions."

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Asked in January whether Biden was reviewing a request to commute Peltier's sentence, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters, "I don't have anything to predict for you."

In recent weeks, Democrats have tried to appeal to Biden. The Democratic National Committee's Native American Caucus wrote in a letter last week that Peltier's continued incarceration "symbolizes the decades-old racial injustice towards Native Americans," HuffPost reported.

The encounter that led Peltier to prison involved a pair of FBI agents, Jack Coler and Ron Williams, who went onto a compound on the Pine Ridge reservation to arrest a man on a federal warrant in connection with the theft of a pair of cowboy boots, according to the agency's investigative files.

Peltier was a member of the American Indian Movement, a grassroots activist organization that began in Minneapolis in the 1960s to challenge police brutality and the oppression of Native Americans' rights. He was at Pine Ridge in 1975 in the wake of a drawn-out protest two years earlier at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, where armed American Indian Movement activists and Oglala Sioux tribal members had occupied the town and clashed with federal law enforcement officers. Two activists were killed.

On the day Coler and Williams were at Pine Ridge, they radioed that they had come under fire. It's unclear who pulled the trigger first; the FBI said the men were in a shootout that lasted 10 minutes. Both men were killed by bullets fired at close range. According to the FBI, Peltier was identified as the only person in possession of a weapon that could fire the type of bullet that killed them.

Dozens of people participated in the gunfight; at trial, two co-defendants were acquitted after they claimed self-defense. When Peltier was tried separately in 1977, no witnesses were presented who could identify him as the shooter, and unbeknown to his defense lawyers at the time, the federal government had withheld a ballistics report indicating the fatal bullets didn't come from his weapon, Sharp said.

"My co-defendants were found not guilty in self-defense, and I'm the one doing all this time," Peltier said.

The FBI maintains his conviction was "rightly and fairly obtained" and "has withstood numerous appeals to multiple courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court."

The incident is seen as an emblematic struggle between Native Americans and the federal government, particularly on Indigenous lands, and it has long rankled Indigenous activists who say the killing of a Native American man in the shootout was never formally investigated.

Over the years, former FBI agents have pushed back against Peltier's claim of innocence and bid for clemency. When Peltier's family sought help from President Bill Clinton, then-FBI Director Louis Freeh wrote in a letter that "ignoring for a moment, the extreme and remorseless brutality of the acts themselves, our employees see Peltier's crimes as a complete affront to our cherished system of government under the rule of law."

In a rare public demonstration by members of the FBI, about 500 active and retired agents and staff members marched to the White House to protest any action by Clinton.

But last year, retired federal prosecutor James Reynolds, who supervised Peltier's post-trial sentencing and appeals, broke from the federal government's position.

He wrote in a letter to Biden that "we were not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offense on the Pine Ridge Reservation." He also underscored a long-held belief that Peltier was treated differently at the time because of a "broken relationship between Native Americans and the government" and that he was prosecuted with "minimal evidence" that "I strongly doubt would be upheld in any court today."

Peltier said Wednesday he was grateful for Reynolds' letter.

"If I could say to him: 'Thank you for finally coming forward. ... I thank you for your courage, and I hope that you can prevent this from ever happening to anyone else.'"

Two of Peltier's adult children said in interviews that they would like a meeting with the White House now so Biden can understand his case and why they believe his release is warranted.

"I know that Joe and Jill Biden are compassionate to the Native peoples," said his daughter Kathy Peltier, who lives in Los Angeles. "I think seeing the family would make them see him as a real person, and we can explain what he's facing so it hits a little harder for them."

Kathy Peltier said she had been hopeful that past administrations would listen. But the presidencies of Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump came and went.

In December 2016, Leonard Peltier's youngest son, Wahacanka Paul Shields-Peltier, died on a trip to Washington, D.C., advocating for his father's release. He was 41.

He died in the waning days of Obama's second term, when the family remained optimistic that the president would grant Peltier clemency.

With the loss of her brother and the realization that her father would never get to see him again, Kathy Peltier was in shock.

Kathy Peltier said that on the day Obama left office after having commuted hundreds of sentences — by far the most of any recent president — she turned off her phone and refused to leave her bedroom.

"I shut out the world," she said.

Kathy Peltier, 46, has known her father only as a federal prisoner. She said it has been difficult to come to terms with how he has missed out on his family's lives. He has six surviving children and a dozen great-grandchildren.

Peltier's oldest son, Chauncey Peltier, 56, who lives in Oregon, previously saw his father in 2015, when he visited him in prison. To channel his emotions, Leonard Peltier took up oil painting featuring Native American themes and iconography.

"The family prays every day and hopes he gets to go home, but some of us aren't hopeful it will ever happen," he said. "In his children's eyes, Leonard wasn't the only one robbed."

Leonard Peltier hasn't painted in a couple of years amid Covid restrictions in prison. But, he said, the art studio will be opening up again, and he hopes to pick up a brush in the next week.

To all of his supporters, including those who have helped with his legal defense, he said, he is thankful they haven't forgotten him and hopes their messages to the White House are heard.

"One of the elders, when I was convicted and I was going to leave the courtroom, she stood by the railing and said: 'They don't know who they did this to. We will be here the rest of our lives,'" Peltier said. "And they have been.

"I would love to go home," he added. "My family wants to take care of me. My tribe wants to take care of me."

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Smoke rises during an air strike on an army weapons depot on a mountain overlooking Yemen's capital Sanaa, April 20, 2015. Picture taken April 20, 2015. (photo: Khaled Abdullah/Reuters)

'We Are Lost': Yemenis Face Eighth Year of Struggle as War Grinds On
Reuters
Excerpt: "Khaled Rmeishi, 16, has spent half his life watching Yemen, and his hopes for the future, collapse under a war that has pushed millions in the long-impoverished Arabian peninsula country deeper into poverty and hunger."

Khaled Rmeishi, 16, has spent half his life watching Yemen, and his hopes for the future, collapse under a war that has pushed millions in the long-impoverished Arabian peninsula country deeper into poverty and hunger.

Rmeishi, who is in the ninth grade, helps his family by working at his father's car repair garage in the capital Sanaa and hopes later to have a trade job as a mechanic, plumber or electrician.

"When I first started my education, when I first went to school, all I saw was war ... It affected my schooling, my work, it affected everyone," he said at the garage, where he washed and polished a blue sedan and fixed a bumper.

"We've wasted enough years of our lives. I hope the war will stop and that we will live in peace and security."

The war between the Iran-aligned Houthi group and a coalition led by Saudi Arabia, which enters its eight year on Saturday, has killed tens of thousands of people and left 19 million people reliant on food assistance.

Some 22 million need support to access health services, 8.5 million children require education support and 16 million need help accessing potable water, according to the United Nations.

Fighting has displaced some 4 million people inside Yemen.

"We are lost, people are lost, it's as if we are buried underground," said Abdullah Hamzeh at Darwan camp near Sanaa. "My children and I are destitute, we have no income, nothing. We pray to God that this war will stop across all of Yemen."

Yemen's economy has collapsed and the flow of goods into the import-dependent country has been severely hindered by coalition restrictions on areas held by the Houthis, who ousted the Saudi-backed government from Sanaa in late 2014.

The United Nations has warned that the world's largest humanitarian operation in Yemen will be further scaled back, including food and health assistance, after a pledging drive raised less than a third of the $4.27 billion sought for 2022.

"Please don't forget the people of Yemen. We need your support as the international community, we need you to be active in the peace process," said Sami Fakhouri, head of the Yemen delegation to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, referring to U.N.-led peace efforts.

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The 2021 toll shows the killings span a Noah's Ark of species. About 64,000 coyotes were killed. (photo: Rory Merry/Shutterstock)

'A Barbaric Federal Program': US Killed 1.75 Million Animals Last Year - or 200 Per Hour
Oliver Milman, Guardian UK
Milman writes: "An obscure division of the US government had a busy - and ruthless - year in 2021, killing more than 1.75 million animals across the country, at a rate of about 200 creatures every hour."

Activists condemn Wildlife Services, a division of the USDA, which says deaths necessary to protect farmers and public health

An obscure division of the US government had a busy – and ruthless – year in 2021, killing more than 1.75 million animals across the country, at a rate of about 200 creatures every hour.

The latest annual toll of Wildlife Services, a department within the US Department of Agriculture, has further stoked the fury of conservation groups that have decried the killings as cruel and pointless. Wildlife Services maintains the slaughter is necessary to protect agricultural output, threatened species and human health.

The 2021 toll shows the killings span a Noah’s Ark of species, including alligators, armadillos, doves, owls, otters, porcupines, snakes and turtles. European starlings alone accounted for more than 1m of the animals killed. A single moose was shot, along with a solitary antelope and, accidentally, a bald eagle.

Wildlife Services targets certain invasive species that it considers a threat to ecosystems, such as feral hogs and a type of giant swamp rodent called nutria, but it also, controversially, kills vast numbers of America’s native species.

Last year, 404,538 native animals were killed by the agency, a compendium of snuffed out life that included 324 gray wolves, 64,131 coyotes, 433 black bears, 200 mountain lions, 605 bobcats, 3,014 foxes and 24,687 beavers.

Plenty of animals are killed unintentionally, too, with 2,746 unfortunate creatures, including bears, foxes and dogs, exterminated by accident last year. This is partly down to the methods used by Wildlife Services, which deploys leg hold traps, snares and poisons to target animals. The agency uses a variety of other approaches too, such as rounding up and gassing geese or shooting coyotes from helicopters or aircraft.

“It’s stomach-turning to see this barbaric federal program wiping out hundreds of thousands of native animals,” said Collette Adkins, carnivore conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Killing carnivores like wolves and coyotes to supposedly benefit the livestock industry just leads to more conflicts and more killing. This is a truly vicious cycle, and we’ll continue to demand change from Wildlife Services.”

Last year’s death toll was, in fact, fairly low by the standards of recent years. In both 2008 and 2010, Wildlife Services killed 5 million animals, and as recently as 2019 it killed around 1.3m native animals, a total much higher than last year. Wildlife Services, which has a mission to “resolve wildlife conflicts to allow people and wildlife to coexist”, often acts at the behest of ranchers, state agencies and airports to eradicate animals considered to be damaging to the environment, economic activity or public safety.

But this approach has long been opposed by conservationists who argue the killings are indiscriminate and degrade America’s environment.

The targeting of predators such as coyotes and bears, for example, can disrupt ecosystems and even aid the spread of invasive species. Various and pieces of legislation have failed to curb Wildlife Services’ activities, however, although opposition has placed restrictions in some states, such as California and Washington.

Most contentious is the department’s use of M-44 cyanide “bombs” to kill certain animals. The devices, described by Wildlife Services as an “effective and environmentally sound wildlife damage management tool”, are essentially canisters placed in landscapes that eject a cloud of sodium cyanide when tugged at by animals. It will typically kill foxes, coyotes and other targeted species within five minutes.

The use of M-44 canisters can go awry, however, such as when pet dogs inadvertently trigger them. In 2017, a 14-year-old boy, Canyon Mansfield, was covered by the toxic powder when he encountered one of the devices while walking his dog Kasey behind his home in Pacatello, Idaho. The incident injured Mansfield and killed his dog, prompting calls by environmentalists, so far rebuffed by the federal government, to ban the use of M-44s.

“M-44 cyanide ejectors jeopardize animals and people alike, and a nationwide ban is long overdue,” said Carson Barylak, campaigns manager at the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).

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Special Coverage: Ukraine, A Historic Resistance
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