Giving Compass' Take:

• Pacific Standard reports that Oregon has banned Wildlife Services' use of cyanide bombs against wild animals, and some California counties have severed their contracts with the agency.

• The concerns of wildlife, and what today we would call conservation biology, were not central to public lands policy when agencies like the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management were founded. How can donors and philanthropists drive support to policy makers to take action? 

• Here's how to direct your giving to impact the most animals. 

Wildlife Services is a federal agency that shoots, traps, and poisons wild animals en masse at the behest of state governments, agricultural interests, and more. With a purported mission to reduce human-wildlife conflict and mitigate economic damage caused by wildlife, it kills many thousands of critters that come between ranchers or farmers and their profits, and it has done so for more than a century. Earlier this month, it released up-to-date data about its nationwide operations in 2018 and, as usual, the numbers were eye-popping.

According to the agency, which is housed under the United States Department of Agriculture, its trappers and field operatives killed more than 1.5 million native animals last year. The list of the dead includes roughly 515,000 red-winged black birds, 68,000 coyotes, 22,500 beavers, 19,900 mourning doves, 17,000 black-tailed prairie dogs, 10,000 double-crested cormorants, 2,000 mallard ducks, 1,784 gray foxes, 1,300 red-tailed hawks, 1,000 bobcats, hundreds of owls, 357 wolves, 350 black bears, one grizzly bear, and many, many more.

Read the full article about wild animal welfare by Jimmy Tobias at Pacific Standard.