2.8 Million Wild Animals Killed: What the USDA Wildlife Services Data Shows

A US federal agency killed exactly 2,833,285 wild animals in fiscal year 2025. That is what the data published at the end of September by Wildlife Services, a program of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), shows. On average, that is more than 7,700 animals a day. The animal protection group World Animal Protection has now shared the figures and puts part of the blame on industrial animal farming.

We went through the agency’s original tables. The numbers are correct. Read closely, though, they tell a story most posts leave out: the rise of more than 900,000 animals is almost entirely starlings. And the agency itself explains it with protecting dairy farms.

Contents6 chapters

1. 01What Wildlife Services is
2. 02Which animals were killed
3. 03The real number: two million starlings
4. 04What the posts leave out
5. 05The animal ethics angle
6. 06What you can do

What Wildlife Services is.

Wildlife Services is part of the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). It steps in when wild animals are said to threaten crops, livestock, airports, buildings or human health. Often it only drives them away. According to its own report, it dealt with about 28.1 million animals in 2025 and dispersed about 25.2 million of them. Just over ten percent were killed.

About half of the program is paid for with federal funds, around 138 million dollars. The other half, just over 124 million, comes from cooperators such as states, local governments, airports and farms. The fiscal year ran from 1 October 2024 to 30 September 2025.

Which animals were killed.

We checked World Animal Protection’s list line by line against the agency’s tables. This is how many animals of these species Wildlife Services killed in 2025:

• 68,760 feral pigeons
• 61,383 coyotes
• 23,422 beavers
• 8,629 raccoons
• 2,292 opossums
• 1,314 red foxes
• 743 feral or free-ranging cats
• 402 black bears
• 326 gray wolves, plus 3 endangered Mexican wolves
• 122 feral or free-ranging dogs, plus one livestock guardian dog that died in a snare by accident

These numbers include animals that were never the target. For raccoons it is 464, for coyotes 117. The agency itself reports 2,246 native animals killed unintentionally in 2025.

Most of the gray wolves died in Minnesota (208), Montana and Wyoming (39 each). In Minnesota almost all were caught in foothold traps and snares, in Montana 38 of 39 were shot from helicopters.

The real number: two million starlings.

Coyotes and wolves make the headlines. The biggest group, though, is birds. Wildlife Services killed 2,150,100 European starlings in 2025, three quarters of all animals killed. Far behind are 131,740 feral swine.

Almost all of the starlings died from DRC-1339, a poison the agency puts out in bait. In total it killed 2,012,691 animals, including more than 10,000 common ravens.

This is where the increase comes from. In 2024, Wildlife Services killed 1,928,932 animals. In 2025 it was 904,353 more, and 903,660 of those were starlings. The agency explains it itself: because of bird flu concerns, producers asked for additional poison treatments, and staff stepped up efforts to protect dairy facilities from starlings to avoid losses in milk production.

So World Animal Protection’s point that wildlife pays the price for industrial animal farming is, in this case, fairly literal.

What the posts leave out.

A few things World Animal Protection doesn’t mention. According to the agency, 86.7 percent of the animals killed belong to invasive species. These include European starlings, feral pigeons and feral swine, which are not native to North America. For the animals that changes nothing, they die all the same. But it explains why the agency presents its figures so differently from animal advocates.

Measured by spending, agriculture is also not the biggest client. Just under 33 percent of the money in 2025 went to protecting agriculture, meaning livestock, crops, aquaculture and timber. More, just under 37 percent, went to human health and safety, for example at airports. The starlings at dairy farms show, however, that animal farming plays a big part in the killing.

The methods mentioned are all real, just on very different scales. 72,331 animals were shot from helicopters and planes, mostly feral swine and coyotes. Glue traps do appear in the data, but only for 90 animals, most of them exotic reptiles.

The animal ethics angle.

Whether an animal counts as native or invasive says something about where it came from, not about its ability to suffer. A starling dying from poisoned bait suffers just like a coyote in a snare. Starlings in North America go back to people who released them in the 19th century. Now their descendants are killed by the million because they feed where cows are fed.

This shows how closely wildlife and animal farming are linked. Huge feed areas and open barns attract birds, pastures attract predators. A system that keeps millions of animals for milk and meat creates constant conflict with the animals that lived there first, and very often it resolves that conflict by killing them.

Wildlife is killed in Europe too, often under the label of hunting. Read more in our piece on the EU lead shot ban.

What you can do.

The dairy facilities where extra starlings were poisoned in 2025 exist because milk is bought. Switching to plant milks takes a little demand out of that cycle. Our barista oat milk test is a good place to start. Coyotes are also hit a second way: their fur still ends up on jacket hoods, as our article on Woolrich going fur-free shows.

If you want to go deeper into the history of the coyote and the decades-long campaign against it, Dan Flores’ book “Coyote America” is a good read.

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