Read our top ten reasons why the Washington Fish and Wildlife Department needs to reform here.
The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is responsible for protecting and preserving the state’s fish and wildlife, which it holds in trust for the benefit of all Washingtonians. But WDFW has lost sight of this core mission. It has become an agency focused on killing fish and wildlife, not protecting them.
This problem is not isolated—it reflects a deep, pervasive pattern within the agency, one that overlooks wild animals’ wellbeing, discounts their ecological importance, and disregards the science needed to protect them. Our Not My WDFW campaign documents these systemic failures in detail, showing how they consistently sideline evidence and exacerbate harm to the very animals the Department is entrusted to safeguard.
WDFW ignores science. Time and time again, WDFW’s leadership has misrepresented and ignored hard facts and the best available science, including peer-reviewed papers published by its own scientists and its own internal data. As a result, WDFW routinely authorizes overhunting and overfishing, and takes management actions that jeopardize state fish and wildlife populations—such as the decimation of the state’s cougar population, and the authorization of net pen fish farming in Puget Sound, despite the known danger it poses to endangered wild fish.
WDFW promotes unethical hunting. WDFW refuses to put ethical constraints on hunting; some of its leaders believe there is no such thing. If a species can be hunted, WDFW seems to believe it must be hunted, using any method that has not been outlawed—and even some that have been. For example, Washington voters have outlawed the brutal practice of pursuing wildlife with hounds, but some of WDFW managers openly advocate for that law to be repealed, and WDFW abused loopholes in the law to allow the barbaric practice to flourish for years, until courts forced them to stop.
WDFW’s default response is to kill animals. Whenever any purported “conflict” arises between humans and wildlife, WDFW’s default response is to kill the animal—or allow them to be killed. WDFW kills carnivores for eating cattle, even when livestock owners have left their animals in public forests without protection. It permits timber companies to kill newly awakened spring bears who are eating tree bark to survive, even though it knows that many of them are nursing mothers. And it sends hound hunters to pursue and kill cougars, even when the only reported “conflict” is the sighting of a cougar.
WDFW has betrayed the public’s trust.WDFW leadership has forgotten that its first responsibility is to protect and preserve the state’s fish and wildlife. It has sacrificed protection for the sake of consumption and ecology for the sake of the economy, devastating fish and wildlife populations to cater to the demands of commercial interests, powerful politicians, and tiny factions of the hunting and fishing community.
WDFW is out of step with Washington values. The vast majority of Washingtonians neither hunt nor fish, but value the preservation of the state’s wildlife for its own sake. WDFW leadership openly declares that Washingtonians who do not hunt and fish should have no say in state fish and wildlife policy, even though most of the agency’s funding comes from general taxpayer dollars. It is time to remind WDFW that it serves at the pleasure of all Washingtonians, and that its responsibility is to preserve, not plunder, the state’s fish and wildlife.