Proceedings of the Vertebrate Pest Conference

This paper reviews the Vertebrate Pest Conference’s beginnings, why it started, and assesses its success in meeting the goals articulated during the opening Conference in 1962. Probably moreso than any other state, California has a diversity of agriculture that gives every vertebrate a chance to become a pest, even those that didn’t originally live in the state. This, and the hard work of Conference founders, made California a logical place to develop a first-rate Conference on all aspects of vertebrate pests. At the first Conference, over 80% of attendees were from California. At the 24th Conference, this had changed with over 40% attendees from other states and almost 10% from other countries. During the first Conferences, the presentations were mostly about current control methods for various vertebrate pests. Now, the topics have shifted to deal more with specific aspects of control such as non-target impacts, pesticide metabolism, etc. The Conference Proceedings have evolved from a collection of 25 “how-to” papers in the first Proceeding to over 75 peer-edited papers in the 24th. Many of these papers, especially in the more recent Conference Proceedings, are cited throughout the international vertebrate pest control literature. Another trend has been the publication of multiple-authored papers. This represents the important goal of the Conference of getting people together to discuss and work on understanding all aspects of vertebrate pest control. It is clear, just by looking around at the audience and reviewing the program for the 25th Conference, that the VPC is doing exactly what the founders envisioned, and in my opinion, it is an unconditional success!