Every year, the United States government consciously poisons bobcats, coyotes, bears, foxes, wolves, and many other animals in the name of “predator control.” The Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services Program calls for these animals to be killed by the strategic placement of toxic poisons all across the nation’s public lands and national forests. That’s right—the same forests we lobby to preserve and protect are being treated with poisoned to kill the very animals that we should also be protecting.

I’m not sure who died and made the Department of Agriculture the United States Orkin Man, and I have no idea who called him in the first place, but mass murder of these animals should be something we avoid, not promote. Each time we work at “conserving a species” via death—as so-called conservationists like to call it as an excuse to hunt—we end up wiping them out. If there’s anything we should’ve learned by now, it should be that we don’t interfere with nature when it comes to our fellow creatures. When we kill off one species, after all, many more usually follow suit. Indeed, we lose dozens to over 100 species daily, mostly due to our own actions such as deforestation and global warming.

Aside from the ethical problems that slaughtering more than 13,000 of these animals through poisoning every year presents, the harmful chemicals used are another issue. One poison is known as Compound 1080, and it is so deadly that it is outlawed in not only some U.S. states but many other countries, too. (Many of us are already familiar with the U.S. government’s failure to outlaw hundreds of harmful chemicals that other countries protect their citizens from.) Sodium cyanide is also projected to kill the animals—though they often miss their targets and kill many house pets instead. Imagine if these chemicals ended up on your property—or in the hands of your child.

We’re also paying for this unnecessary program with tax money, which we all know could go toward better, needed things—such as real conservation efforts to protect the animals we’re already killing, or perhaps saving the schools that are going under all across the country due to lack of funding. Surely anyone could come up with better ways of spending this revenue.

Please write to your representative today and urge her or him to co-sponsor the new Compound 1080 and Sodium Cyanide Elimination Act. We don’t need these chemicals floating around in our national parks or our country at all, let alone these animals killed in the first place.