A plan by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to expand predator control activities in Idaho has been overturned by a federal judge who found it should undergo a more extensive environmental analysis.
The agency’s Wildlife Services division completed an “environmental assessment” in 2016 that would increase killing and removal predators to benefit other wildlife in Idaho. U.S. District Judge Lynn Winmill has now vacated that plan at the request of four environmental groups because it violated the National Environmental Policy Act. However, the judge did not grant the plaintiffs’ request to limit Wildlife Service’s ability to kill coyotes and other predators and to prohibit the agency from using M-44 cyanide capsules, neck snares, and body-gripping traps.
Instead, predator control in northern and central Idaho will be governed by an environmental assessment from 1996 and in southern Idaho by an E-A from 2002, which the judge called “obviously outdated” and which the environmental groups will be allowed to challenge as part of a separate lawsuit.
Meanwhile, Winmill said Wildlife Services must decide whether to complete a more extensive “environmental impact statement” for its 2016 proposal or to come up with another course of action. Windmill found that Wildlife Service violated NEPA in an earlier ruling because the agency didn’t take the required “hard look” at the ecological consequences of expanding lethal predator control.
Before the proposal was finalized in 2016, the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and the Idaho Department of Fish and Game criticized the environmental assessment for not being objective in its analysis. (Capital Press)
