Guardians and allies sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today for funding Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s plan to kill hundreds of mountain lions and dozens of black bears without assessing how this slaughter will affect the environment.
CPW’s lethal experiment targets black bears and mountain lions in the Piceance Basin and Upper Arkansas River areas of Colorado. Its ostensible purpose is to artificially boost mule deer populations where oil and gas drilling has degraded deer habitat. But the Service bankrolled this killing plot without actually determining how the deaths of hundreds of carnivores would further destroy the ecosystem: mountain lion predation, for instance, produces carrion that bird and mammal scavengers rely on, and black bears’ foraging allows sunlight to reach plants below the forest canopy.
The Service is ignoring the potentially devastating impacts of killing these carnivores, instead scapegoating them in a disastrous effort to undo the filthy fossil fuel industry’s destruction. It won’t get away with this appalling behavior on our watch.
Read the press release.
