Skip to main content

Activists Under Siege: Mourad Gabriel

Support Provided By
Nyxo-12-22-15-thumb-630x385-100344
Nyxo | Photo courtesy Mourad Gabriel and Greta Wengert

December 15 is the birthday of Brazilian environmental activist Chico Mendez, who was assassinated at age 44 on December 22, 1988 in retaliation for his work to protect the rainforest. To honor Mendez, KCET's Redefine is using this week to profile Californians whose work on behalf of the environment has been met with retaliatory violence.

Super Bowl Sunday, 2014 was Nyxo's last good day. The rescued lab-mix companion of scientists Mourad Gabriel and Greta Wengert and their family, Nyxo had been enthusiastic company during field work Gabriel and Wengert did with the Integral Ecology Research Center, an institute the two co-founded in 2004.

"Nyxo was a handsome rescue dog who accompanied us on many research projects," said Gabriel. "Whether we were studying the mountain yellow-legged frog or spotted owl, he always had an inquisitive demeanor and vigorous spirit while joining us on conservation projects."

The next morning, Wengert woke to find Nyxo in agony on the kitchen floor. The local vet couldn't do anything to save him, and he died later that day. Gabriel took Nyxo's body from their home near Arcata to a veterinary forensics lab at UC Davis, where tests confirmed Gabriel's suspicions. Nyxo had been fed a fatal dose of a highly toxic rat poison used by illegal pot growers, with devastating effects on wildlife that Gabriel had been studying -- and speaking out about.

That poison, brodifacoum, interferes with the normal process by which blood clots. Ingesting too much of it can cause massive internal hemorrhaging. When used to kill rodents, brodifacoum generally results in death through either massive blood loss or dehydration. One of of a class of poisons called "second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides," brodifacoum takes a while to work and is usually applied in a bait, so a rodent may ingest way more than a lethal dose before the onset of symptoms.

And as animals don't detoxify brodifacoum in the process of being poisoned, whatever eats that dead or dying rodent -- a cat, a hawk, or a Pacific fisher -- may end up ingesting enough brodifacoum to kill a much larger animal. If the poison is used routinely in a particular location, the toll on the local predator and scavenger populations may be considerable.

In 2009, Gabriel discovered that an apparently healthy male Pacific fisher -- an increasingly rare small predator in the weasel family -- had died of brodifacoum poisoning. That's not particularly unusual: brodifacoum was being sold freely and over the counter as a commercial and household rat poison in 2009. (The EPA had ordered it removed from hardware store shelves in 2008, but Reckitt Benckiser, the parent company of D-Con, sued to block implementation of that ban.)

But the dead Pacific fisher wasn't near any farms or residences: it had been found in the high country of Yosemite National Park. Puzzled, Gabriel and colleagues did retroactive necropsies on a number of Pacific fishers whose carcasses had been collected since 2005. Four fifths of them tested positive for exposure to rodenticides. Some of them had been exposed to multiple poisons.

The source turned out to be illegal pot grows. In spring, growers would set out large amounts of rodenticides to depress local rodent populations, thus protecting their tender and expensive seedlings. Deer mice and other rodents would eat the rodenticides, which were often obtained online to circumvent regulations. Those ailing rodents would be eaten by predators, including Pacific fishers.

Pacific fishers weren't the only animals being exposed to the pot growers' poisons: Gabriel and his colleagues found rodenticides in animals ranging from spotted owls to black bears, in remote areas where the only realistic sources of rodenticides would have been pot farms.

Gabriel published the results of his study in 2012, and UC Davis put out a press release, publicizing it, complete with accompanying YouTube video:

Poison from marijuana cultivation on public lands

In 2013, Gabriel published a report on a dead male fisher found at an illegal grow site in Humboldt County, where the growers had hung carbamate-laced hot dogs on fishing hooks all around the site. Carbamate is a nerve-poison pesticide that's illegal for any use in the U.S.

North Coast public opinion is split on just about every topic, from Obamacare to bike lanes, but pot cultivation is a special kind of North Coast controversy all its own. Some residents express concern over the increasing takeover of the region's most lucrative industry by outsiders, including the cartels. Others maintain that the harm done by pot grows pales in comparison to that done by suburban development or the timber industry.

Whatever your take, it's hard to deny that California's climate and abundant unsupervised land has attracted a whole lot of well-financed illegal pot growing ventures to the North Coast and the Sierra Nevada, with serious ramifications for wildlife, water use, and the safety of both hikers and wildlife biologists. Shortly after Nyxo's killing, Humboldt County Sheriff Mike Downy told theL.A. Times' Julie Cart that that around 80 percent of the violent crime in the county was related to pot cultivation.

Though his office had no leads in the poisoning -- and that's still the case, despite a reward offered by the Center for Biological Diversity for information leading to an arrest -- Downey told the Times that he suspected a grower, and employee, or a sympathizer was likely responsible. "It's reflective of an industry that is unchecked and has no moral compass," Downey told Cart. "There's no regard for life."

Nyxo isn't the first dog who's suffered because someone had a problem with a human's environmental work. In his 1994 work The War Against The Greens, investigative journalist David Helvarg detailed one case after another in which anti-environmentalists and other nefarious types targeted family pets in order to strike terror into the heart of an activist. Take for instance Ohio anti-pollution activist Paula Siemers, whose dog was killed in 1992 as part of a series of assaults that culminated in a stabbing attack and her house being set on fire.

Or Albany Georgia physician Tony Woodard, who in 1993 was an expert witness in a suit over pollution from a pharmaceutical plant owned by Merck and Company. In March of that year, after word got out that he planned to testify that pollution from the Merck plant had caused stillbirths in one of his patients, Woodard's dog was killed, drained of its blood and dumped in his driveway.

It's standard enough practice among anti-environmental terrorists -- let's call them what they are -- that when journalist Jonathan Franklin wrote an article on anti-environmental terror that was published in the Spring, 1992 issue of The Muckraker, the newsletter of the Center For Investigative Reporting, he entitled it "First, They Kill Your Dog" -- a line taken from an interview with a victim.

Though losing a dog can be just as traumatic as losing a human family member, legal penalties for killing someone's dog in a terroristic act are minimal in most places. In California, which has some of the most stringent animal protection laws in the world, intentionally poisoning someone else's animal the way Nyxo was killed -- tempted with a piece of poisoned red meat -- is just a misdemeanor.

neighborlove4nyxo-thumb-630x419-100346
Kids in the neighborhood loved Nyxo. | Photo courtesy Mourad Gabriel and Greta Wengert

It's an easy and devastating way to inflict grievous emotional harm on a person, a direct blow to the heart with little risk if you're caught. And Nyxo's violent death certainly had that effect on Gabriel and Wengert, and on the community of neighbors who loved him, whose kids would often drop by to ask if they could take Nyxo for walks.

But for Gabriel, seeing Nyxo's death first-hand gave him even more reason to prevent similar suffering in other animals. That's especially urgent given the advent of a new generation of rodenticides intended to replace the controversial Second-Generation poisons. Manufacturers claim they're safer for non-target wildlife, but Gabriel says those claims aren't backed up with enough science to assuage his skepticism.

"Nyxo's death is still very painful," Gabriel told me last week. "But it's my personal mission as a scientist to keep studying the effects of these poisons on wildlife. Pacific fishers and other wildlife deserve to be protected. I have to keep working."

For the record: A previous edit of this piece incorrectly stated that the hot dogs Gabriel found at a grow site were laced with rodenticide. They actually contained a far more toxic pesticide. I regret the error.

Support Provided By
Read More
Gray industrial towers and stacks rise up from behind the pitched roofs of warehouse buildings against a gray-blue sky, with a row of yellow-gold barrels with black lids lined up in the foreground to the right of a portable toilet.

California Isn't on Track To Meet Its Climate Change Mandates. It's Not Even Close.

According to the annual California Green Innovation Index released by Next 10 last week, California is off track from meeting its climate goals for the year 2030, as well as reaching carbon neutrality by 2045.
A row of cows stands in individual cages along a line of light-colored enclosures, placed along a dirt path under a blue sky dotted with white puffy clouds.

A Battle Is Underway Over California’s Lucrative Dairy Biogas Market

California is considering changes to a program that has incentivized dairy biogas, to transform methane emissions into a source of natural gas. Neighbors are pushing for an end to the subsidies because of its impact on air quality and possible water pollution.
A Black woman with long, black brains wears a black Chicago Bulls windbreaker jacket with red and white stripes as she stands at the top of a short staircase in a housing complex and rests her left hand on the metal railing. She smiles slightly while looking directly at the camera.

Los Angeles County Is Testing AI's Ability To Prevent Homelessness

In order to prevent people from becoming homeless before it happens, Los Angeles County officials are using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to predict who in the county is most likely to lose their housing. They would then step in to help those people with their rent, utility bills, car payments and more so they don't become unhoused.