Killing Fields

In Vietnam, U.S. troops bombed the land in order to save it. The same logic seems to have prevailed in the wake of the 11 million-gal. Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska last year. To help win multimillion-dollar court judgments against Exxon, federal and state officials have funded the deliberate killing of hundreds of healthy animals. The aim of all this destruction? To better estimate the destruction caused by the spill.

In one $600,000 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service study, 219 birds were grabbed from several remote locations, including some national wildlife refuges, and shot. The carcasses, many doused with oil, were fitted with radio tracers and tossed into the sea to develop a tracking formula.

The Fish and Wildlife Service says the killings were approved only "after a lot of soul searching" in order to "develop a key piece of evidence." Following the spill, some 36,000 dead birds were recovered from the waters. But researchers estimate that the fatalities may have been far more numerous, between 100,000 and 300,000. The project seeks to demonstrate that the missing birds could have sunk to the ocean bottom, floated out to sea, or washed up on deserted shores. In separate studies, meanwhile, the state of Alaska killed more than 200 ducks and scores of mammals, including deer, otter, mink and seals, to analyze long-term contamination effects.

The Federal Government maintains that some conservation groups were told of the studies and agreed that they were necessary, but other environmentalists angrily reject the need for the projects. Says Allen Smith, Alaska regional director of the Wilderness Society: "I don't understand why they have to go out and kill a bunch of wildlife to prove what everybody already knows -- that a bunch of wildlife was killed."