The Department of Agriculture has a really special program in the Wildlife Services division. They conduct “predator control” operations in the West, which basically involves going around killing stuff, especially coyotes. While they do more traditional things like lay traps, snares and poisons (sorta problematic for other wildlife, dickwads), they also let their employees fly around and shoot coyotes from planes. Their justification? Coyotes kill domestic animals (being as they are, like, predators). Last year, your Department of Agriculture killed 87,000 coyotes, but they’re being forced to do an investigation into the shooting-animals-from-airplanes program because one crashed in Utah this year. No one expects anything to change. [Yahoo News]