Photo by Bobby Mc Leod on Unsplash
President Trump’s administration has reopened the door to M-44 sodium cyanide devices on public lands, and the decision is being framed as a wildlife management issue. But it is not only a wildlife management issue. Yes, it is about coyotes, foxes, wolves, and the family dogs that will never be the intended targets. But the deeper question is what kind of country we become when we normalize placing cyanide into shared landscapes and call it stewardship.
The policy shift may sound bureaucratic, a memorandum, a reversal, a case-by-case review, but the practical effect is simple: sodium cyanide devices are back on the table for use on public land.
For anyone tempted to say they do not care about coyotes, the larger point remains: public land is not an industrial kill zone. It is habitat, a watershed, a soil, microbial community, a grazing land, a recreation space, a migration corridor, and an ecological common ground we all share. We keep pretending that any chemical poison can be surgically deployed in nature, as though nature respects our intended categories. It does not. What enters an ecosystem enters a web of shared life, and ecological webs do not honor our target zones.
Cyanide is not a benign tool. It is a mitochondrial poison — one that blocks the body’s ability to use oxygen at the cellular level, causing death not from lack of oxygen, but from the cell’s inability to use it. This is the same conversation we keep refusing to acknowledge about the full spectrum of toxic, chemical burdens we release into our environments, such as pesticides, herbicides, heavy metals, PFAS, mycotoxins. The assumption in each case is that a toxin will stay in one place where we put it, affect only what we intend, and leave everything else undisturbed. That assumption has never once been correct. Nature does not honor our intended targets, and toxicology has been proving that for decades.
Our bodies are not separate from the environment. The animals we share this land with are not separate from the living systems that sustain it. And we are not separate from either. These are not sentimental claims dressed up as ecology; they are biological realities.
The question is not only whether M-44 devices kill predators. Of course they do. That is the intended mechanism. The question is why a society with everything we now know about toxicity, ecology, and unintended consequence is still reaching for chemical violence as a first response. Cyanide does not enter a landscape as a contained idea. Once released, it can move through air, soil, water, and the living bodies that encounter it. If public lands require stewardship, then stewardship cannot mean baiting the ground with a mitochondrial poison and hoping the ‘right’ living thing dies.
And maybe we should ask the simplest question of all: is it so wrong to care about the animals whose land we keep taking, whose habitats we keep shrinking, and whose survival we keep treating as an inconvenience?
Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that “all flourishing is mutual,” and that is the truth underneath all of this. I care about these animals for the same reason I care about endocrine-disrupting chemicals, contaminated water, mitochondrial injury, poisoned soil, and the rising toxic burden now affecting our bodies, our families, and the quality of human life. It is all one conversation, because it is all one web.
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