The USDA isn’t prohibited from controlling predators in federal wilderness areas, contrary to arguments by environmental groups, according to a federal appeals court ruling.

Environmental advocates have failed to convince the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that controlling predators to assist livestock grazing is prohibited as a commercial activity within wilderness areas.

Commercial activities are generally banned within wilderness areas — federal lands where human activities are restricted — but grazing has been allowed to continue where it’s occurred historically.

Two decades ago, the 9th Circuit ruled that associated activities, such as predator control, can lawfully help livestock grazing within wilderness areas.

However, the Wildearth Guardians and Western Watersheds Project nonprofits filed a lawsuit in 2021 arguing that the ruling had effectively been overturned by a subsequent decision.

The 9th Circuit has now disagreed with that argument because the more recent opinion doesn’t directly implicate the exception for grazing in wilderness areas, which means USDA can continue to assist livestock production with predator control.

Predator damage management, or PDM, “is a permissible activity in wilderness areas when conducted in support of pre-existing grazing operations,” the appellate ruling said.

In a separate part of the ruling, though, the 9th Circuit has determined that USDA’s environmental analysis of predator control activities specifically in Nevada fell short of legal requirements under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA.

The agency’s environmental assessment of predator control in the state’s wilderness areas, or EA, didn’t “consistently describe the geographic areas where the planned activities will occur,” hindering the public’s ability to understand the effects, the ruling said.

“A clear disclosure of geographic areas where PDM may be conducted is essential to ensuring that the public is both informed and able to participate meaningfully in the NEPA process,” the 9th Circuit said. “By leaving the public guessing where Wildlife Services proposes to conduct PDM, the agency vitiated NEPA’s purpose because it deprived the public of the ability to evaluate the impacts of the agency’s proposed actions.”

The USDA didn’t include “sufficiently detailed information” about the local impacts of predator control in specific wilderness areas, instead analyzing the effects on a statewide level, and didn’t sufficiently examine the repercussions of using lead shot and cyanide devices in sensitive locations, the 9th Circuit said.

“Indeed, the EA made no effort to analyze any particularized impacts or even to describe the different types of environments protected by wilderness areas, much less analyze the expected impacts to those ecosystems,” the ruling said.

Finally, the USDA didn’t adequately respond to studies that called into question the efficacy of using lethal methods to control predators, according to the 9th Circuit. 

Though the agency may be able to support its decision to use lethal control, the explanations in its environmental assessment didn’t take a sufficiently “hard look” at the data, as required by NEPA, the ruling said.

“Here, the EA does not show that Wildlife Services adequately considered opposing points of view, and its failure to respond to the evidence of uncertainty weighs in favor of remand,” the ruling said.

The 9th Circuit has ordered the USDA’s Wildlife Services division, which conducts predator control operations, to cure these deficiencies in another environmental assessment or a more in-depth “environmental impact statement.”