This is my favorite party of the year. It’s my favorite because I get a free pass to talk about intense environmental stuff without people looking at me with that, you know … “who invited him” face. Despite what you may have heard, we environmentalists are not always the most fun people to have at a party. We’re not so good at just letting go and enjoying the moment – no matter how much fun everybody else is having, we can always think about something awful … like the climate crisis, endangered species, or vegan meatloaf.
For example, I have trouble enjoying my father’s birthday. Don’t get me wrong – I love my father – he’s the best Dad in the whole world, but my father was born in 1931 and I don’t really like that year. You see, 1931 is when congress authorized the Animal Damage Control Act – which created the Animal Damage Control agency. Eventually, that agency changed it’s name to Wildlife Services, which might be the most misleading name of any agency ever – because it sounds like they do catering for animal birthday parties or something, when what they really do is kill some of the most misunderstood animals, like wolves, coyotes, and mountain lions.
I want to repeat what Michelle said earlier…Between 2004 and 2014, Wildlife Services spent more than 1 billion dollars in taxpayer money to kill over 30 million animals using aerial gunning, poisons, traps, and snares. I don’t know about you but I feel oppressed that I have to pay for this.
You know, sometimes I think I’m not qualified to do this job, because it really requires a psychologist or a philosopher to figure out why people just go along with spending $100 million a year to kill animals, or why we allow so many other terrible things to exist – like sexism, racism, and drone strikes. Please bear with me while I try to work this out with you tonight. My instinct is that all these terrible things are somehow connected.
I’m sure if you got a room full of ten year-olds together they wouldn’t agree to spend 100 million dollars on animal cruelty… assuming they’re happy and well-adjusted ten year olds. So, what happens, between childhood and adulthood? How do we arrive at a place where our government can be so cruel and oppressive? There’s a word for cruel and oppressive government – and that word is tyranny.
In 1831, exactly one hundred years before my father’s birthday and the Animal Damage Control Act – the French government sent a guy named Alexis deToqueville to the United States to study us and figure out how we work. Here’s what he had to say…
I seek to trace the novel features under which tyranny appears in the world. The first thing that strikes the observer is a multitude of people endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is a stranger to the fate of all the rest, – his children and his private friends constitute the whole of mankind.
Above these people stands an immense government, which takes upon itself alone to watch over their fate. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules – through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.
Honestly, I’m not sure what that means. I think, maybe, it means that because so many of us are distracted by our own lives, and because the path to leadership is so narrow – that we just give up and let other people take control. More than that, we don’t want the job. Maybe lots of ten year olds want to be president, but not many forty year olds do. The most creative and energetic minds are not only blocked from power, they prefer other pursuits. What I think deToqueville is saying is, “what we want from government is the space to pursue our own goals, and to excuse us from the time and effort required to make this country the kind of place it should be.”
Maybe that’s what happens between childhood and adulthood – we become so focused on our personal goals that we let others, we let politicians and bureaucrats, make decisions for us – really important decisions, with unavoidable and profound consequences – consequences that color our character, that define us, and that carry the burden of guilt.
It’s not enough to say, “I wasn’t there, in the room, when they voted to destroy some village somewhere or to shoot a thousand coyotes from a helicopter.” We are, each of us, defined by what our society performs. Not knowing what’s going on is not the same thing as being innocent. Ignorance is the second excuse for allowing cruelty to exist. The first is lack of power. There was nothing I could do. The bully was too big for me, or I was too far away.
I don’t blame people who don’t want to make the compromises necessary to be in the rooms where those decisions are made, but we cannot choose to be ignorant of the consequences of those decisions. Because you are here, tonight, it means you’re willing to learn about some of the fallout from these bad decisions.
So let me share a few more facts. Wildlife Services admits that its indiscriminate killing methods, and especially traps, cause massive collateral damage – killing more than 50,000 non-target animals since 2000. 50,000 non-target animals. This includes 150 different species. Among the mistaken dead are pronghorn antelope, mule deer, river otters, porcupines, badgers, foxes, bald eagles and… our own family pets.
Wildlife Services agents rarely handle federally controlled poisons legally and often fail to post the required signs indicating where those poisons are being used. As a result, cyanide traps set for coyotes end up killing hundreds of domestic dogs every year.
Every year the agency kills approximately 80,000 coyotes. Most of this is carried out with a scorched earth mentality, often torching coyote pups while they are still in the den. On average, the agency kills a coyote once every seven minutes.
I can’t help but think that something important – something mysterious or magical – is lost with the death of each and every coyote. It’s like someone is taking a knife and carving out a piece of our collective imagination. It’s not something that can be explained with facts or numbers, it’s something that you either feel or you don’t. And I feel it… relentlessly.
With your help, WildEarth Guardians has been in the trenches for over twenty years fighting against Wildlife Services, but this year, we’re launching a major campaign to stop the bloodshed.
Let me tell you how we’re going to win – we’re going to win by suing the bastards.
In fact, we’re about to settle a lawsuit with the agency that will prevent killing on 6 million acres in Nevada–that’s bigger than the state of Vermont and the largest such closure in the agencies’ history. We’ve filed dozens of lawsuits and we’re going to file dozens more – but lawsuits alone are not enough.
People have to know what’s going on – and we have to show them. The reason Wildlife Services doesn’t do interviews and refuses to release public records is because they know they can’t defend themselves in the light of truth. Cruelty, alone, is a terrible thing – but cruelty that’s hidden – that’s sinister. It is not an exaggeration to say that Wildlife Services is a parasite that hides in the shadows and thrives on blood. That’s a vampire. And we’re going to kill Wildlife Services the same way you kill a vampire – by dragging it, kicking and screaming, into the light. That’s why we are going to go state by state, county by county – shining a light on every dark corner of Wildlife Services, till they have nowhere left to hide.
If I could, I’d stop every form of cruelty. But I don’t know how. I do know this. Cruelty to animals is the window through which every other form of cruelty enters the world. Cruelty almost always flows downhill, from those with power to those with less, and no one has less political power than animals. I honestly believe that, if we can begin by stopping cruelty to animals, we can begin to reverse the flow, to stop other forms of cruelty. But as long as we allow one form to exist, others will surely follow.
Wildlife Services is, without doubt, a bully. But this bully is not too big for us, it’s not too far away, and we definitely have the power to do something. Tonight is neither the time nor the place to solve all the world’s problems, but it is precisely the time and place to tackle one of those problems and begin to dismantle an institution of brutality that has lasted far too long.
So, while environmentalists may not be the most fun at a party, it’s still good to have us around, because it’s hard to have a really good time when your tax dollars are being used to kill defenseless animals. So, let’s put these guys out of business, so next year, when we get together – we can have a lot more fun.
Thank you all for coming.
