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The U.S. Department of Agriculture went through $117 million killing wild animals last fiscal year, but the department doesn't seem too eager to publicize its achievements.

We think the taxpayers who put up more than half of that considerable sum deserve to know precisely what they got for their money.

The tallies of dollars spent and animals killed is available on the Web site for Wildlife Services, the inaptly named agency that conducts the campaign. (We feel compelled here to acknowledge the government's brilliance with euphemism — you have to really know what you're doing to describe the killing of animals as a "service.")

But the government got to this point grudgingly.

Wildlife Services didn't post online reports for fiscal 2005 and 2006 until conservation groups sent a letter to William Clay, the agency's deputy director, in which they cited a 2000 federal court ruling requiring the agency to post the data under the auspices of the Freedom of Information Act.

The newest online reports, though, for fiscal 2007, are posted by state. That means anyone who wants the totals for the entire country has to look at each of the 50 state reports and add the numbers.

That's hardly a daunting mathematical challenge, of course.

But it's a ridiculously unnecessary one.

A Wildlife Services spokesperson said the agency could post "additional tables if people are requesting the information that way."

Of course people are requesting the information that way.

The Wildlife Services' reluctance is tantamount to the Census Bureau announcing the populations for each of the 50 states, but leaving out the total for the United States until someone asks about that specific figure.

We understand that this issue, the tax-subsidized killing of animals, is infused with politics.

Some of the conservation groups that complained when Wildlife Services failed to make its annual reports available online oppose aspects of the agency's work, and we've no doubt they use the statistics to recruit people to their cause.

But the point here is not what people might do with the data — the point is that a federal law compels Wildlife Services to give those data to the people.

In any case, government agencies that seem intent on keeping secrets merely supply rich fodder for conspiracy theorists who can, if they gain enough traction, stop agencies from doing work that benefits the public.

We're pretty sure, for instance, that a majority of Americans would go along with Wildlife Services killing 1 million starlings last year.

And we doubt anyone will sue the government because it took down 19,584 feral hogs that year.