Vertebrate Pest Conference Proceedings collection
Date of this Version
March 1990
Document Type
Article
Abstract
I greatly appreciated the invitation to attend this Conference, and to share some thoughts on the future of vertebrate pest management in the form of a Keynote Address. In making the presentation, I will dwell mostly on a single document. This document is entitled “Strategic Plan for Animal Damage Control,” and became available in December 1989, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). The document is one of the products from a strategic planning process that began in APHIS about 2 years ago, and continues today. The process began at the highest level of organization of APHIS itself, and that effort resulted in its own document. The process then continued with each of the eleven organizational units of APHIS. The federal operational Animal Damage Control (ADC) program is one of those units, and the referenced document is the product of their strategic planning effort. The Denver Wildlife Research Center (DWRC), familiar to many of you as the major federal research program in animal damage control, is part of the Science and Technology (S&T) unit of APHIS, and not organizationally part of ADC. Just like ADC, S&T also completed strategic planning, the product of which was a similar-looking document. In my opinion, the document is a good one and will serve a useful function for the S&T unit. However, it is also more broadly oriented than vertebrate pest management alone, and, because the ADC document is more tightly focused and can serve as well as a basis for discussion of the federal research program in vertebrate pest management, I have chosen to highlight the ADC document. I will digress from its contents slightly only in discussing the research aspects of vertebrate pest management.