USDA Wildlife Services Patch

The USDA Wildlife Services sound like a program designed to protect animals, right? Wrong. Based under the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the job of the Wildlife Services is to kill predators that threaten livestock, such as coyotes, cougars, and, you guessed it, wolves (Bale, 2017). This agency was founded in 1885, and ever since then the red wolf population steadily decreased as a result, the original thousands of wolves across the majority of North America went completely extinct in the wild once already. Thanks to protections put into place by the protection plan for these wolves, it is now illegal to kill them due to their endangered status; unfortunately, gunshot wounds are still the leading cause of death among red wolves in recent years (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, 2019). The next time you reach for your McDonalds Burger, a product with conventional corn, or any other mass-produced agricultural item, remember that you are supporting a program that was a major factor contributing to the extinction of a species.