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'That's a bloodbath': How a federal program kills wildlife for private interests

A federal program kills hundreds of thousands of wild animals a year. Documents obtained by NPR show that many of those animals were killed in places where no damage to livestock was reported.

Conservationist groups have long protested the program, saying the government is killing animals at the request of private livestock owners without first presenting enough evidence to show that the management methods aren’t harming the environment, as federal law requires. NPR obtained and digitized thousands of Wildlife Services work orders from Montana, created from 2019 through 2022, and built a database that shows that the program’s employees frequently kill native wild animals without evidence of livestock loss. Killing a large number of predators in the same place can eradicate them from an area, said Robert Crabtree, a canine ecologist and founder of the Yellowstone Ecological Research Center, a nonprofit that advocates for evidence-based conservation efforts in Montana.

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