4 October 2016

TUCSON, AZ—The Animal Welfare Institute and the Center for Biological Diversity today filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Agriculture and the US Fish and Wildlife Service to ensure that endangered ocelots aren’t inadvertently killed as part of the USDA’s long-running program to kill coyotes, bears, bobcats and other wildlife in Arizona and Texas. The department’s Wildlife Services program kills tens of thousands of animals in the two states every year using traps, snares and poisons.

“The ocelot population is crumbling at the feet of Wildlife Services’ indiscriminate and haphazard wildlife-killing activities,”said Tara Zuardo, a wildlife attorney with the Animal Welfare Institute. “With this lawsuit, we are sending a message to Wildlife Services that its tactics should not come at the expense of the future of this critically endangered species.”

Wildlife Services is required by the Endangered Species Act to consult with the USFWS on its activities that may affect endangered species, including its predator-control activities. Because Wildlife Services kills wildlife within the range of the endangered ocelot, and given the similarity in size between ocelots and many of the targeted predators, the USFWS warned Wildlife Services in a 2010 “biological opinion”document that ocelots could be harmed by its use of traps, snares and poisons (including baited M-44 devices that propel lethal doses of sodium cyanide into animals’ mouths).

Since that 2010 opinion, ocelots have been spotted in several additional locations in Arizona, including the Huachuca and Santa Rita mountains. New evidence also indicates that Wildlife Services has failed to comply with the document’s mandatory terms and conditions, intended to minimize risk to ocelots. This new information requires the program to reinitiate consultation with the USFWS to examine risks to ocelots and develop risk-mitigation measures. The complaint also alleges that Wildlife Services must use recent science to supplement its outdated environmental analyses of its wildlife-killing program in Arizona, which were prepared in the 1990s under the National Environmental Policy Act.

“All the latest science shows Wildlife Services’ predator-control program is expensive, ineffective and inhumane,”said Collette Adkins, a Center attorney and biologist. “With fewer than 100 ocelots remaining in the United States, we’re trying to ensure that none will suffer and die in traps set for bobcats, coyotes and other predators targeted by Wildlife Services.”

To protect ocelots while the USFWS completes the required analysis, the groups are seeking a halt to Wildlife Services’ animal-killing activities throughout the ocelot’s range in southern Arizona and Texas.