Enviro Groups Challenge Anti-Wildlife Policies

…Two of the top environmental groups have sent out action alerts challenging anti-wildlife policies today. First, from the NRDC…

A little-known government agency called Wildlife Services is killing thousands of wild animals every year — and you and I are picking up the tab.

We need your help to end the taxpayer-funded slaughter of wildlife!

This out-of-control agency is part of the Department of Agriculture. It kills at the behest of big ranchers and agribusiness. It spends tens of millions of our tax dollars to “resolve conflicts” with wildlife — by using poisons, traps, aerial gunning and other brutal methods.

The result? More than 100,000 native carnivores — such as wolves, bobcats, foxes and black bears — are being wiped out every year.

The tragic toll since 2000 is two million dead, and that number grows larger every day.

More than 50,000 of those animals were killed accidentally. The victims have included endangered species and even household pets.

It’s time to expose this secretive and senseless attack on wildlife — and end it.

Please demand an investigation of Wildlife Services and its heartless “predator control” methods.

Make no mistake: The agency is going to carry on with its wildlife killing spree unless they are held accountable and forced to stop.

But that won’t happen unless hundreds of thousands of us make our voices heard right away.

Join NRDC in calling for an immediate end to this taxpayer-funded travesty. The lives of thousands of wild animals depend on it.

…and this alert is from the Sierra Club…

Strychnine is a deadly poison — but it’s slow.

A wolf pup that’s eaten bait laced with strychnine will die of suffocation, but only after hours of excruciating muscle spasms and convulsions.

That’s the cruel fate Canada has in store for wolves that get in the way of tar sands production. Wolves are being poisoned—or, if they’re “lucky,” they’re dying quickly by a helicopter-fired gunshot. It’s politicians’ answer to the disappearance of caribou that have lost their habitat to dirty tar sands oil development.

You read that right—wolves are dying to make way for tar sands and the Keystone XL pipeline. It’s like some sick alternate universe where Sarah Palin is in charge.

Within the next few months, we will know once and for all whether the Obama administration will allow Keystone XL to be built. Sierra Club members have marched and petitioned against it for years, but now we’re in the final stretch—and it’s going to take everything we’ve got to stop dirty tar sands from destroying everything we hold dear. We can do it with your added support.

Wolves and caribou aren’t the only animals under threat right now. Other vulnerable wildlife, like black bears, moose, and native fish will continue to be at risk if the Keystone XL pipeline is built and the tar sands expand as a result. So will the Boreal Forest—the “Lungs of North America”—the largest remaining intact ecosystem in the world, storing 11 percent of the world’s carbon and home to a third of North American song birds.