Ninth Circuit pauses predator killing on Nevada’s federal public lands

Native animals, such as mountain lions and coyotes, will get a reprieve from predator control efforts on Nevada public lands thanks to a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals order requiring the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services to  reexamine its policy of killing wildlife to benefit cattle ranching and other livestock production. 

The order, issued Monday, instructs the USDA to redo its environmental analysis to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires the department to demonstrate its actions cause no significant harm to the environment. 

The ruling does not affect lethal predator control efforts employed by the Nevada Division of Wildlife, except those involving federally-protected lands. 

“The decision keeps native carnivores like mountain lions and coyotes from being killed across Nevada’s 65 congressionally-designated Wilderness areas and 62 specially-protected Wilderness Study Areas, an area spanning over 6.2 million acres of federally-managed public lands, or roughly 9% of the state’s total landmass,” WildEarth Guardians, an environmental organization, said in a news release.  

“As the agency attempts to fix its deeply flawed and now invalid environmental analysis, top predators can continue playing their vital ecological roles free of human control and persecution in the state’s most remote and rugged public lands,” Jennifer Schwartz, Senior Staff Attorney for WildEarth Guardians, said in a news release.  

“Nevada’s wilderness and other specially protected areas should be sanctuaries for wildlife and places where people can experience true wilderness—not landscapes laced with traps, snares, and cyanide bombs,” Paul Ruprecht, Nevada Director for Western Watersheds Project, said in a news release. “The court’s decision underscores that the public has a right to know where and how lethal predator control is happening, especially when it puts people, pets, and native wildlife at risk.”

WildEarth Guardians and Western Watersheds Project, in 2021, challenged a decision allowing USDA-Wildlife Services in Nevada to employ aerial gunning, poisoning, trapping, and shooting of foxes, bobcats, coyotes, mountain lions, beavers, badgers, rabbits, ravens, and other wildlife on Nevada’s federal lands. The ruling marks the second time USDA Wildlife Services has shut down its lethal predator control operations since 2016, when it agreed not to respond to requests for predator control while it conducted an environmental analysis. 

The effort resumed following a court order allowing the agency to protect livestock grazing on federal lands. Monday’s ruling from the Ninth Circuit invalidated that order. 

The court ruled USDA Wildlife Services’ environment analysis was too broad and failed to consider the potential impacts on public safety and health of lethal methods such as lead shot, poisons, and cyanide ejectors, which were approved by President Donald Trump’s first administration. 

The agency’s new analysis must rely on current scientific studies of the long-term efficacy of predator control methods.