Department of Agriculture and renamed the Division of Wildlife Services. Mission At its founding in 1896, the work of the Division of Biological Survey focused on the effect of birds in controlling agricultural pests and mapping the geographical distribution of plants and animals in the United States. By 1905 with funding scarce, the Survey included in its mission the eradication of wolves, coyotes and other large predators. This garnered them the support of ranchers and western legislators resulting, by 1914, in a $125,000 congressionally approved budget for use "on the National Forests and the public domain in destroying wolves, coyotes and other animals injurious to agriculture and animal husbandry". Meanwhile, scientists like Joseph Grinnell and Charles C. Adams, a founder of the Ecological Society of America, were promoting a "balance of nature" theory - the idea that predators were an important part of the larger ecosystem and should not be eradicated. In 1924, at a conference organized by the American Society of Mammologists (ASM), the debate generated a public split between those in the Survey, promoting eradication, and those from the ASM who promoted some sort of accommodation. Edward A. Goldman, from the Survey, made perfectly clear their position in a paper that with the arrival of Europeans in North America, the balance of nature had been "violently overturned, never to be reestablished". He concludes with the idea that "Large predatory mammals, destructive to livestock and to game, no longer have a place in our advancing civilization." The Survey subsequently placed over 2 million poisoned bait stations across the west and by 1930 had "extirpated wolves from the Lower 48 and advised and assisted in erasing grey wolves from" Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks. The Survey then turned to the eradication of coyotes. [pp. 124–126], coordinated through the 1931 Animal Damage Control Act. With various agency reorganizations, the practice continued more or less apace through the early 1970s but though hundreds of thousands of coyotes were killed, their extreme adaptability and resilience led to little overall population reduction and, instead, their migration into an expanded habitat, including urban areas. Increasing environmental awareness in the late 1960s and early 1970s resulted in Nixon banning post WWII era poisons in 1972 and the passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973. Also in 1972, the Nixon administration rewrote the Animal Damage Control Act, effectively repealing it in favor of turning the mission