The U.S. Forest Service won't be killing coyotes in southern Utah's Dixie National Forest before Feb. 6, under an agreement in federal court Friday.
Meanwhile, U.S. District Senior Judge Aldon J. Anderson warned government attorneys, the government should be prepared to better defend its decisions to shoot predators.The agreement was announced during a hearing on a request for a temporary restraining order to prohibit the killings, in a suit filed against the Forest Service this week by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, The Wilderness Society, the Humane Society of the United States and three individuals.
On Feb. 6, Anderson will hear a motion by the environmentalists for a temporary restraining order. Whether predators are killed after that depends on the outcome of the hearing.
The suit was a response to an April 25 decision by Dixie Forest supervisor Hugh Thompson, based in Cedar City, to implement a wide range of predator controls. They include aerial gunning, cyanide poisoning and killing coyote pups in their dens.
"I've had some experience with environmental cases," Anderson said in the short hearing. "They're important."
When he studied documents filed in the case, he thought he should check on parts discussing the effectiveness of the predator-control program.
"There must of necessity be a factual setting of substance," he said. "Conclusions with respect to the effectiveness of the kill are very important in determining the reasonableness of the plan."
But what he read "didn't give me a lot of confidence in the extrapolative process (about the effectiveness of the coyote killing program), at least as it's on paper," the judge added.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Roth assured Anderson, "I don't intend to come before the court with something I can't sustain."
After the hearing, Roth said Forest Service officials hadn't planned to kill any coyotes before Feb. 6 anyway.
But Stephen Koteff, staff lawyer for SUWA, responded that it could snow at any time, and that Forest Service officials could have decided to fly aerial gunning missions as soon as coyote tracks showed up in the snow.
"The effect of the stipulation is that coyotes on the Dixie will not be senselessly slaughtered until the Forest Service can prove there is need for this program," Koteff said.
In a press release, Koteff claimed the Forest Service failed to demonstrate any need for the project. He said the agency's own statistics show that only one-half of one percent of sheep grazing on the forest were confirmed lost to predators in 1990, and that the cost of the lethal controls far exceeded the value of the sheep lost.
Ken Rait, issues coordinator for SUWA, said an appeal by SUWA halted Dixie's aerial gunning program last winter and that a separate appeal by the group about Fishlake National Forest (also in southern Utah) terminated all predator controls there last year.
"The Forest Service has been continually unable to prove that by turning the public lands into killing fields, predation by indigenous wildlife on livestock is curtailed," Rait said.