The whole thing just sounds like some overconfident bureaucrat’s bad idea to me. What makes you think this isn’t allowing civilians to handle it? The idea that

The whole thing just sounds like some overconfident bureaucrat’s bad idea to me. What makes you think this isn’t allowing civilians to handle it? The idea that this is helping rests on that. If it doesn’t, it falls apart. Civilians don’t even know this program exists! That’s part of the problem. If a non-law-abiding rancher gets mad he pulls out his gun and shoots a coyote - and there are lots of those. Maybe he doesn’t very much in 2020, because of education programs. But should this program get the credit? For what you said to be true, you have to prove that these cyanide bombs are effectively controlling populations that need to be controlled - a huge stretch and exactly the claim that should be demonstrated by any defense. It may not be controlling coyotes (vs something that doesn’t need to be controlled, like skunks). It may be controlling some coyotes, but not enough to make a difference. It may be controlling coyotes but actually worse than angry farmers would have - killing them without rhyme or reason, instead of after an offense. This doesn’t look like a smart program that weighed the pros and cons and then went ahead with deployment judiciously. It seems questionable and dumb, which is why it’s also kind of a secret (often a very reliable tell). Note that there are no university professors or believable experts saying, “this is a good program with a lot of data behind it.” If there is good science to be seen, it seems suspiciously hard to access. It’s okay to be skeptical, dismissive even, of bad decisions without good data behind them- and it looks like that’s what we are seeing here.