Problemi con i cacciatori e la caccia anche negli Stati Uniti

Dear Gabriella,

A shadowy arm of government animal-killers called "Wildlife Services" is secreted away in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Yet the only "service" this butcher bureaucracy provides is the wanton destruction of wildlife. And while its slaughter machine operates with a green light from a federal agency, chances are good it's being paid to carry out this sanctioned slaying by your city, county or state government.

This cadre of poorly trained animal executioners is often made up of local guns hired at the behest of powerful interests like the livestock and timber industries. During their killing sprees, these wildlife exterminators lay explosive traps like the M-44, a cyanide landmine with scented bait that lures animals to nuzzle or chew it, causing terrible suffering, maiming and death. They gun down wolves from helicopters, trap bobcats in snares by their necks, take out hawks with paintball guns, call coyotes close with electronic decoy signals so they can shotgun them to death, and blind jackrabbits with spotlights so they make easy targets.

We're working furiously to end local county- and state-sanctioned hunts unwittingly funded by taxpayers. Please -- help us protect animals targeted by this rogue federal program with a contribution to the Center's Stop Wildlife Services Fund.

We've taken a hard look at the data, and the grim news is: The killing is happening in a state near you. In Texas 389 bobcats were killed in neck snares in 2015, and another 105 were caught in painful foothold traps and executed -- the same kind of traps used to kill 220 wolves in Minnesota. In California 52 mountain lions were gunned down, as were 42 of Oregon's black bears. Wildlife Services took out thousands of geese in New York and raccoons in Ohio. Across America taxpayer money has covertly funded mass annihilation of wildlife, to the tune of 3.2 million animals last year. Not even squirrels were exempt -- more than 5,000 were killed in California alone on the public dime.

Because Wildlife Services is paid to kill wildlife by local governments, the Center for Biological Diversity has adopted a legal campaign strategy to shut them down county by county and state by state. We recently ended Wildlife Services' lucrative contract in California's Mendocino County, and now we're moving on to Monterey County to turn off the money tap there too. Meanwhile we've also just filed suit in Idaho, where Gov. Butch Otter has funneled hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to Wildlife Services to liquidate wolves.

Your donation to the Stop Wildlife Services Fund is a powerful way to defund these hired guns, one contract at a time.

But battling this entrenched agency in the courts isn't easy -- so we're grateful to have you by our side. Working together we'll do everything we can to end these killing contracts so that your state and local taxes are spent on schools, libraries and transportation, not on destroying wildlife. You can help us take down this well-funded butcher bureaucracy with a gift today to the Stop Wildlife Services Fund.

For the wild,

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This message was sent to gabcos-ta@libero.it.

Mountain lion cub photo courtesy Flickr/National Park Service.