Black vultures bedevil farmers, but are protected by treaty, so farmers are supposed to get permits to kill them

Vultures surrounded a cow with a newborn calf in West Kentucky. They were chased off in time. (Photo via Farmer's Pride)

Though black vultures play an important role in the food chain as scavengers, they’re also predators, and bedevil livestock producers by killing or maiming healthy animals. Laws intended to protect birds are complicating the situation, Toni Riley reports for The Farmer’s Pride in Kentucky:

Bourbon County farmer Cyndi Steele found she had to apply for a permit to allow her to kill more vultures than the law normally allows. Vultures are protected by the international Migratory Bird Treaty Act, but in 2015 Kentucky launched a pilot program that allowed each farmers to get a permit to dispatch five vultures, in order to protect their livestock. The state caps total allowed kills at 1,500.

"Steele said a representative of the federal agency told her to stay home and protect her livestock. Producers told her to use the common practice of 'Shoot, shovel and shut up.' The problem finally resolved itself when she purchased new guard dogs, a solution she said was expensive but effective," Riley reports. "The purchase made sense, however, when she compared the cost to losing $10,000 worth of show and breeding animals over a six-week period."

Riley notes, "The black vultures . . . are not the same birds commonly known as turkey vultures. Black vultures are pack hunters and like a fresh kill, while the turkey vulture is content with carrion or a carcass. The black vulture is smaller and stockier and has a black head and white tips on its wings. In-flight it flaps more and doesn’t glide like the larger turkey vulture with its longer wingspan."

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has a program offering permits for killing black vultures. It began in 2015, "with Kentucky being allocated 350 'takes,' with five per producer," Riley reports. "The number of individual takes had to be quickly amended to three because the number of permit requests was great. Since then, the number of takes allowed in Kentucky has increased to 1,500."