Bucknackt's Sordid Tawdry Blog: ranchers

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23 January 2013

The Deadliest Jobs In America, In One Graphic 23JAN13

INTERESTING....

For more from Planet Money, see What America Does For Work

Here's a look at the rate of work-related, on-the-job deaths in 2011 for U.S. workers. We included the three deadliest occupations, along with a handful of other jobs. (Here's thecomplete list, which comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

The number of fishermen who die on the job has gone down by nearly half since 2009. But fishing is still the deadliest job in the U.S. Most fisherman who die on the job die from drowning, typically after their boat capsizes, according to Jill Janocha of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.(Related: Trying To Tame The (Real) Deadliest Fishing Jobs.)

Loggers who die on the job are most often hit by a falling tree or are killed by an out of control machine.

Farmers and ranchers are most often killed on the job in accidents in tractors and other vehicles.

Most pilots who die on the job are flying propeller-driven planes, according to Stephen Pegula of the BLS. So the typical pilot killed in the line of duty is someone flying a crop duster, not a commercial jet.

Firefighters are less likely to die on the job than the average U.S. worker. That may be because we're seeing fewer structure fires and more firefighters are wearing their seat belts, according to the National Fire Protection Agency. Over a third of firefighter deaths from 2011 were due to fires or explosions, but another quarter were because of transportation accidents.

Cashiers rarely die from job-related causes. But when they do, it's almost always due to homicide.

Business and finance staff are among the least likely to die on the job. Nearly half of those who did died from transportation accidents.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/01/08/168897140/the-deadliest-jobs-in-america-in-one-graphic

06 October 2012

MAP: Which States Hunt Wolves? 1OKT12

IGNORANCE and a very effective propaganda campaign by ranchers has lead to the tragic and environmentally unsound legalization of wolf hunting throughout the Rockies as well as Minnesota and Wisconsin. EarthJustice, the NRDC, Defenders of Wildlife and many other environmental groups are fighting the federal and state governments to protect the wolves in the Rockies and northern states in a campaign to restore the health of the ecosystems in these areas and wolves are a vital part of this restoration. This from Mother Jones on which states now allow wolf hunting....

Hunting of Canis lupus is making a major comeback.

—By Jaeah Lee and Kiera Butler

Caninest/Flickr

It's a bad day to be a gray wolf in Wyoming, which today begins its first wolf-hunting season in more than half a century. It's one of three states—the other two are Minnesota and Wisconsin—that will offer hunts for the first time in decades this fall. Two more states—Idaho and Montana—will offer wolf hunts this year for the third time since 2009.
The red dots on the map below represent wolves in the United States—a grand total of more than 5,000 in the lower 48 and 11,200 in Alaska (where wolves have never been protected). Multiple dots in one state show approximate locations of wolves; in states with only one dot, only statewide information was available.
Click on a dot to see the number of wolves and their protection status in each state. Click this link to go to the article and view the map http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2012/09/map-which-states-hunt-wolves In some states, there are two population numbers: "Observed population" refers to wolves that wildlife officials have physically seen and documented, while "estimated population" is an extrapolation, a guess at the total number of wolves believed to exist. (Wolves can be quite elusive and their territories can span hundreds of miles, so it's not always possible to track all of them.)
In the 1800s, hunters drove the gray wolf to the brink of extinction in the lower 48, and it wasn't until the 1930s and '40s that states began to outlaw the practice. Federal and state endangered species acts helped wolf populations slowly rebound, and in the past several years, the species has been delisted in several states.

Today, wolves are possibly the most politicized animal in the United States. Many ranchers fiercely oppose protection programs—understandable, since wolves are a very real threat to their cattle and sheep. Conservation groups, on the other hand, point to wolves' important ecological role: Without predators, entire ecosystems can be thrown out of balance.

It's been a tumultuous few years for wolves in the northern Rockies. In 2009, Idaho and Montana offered the first wolf-hunting seasons in decades. Then, in 2010, conservation groups won a federal case that restored protection for wolves in those states. In 2011, though, Congress once again delisted the wolves and allowed the hunts to continue. Hunts in Idaho and Montana killed 545 wolves last year.

Special thanks to John Motsinger at Defenders of Wildlife for his help with this piece.

Jaeah Lee

Associate Interactive Producer

Jaeah Lee is the associate interactive producer at Mother Jones. Read more of her stuff here. Get Jaeah's RSS feed or follow her on Twitter. RSS | Twitter

Kiera Butler

Senior Editor

Kiera Butler is a senior editor at Mother Jones. For more of her stories, click here. RSS | Twitter

14 May 2012

Why Is the Government Killing Bald Eagles? 11MAI12

THIS is sad and disgusting, and it isn't only creatures as glorious as Bald Eagles being killed....consider the slaughter of Gray Wolves in the Northern Rockies. From Mother Jones / MOJO....

—By Tim McDonnell

Sighthound/Flickr

It's a sad fact of life in wildlife management: Every now and then, wild animals have to be killed for the sake of ecological or agricultural protection. "Culling," as it's known, is often a last resort and is usually carried out with a grim sense of necessary duty. After all, most wildlife professionals aren't big on the idea of killing wildlife.
Right?
An unsettling new investigation by the Sacramento Bee found that the federal Wildlife Services agency, an obscure bureau within the USDA tasked with "resolving wildlife conflicts," has in the last decade accidentally killed over 50,000 animals that posed no threat to people or the environment (in addition to nearly a million coyotes killed intentionally). The execution roster would make John Muir roll over in his grave: wolverines, river otters, migratory shorebirds, bald and golden eagles, and more than a thousand dogs (averaging eight a month!), including family pets. According to the Bee:

In most cases, [employees of the agency] have officially revealed little or no detail about where the creatures were killed, or why. But a Bee investigation has found the agency's practices to be indiscriminate, at odds with science, inhumane and sometimes illegal…because lethal control stirs strong emotions, Wildlife Services prefers to operate in the shadows.
"We pride ourselves on our ability to go in and get the job done quietly without many people knowing about it," said Dennis Orthmeyer, acting state director of Wildlife Services in California.

Officially, Wildlife Services exists to take care of things like aggressive bears, coyotes that eat a rancher's sheep, geese that won't get off the tarmac, etc. But the Bee reports that the methods the agency uses, like traps with spring-loaded poison cartridges, leave a grisly wake of bycatch, sometimes of federally protected species, that has been deliberately hushed up by top officials. Even people are at risk: 18 employees and "several members of the public" have been exposed to cyanide from the traps.

Carol Bannerman, a Wildlife Services spokesperson, said that 80 percent of the animals the agency goes after are "dispersed," meaning chased away, rather than "lethally removed," meaning (you guessed it) killed. But she admitted that the agency's methods were sometimes sloppy. She described a recent incident where a team was dispatched to remove arctic foxes from an area where there were nesting endangered shorebirds. Traps were set, but instead of foxes, they caught snowy owls. There was nothing to do but return to the drawing board and try again.
Bannerman insisted such mishaps were accidental and regrettable.
"No one goes into this profession because they want to kill animals," she said.
That may be true, but it doesn't explain the behavior of one agency official who, according to a former employee interviewed by the Bee, instructed that employee to cover up an accidentally killed golden eagle:

"I called my supervisor and said, 'I just caught a golden eagle and it's dead,' " said Strader. "He said, 'Did anybody see it?' I said, 'Geez, I don't think so.'
"He said, 'If you think nobody saw it, go get a shovel and bury it and don't say nothing to anybody.' "
"That bothered me," said Strader, whose job was terminated in 2009. "It wasn't right."

Bannerman declined to confirm or deny this report, saying it was "a complex personnel situation" that she couldn't comment on. Still, she defended the basic premise of the agency, saying, "It benefits the species as a whole by providing a response and giving people help with problems they're having."

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/04/28/4450678/the-killing-agency-wildlife-services.html#storylink=cpy

Okay. But if you see a USDA pickup rolling up the road, consider locking Fido in the house.

Tim McDonnell

Climate Desk Fellow

Tim McDonnell is a Climate Desk fellow. For more of his stories, click here. Follow him on Twitter or send him an email at tmcdonnell [at] motherjones [dot] com. RSS | Twitter

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