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Just days before an annual killing contest in which some 40 coyotes were gunned down around the town of Adin, the California Fish and Game Commission voted unanimously to consider a statewide ban on wildlife killing contests.

Rapid assessment of wild animal population abundance is problematic, particularly for rare, cryptic felid species. However, estimates of population abundance are critical for effectively targeting conservation and management actions. Traditional mark-release-recapture (MRR) methods require recapturing hundreds of animals—often necessitating the capture of thousands of animals initially (Manning et al. 1995).

The remote borderlands between the United States and Mexico contain vast and beautiful wilderness and include the richest diversity of plant and animal species in North America. Why then, did the US government, under the Bush Administration, choose to waive the many landmark laws set in place to protect these unique areas?

Wildlife Services is a little-known program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that uses brutal methods and taxpayer dollars to kill approximately 5 million animals each year under the guise of “managing problems caused by wildlife.” It operates with little transparency, resisting public access to records documenting many of its activities.

Every year, the US Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services program spends millions of dollars on lethal, ineffective predator control, including chemical poisons such as M-44 sodium cyanide devices.

A federal judge has ruled that an Arizona animal cruelty case, involving a former employee of USDA’s Wildlife Services who trapped and severely injured his neighbor's dog, can go forward. The accused, Russell Files, had sought to dismiss the case, claiming that he was immune from state prosecution because his job with the federal government permitted him to trap animals.

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is one of the country’s strongest environmental laws. It has reportedly safeguarded 99 percent of the 1,482 species placed under its protection from extinction—in contrast to the high extinction rate for species not protected by the Act. Yet few citizens realize that some key provisions of the ESA are interpreted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to allow the very species protected by law—some of them extinct or barely clinging to survival in the wild—to be hunted in captivity.

In September 2016, thousands of government delegates, scientists, industry representatives, and conservationists will gather in Johannesburg, South Africa, for the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (CoP17) to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). CoP17 will tackle an ambitious agenda of working documents and species proposals to influence the treaty’s future and the species it is supposed to protect.

The “exempt” in custom-exempt signifies that this type of slaughter is excused from continuous inspection, unlike federal- and state-inspected slaughter, where government officials must be on the premises of the establishment whenever slaughter is being conducted. With custom-exempt slaughter, inspectors need not be present, and, in fact, inspection typically occurs only once or twice per year.

In a chilly hotel ballroom in the Washington, D.C. suburbs this September, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) heard from the public on the question of whether a farm-raised Atlantic salmon named "AquaAdvantage" should be approved as the first genetically engineered (GE) food animal.

Multiple serious and disturbing Animal Welfare Act citations by USDA veterinary inspectors at Harvard’s New England Primate Research Center (NEPRC) were reported in the Spring 2012 AWI Quarterly. In June, according to The Boston Globe, the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care International put Harvard on probation.

A powerful U.S. law allows the president to impose trade sanctions on nations whose citizens undermine conservation agreements.

Folks, please join my family and friends at the Animal Welfare Institute to see how you can help with this important American cause.-- Willie Nelson

After the precedent setting ruling by a federal court late last year that an industrial wind energy project in West Virginia will kill and injure endangered Indiana bats, AWI and other parties to the lawsuit have reached an agreement that will provide for more protections for bats and additional wildlife, while allowing some elements of the project to go forward.

The International Whaling Commission (IWC) Scientific Committee held its annual meeting in mid-May, once again choosing Bled, Slovenia, as its venue. AWI’s Dr.

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