Last night I returned home from The Outdoor Cat conference in Los Angeles, something I mentioned in a previous post. By now I must have attended and spoken at hundreds of academic and advocacy oriented conferences. The Outdoor Cat was one of the very best. I will have more to say on it in a post next Friday.

In the meantime, I do not want to let the most recent events around Wildlife Services to pass unremarked.

Camilla Fox (Project Coyote) and her colleague Cathy Liss (Animal Welfare Institute) recently published photos of purported animal abuse by an employee of Wildlife Services, Jamie Olson. They did so in a letter made public asking the agency to investigate and fire Olson. According to the letter, the incriminating images were discovered on Olson’s social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter.

I have inserted five of the photos below. Be advised they are disturbing. All of them show Olson’s dogs harassing coyotes caught in leg-hold traps. The last three are especially concerning as they appear to document two of Olson’s dogs killing a coyote.

Project Coyote and the Animal Welfare Institute also believe that Olson is an organizer of contest hunts for the website Coyotehunter.net. These contests reward individuals and teams for killing large numbers of coyotes. An advertisement for one such hunt is below. So too is a T-shirt sold on the site.

Note the “Top of The Food Chain” tagline for the website, as well as the caption on the T-Shirt, “If it bleed, breaths, or breeds… it is on the list”.

Whether or not Olsen is associated with Coyotehunter.net, the website represents the moral insensibility to coyotes and other animals that are of such concern to Project Coyote and the Animal Welfare Institute. I should also note that these contests are gruesome events that have nothing to do with wildlife management. In truth, they are bloodsport spectacles that reflect poorly on the ecological and ethical knowledge of the organizers and participants.

Tom Knudson of the Sacramento Bee has followed up on the Olsen story with an article in his series on wildlife management, and two members of Congress — Representatives John Campbell (R-CA) and Peter DeFazio (D- OR) — have sent a letter to Tom Vilsack (US Secretary of Agriculture) demanding an audit of the agencys culture with respect to predator control. Unfortunately, the Olsen story is one of many causing the public to cast a wary eye on Wildlife Services, and an investigation is clearly warranted.

As I have noted before (Wildlife Services Needs Ethical Review), a key element in an effective audit of the agency will be the ethical norms that underwrite its organizational mission. Such ethical norms are not simply personal preferences or subjective responses. They are the principles that should guide the agency in properly fulfilling its mission. They should also guide the everyday practice of its employees in the field.

Shorn of the moral norms that guide its treatment of people, animals and nature, it is far too easy for any organization, especially this government agency, to dress up unacceptable behaviour in the bureaucratic language of conservation and the rational use of natural resources. The absence of express moral norms also allows individuals to justify the abuse of animals, knowing they can duck accountability for their actions.

Yet it does not have to be like this. There are ethically grounded protocols for lethal predator management. The chart below illustrates one such animal welfare protocol in use by wildlife managers in Australia and New Zealand. This chart is from a slide of my presentation at The Outdoor Cat conferences, and is a summary of protocols based on the work of Kate Littin, John Hadidian and others.

As you can see in the slide, the protocol seeks to protect animal welfare by asking wildlife managers to consider the following criteria.

• Justification: Is there a need for lethal or non-lethal management?
• Achievability: What are the realist benefits from a proposed management action?
• Effectiveness: What workable methods will be used?
• Specificity: Are the methods appropriately targeted to the animal or population of concern?
• Welfare Priority: Are we using the most humane methods possible to achieve management objectives?
• Monitoring: How do we measure the consequences of management?
• Follow-Up: How are positive results maintained, and unintended consequences avoided?

In the language of practical ethics and public policy, these criteria are called maxims. They are rules of thumb that help guide our actions and behaviour in the world. Such maxims are not meant to be absolutes, rather they help us make better choices and achieve better outcomes in everyday practice.

Critics of relying on maxims may point out that it sidesteps more difficult questions about animal ethics. In this they are right. For example, the first criteria used in the chart above is justification. Significantly, this is not simply an empirical question about the need for action. Justification also raises theoretical question about how we ought to live with other animals, including those we find annoying, destructive or dangerous.

To address these kinds of theoretical questions we use principles, that is, rules of thumb that help guide our thinking. For instance, when it comes to Wildlife Services and predator control, we might use ethical principles that help us think through the moral value of animals and what that means for public policy.

For example, the principle of integrity states that we ought to respect the physical, psychological and social integrity of living creatures. Arbitrary, indiscriminate, or cruel violations of this integrity are condemned, while the opposite is condoned. This does not entail we adopt a rigid approach to animal rights or welfare. It is rather a means of identifying the moral issues at play, and providing guidance over what to do about those issues.

To continue with this line of thought, adopting the principle of integrity would also mean developing associated maxims that could be applied in the field. I do not want to get lost in the weeds of moral theory here, as I am only trying to illustrate what a principle is and does. What is most important to take from this discussion is that principles and maxims work hand in hand to help us understand our moral situation and act upon it. Applying moral principles and maxims to the work of Wildlife Services will help define its mission, ensure it treats animals and the landscape with respect, and provide guidance to its employees in the performance of their duties.

While we have to expertise and conceptual resources to do so, changing the moral norms that ought to guide Wildlife Services will not be easy. Despite any talk about value-neutral resource management, the agency clearly operates under moral norms that might best be described as dominionism — the earth is ours and we can treat it’s creatures with impunity. This is a dying policy ethic long since rejected by the vast majority of citizens in the US, as well as in Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Ecuador, Peru, and other parts of the world.

Wildlife Services has a long history of hostility to predators, powerful vested interests that want to maintain the status quo, an agency culture resistant to thinking in explicit ethical terms, and an enabling culture of mindless violence towards animals in portions of society. Change will be difficult for the agency and it’s personnel. As the Olsen story illustrates, it is nonetheless necessary for Wildlife Services to reform its mission, alter it’s behaviour, and manage wildlife on a sound ethical basis.