Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

by Mary Roach

Breck’s employer, the National Wildlife Research Center, has had many incarnations and names over the past hundred and fifty years but always one goal: effective, cost-efficient wildlife damage control. Whether the wild animals were predators taking livestock or birds and rodents helping themselves to crops; whether the name on the door was Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy or Eradication Methods Laboratory or Division of Predatory Animal and Rodent Control, the goal was to help the rancher and farmer. What looked like pure wildlife biology—studies of animal behavior, food habits, migratory patterns–was biology in service of prosperity. With the birth of environmental and animal welfare movements in the 1960s and ’70s, a national conscience began to emerge. Activists pushed back against practices like den-shooting and airdrops of strychnine-laced bait. In 1971, Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club, and the Humane Society of the United States sued to end the use of poisons in predator control. The following year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) canceled registrations for strychnine and two other predacides. Advocacy groups sparked a shift in public sentiment, which over time has become impossible—and impolitic—to ignore. A growing percentage of Americans feel a strong emotional connection to wild animals and disapprove of their destruction for economic reasons. In 1978, three thousand Americans were asked to rate their like or dislike of twenty-six ...