The federal agency that manages cyanide devices used to kill coyotes and other livestock predators won’t decide whether to lift a ban in Idaho until an investigation into a troubling incident involving a Pocatello boy and his dog is completed, an official with USDA Wildlife Services said at a public meeting Wednesday in Boise.

Wildlife Services gave a presentation on their agency’s multi-faceted mission at the Holiday Inn-Boise Airport in front of a crowd of about 25 people, not including two Boise police officers at the back of the room.

They also answered questions and demonstrated how the controversial M-44 sodium cyanide devices work. It was the second of three informational meetings the agency has planned in Idaho; the last is in Pocatello on Thursday night.

About 15 to 20 opponents of the use of devices — which they call “bombs” — waved signs outside the hotel before the meeting. One of the protesters was the sister of the 14-year-old Pocatello boy, Canyon Mansfield, who watched his dog die from cyanide poisoning.

Canyon Mansfield has suffered severe headaches, numbness in his limbs and emotional trauma from the incident, Madison Mansfield told the Statesman.

Madison Mansfield, a 21-year-old pre-med student who is working in Seattle this summer, said she dropped everything to go a Wildlife Services meeting in Lewiston on Wednesday to speak out against the continued use of M-44 devices, and she will be at the Pocatello event too.

“In this day and age, the use of M-44s is completely absurd,” she said. “It’s not worth the risk of losing pets, of losing children possibly. It’s not worth it at all.”

The protesters in the audience listened attentively during the first hour of the meeting, though several erupted spontaneously when Idaho Wildlife Services Director Todd Grimm talked about cyanide being a natural substance, occurring in lima beans, almonds, apples and cigarette smoke.

“How is that relevant?” one woman asked.

“People think that cyanide — instant death,” Grimm said. “That’s not necessarily accurate.”

Grimm said cyanide is also used in manufacturing, mining, textiles, plastics and film developing.

“I’ve been with this [Wildlife Services] program since 1992. Before March 17 of this year, I had never heard the term ‘cyanide bomb,’ ” Grimm said.

The cyanide devices are trigged when an animal pulls on a baited capsule holder; sodium cyanide powder is ejected into the animal’s mouth, killing it within five minutes.

Jason Suckow, Fort Collins, Colo.-based western regional director for Wildlife Services, said M-44s are a pesticide that has to be registered with the Environmental Protection Agency.

“There’s a whole litany of tests that you have to go through in order to get a pesticide registered,” he said. “They have to do all these various risk assessments — human exposure, pet exposure, all sorts of impact analysis before they approve any pesticide, not just M-44s, but any pesticide.”

Wildlife Services temporarily suspended the use of cyanide bombs in Idaho this past April, after hue and cry following the incident in Pocatello.

A letter to Wildlife Services from 19 conservation and wildlife groups moved the agency to stop use of the devices on all private, state and federal lands. They also removed all the devices that were deployed. Suckow said the use of M-44s was later resumed under new guidelines in all states where it’s authorized, except Idaho.

Wildlife Services says it’s authorized to use the M-44 devices in at least 16 states.

“WS [Wildlife Services] understands the public’s concern regarding the use of M-44s,” the agency said in a news release about the public meetings. “It is offering these sessions to provide information about the devices, procedures and guidelines to ensure that all devices are set in a manner that minimizes the chances of attracting non-target species.”

The news release said a 2015 survey of livestock producers found that more than 118,000 lambs and sheep in the United States, including 3,700 in Idaho, were killed by predators such as coyotes, foxes and feral dogs. They provided a link to an M-44 fact sheet.

“It goes to the larger question of what are our public lands for?” Kristin Ruether, an attorney for the Idaho-based Western Watersheds Project, told the Statesman on Wednesday. “They’re for wildlife and public use.”

Ruether said it is wrong for the government to “sanitize public lands to make them safe for sheep.”

“Our public lands are more valuable for other things,” she said.

The group leading the effort to end the use of M-44 devices is Predator Defense. The group’s website, predatordefense.org, has information about victims of these devices and proposed legislation banning them.

The Pocatello meeting will be from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Idaho State University-Pond Student Union, 1065 Cesar Chavez.

Lifelong Idaho hunter Marvin Jennings has bagged his share of black bears over the years.

The 43-year-old grew up in Boise but has lived in the mountains of Boise County for the past 20 years. He hunts big-game animals and waterfowl for food.

“I’m not a trophy hunter in any way,” he said recently from the front porch of a house that he built.

A 300-pound black bear that he killed a couple of years ago helped feed his family for a year, said his wife, Jamie Jennings.

The bear that upended Marvin’s life on May 28 — creating national headlines and reigniting the debate about the use of bait in hunting — wasn’t one that he hunted for his wife and two teenage daughters. Marvin was helping Jon Pendergraft, an uncle from Washington state, kill his first bear.

“We’d been planning the trip for a year,” Marvin said. “It’s an experience he’d never had.”

And it’s not one that Pendergraft will soon forget after watching a wounded bear chew on his nephew and try to shake the life out of him.

“You don’t see something like this every day,” said Pendergraft, a 66-year-old taxi driver from Lynnwood, north of Seattle.

Doctors harvested an artery from Marvin’s right leg to save his left arm, which has significant nerve damage but is still functioning. A tooth from the bear lodged in his artery and helped stem the bleeding, possibly saving his life, he said. A nurse visits him at home each day to clean and treat the deep bite wounds on his left side and back; another nurse is doing weekly checks to make sure he’s healing.

Marvin works as a general contractor. He has no idea when he’ll be healed enough to get back to work, and he said he’s having trouble sleeping due to nightmares. Though covered by health insurance, the medical bills are piling up. A GoFundMe account set up by fellow firefighters at the Clear Creek Volunteer Fire Department has raised $1,250.

“It’s a huge tragedy to my family,” said Marvin, who has received both tremendous support and scorn. During his five-day hospitalization, he got a card from someone who wrote they wished the bear had killed him.

The debate on bait

Marvin chalked up the angry backlash he has received to “Californians,” “tree huggers” and others who generally oppose hunting. But many Statesman readers online questioned and criticized the use of bear bait, a legal hunting method in Idaho that has been debated nationwide.

Critics say it’s unsporting since it doesn’t involve “fair chase” and can have unintended consequences, such as conditioning wild animals to seek handouts.

“That’s not really hunting, it’s ‘luring into a trap,’ ” wrote one commenter. “Are hunters too lazy to work at getting their ‘trophy’? My father and the men he hunted with in Washington would be appalled at this travesty.”

Idaho has roughly 30,000 black bears, according to estimates by the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. Each year, the state issues about 30,000 hunting tags for them; the annual number killed by hunters over the past 10 to 15 years ranges from 2,000 to 2,800.

More than 90 percent of people who obtain tags in a given year won’t bag a bear. Of those who do, 35 percent to 48 percent hunt over bait, depending on the year.

Some hunters buy black bear tags in case they come across a bear while out hunting other game, said Craig White, deer and elk coordinator for Fish and Game. Permitted black bear hunting methods in Idaho also include spot-and-stalk and the use of hounds. (Hounds and bait are allowed only in specific locations.)

The Jenningses see baiting bears with food as more humane than chasing them with hounds, and akin to other accepted methods of obtaining food.

“If you bait a hook, it’s called fishing,” said Jamie.

Marvin invests weeks, even months, in hunting bears. The state allows hunters to manage up to three bait sites, and there are many rules governing what food is used and the container it’s in. He puts up wildlife cameras near sanctioned bait sites to learn about the bears in the area. He then looks at those images at home before setting up near one of the sites.

Using bait to hunt black bears is prohibited in many states, including Oregon, Montana and Colorado. Idaho has a long history of allowing it, though there have been efforts to change that. The last voter initiative to ban the use of hounds and bait was in 1996.

“There are different perspectives among our sportsmen of what’s proper and what’s not,” White said. “I think people don’t look at baiting and realize the effort that goes into that … Hounds hunting isn’t necessarily the cinch deal that a lot of people might think it is. There’s tremendous effort training dogs to track bears by scent.”

The number of annual bear baiting permits in Idaho has increased over the past two decades, topping 3,000 each of the past two years for the first time ever, White said. That’s double the number issued in the late 1990s.

The black bear population, however, is not declining. That’s notable, he said, because state wildlife managers want to keep the population in check to ensure bears do not become a nuisance: preying on domestic sheep, damaging crops or wandering into cities.

“Because our bear populations are robust and a natural resource, we can provide hunter harvest opportunities without negatively impacting the bear population,” said Jon Rachael, state wildlife game manager.

What went wrong?

Marvin believes what happened on the night of May 28 was a fluke.

“I’ve played it back a million different ways,” he said.

He and Pendergraft said they were sitting 65 to 80 yards away from the bait site in the Clear Creek area, west of Idaho 21. The bear’s behavior — glances in their direction, ears back and gums flared — indicated that it knew they were there, Marvin said. It was about 9 p.m.

A shot behind the ribs took the bear down, and Pendergraft recalled seeing it tumbling downhill. Marvin went down soon after to check on it.

About 15 to 20 yards away, he said, he used a handgun to shoot the bear twice in the head, intending to end any suffering. He turned to look at his uncle. When he looked back at the bear, it was charging at him.

He was unable to lower his rifle quickly enough to get a shot off. The bear swiped his legs out from under him and bit him in the left arm, hip and back.

Marvin was able to reach the handgun. “I straight up had to shoot him off me,” he said.

Pendergraft, who was still uphill and looking for a fallen clip, heard Marvin’s screams for help: “He’s got me. He’s got me.”

In his haste to aid his nephew, he tripped and fell down the hill. He wasn’t hurt, he said, but he had no way to communicate the emergency to his son, who was sitting in a tree at another bait site.

By the time it was over, Marvin had fired all but one of his handgun’s 15 bullets at the bear. The taxidermist found that just two went through its head, he said.

Marvin’s arm was a mangled mess, and he was bleeding from multiple bite wounds. He told his uncle that he had to go for help. Pendergraft eventually got to a fellow firefighter’s house and called for help. Volunteer firefighters and EMTs took Marvin to a rendezvous point with the air ambulance.

Jamie said she reads to her husband at night to try to help him sleep, and she’s thankful for the support they’ve received from family members, who helped at the hospital, sent money and have helped with wound care.

Pendergraft is going to keep the bear’s head and hide — Marvin has a standing invitation to come up and “stomp” on it, his uncle said. He’ll be getting the meat from the butcher soon.

“Because of the age of the bear, it’s all going to be turned into pepperoni and summer sausage,” Pendergraft said. “We will be sharing it with Marvin — he well deserves part of this.”