I'M home at the ranch for the holidays, recalling Christmas traditions.

Both my family and my wife feed our animals special rations on Christmas morning. My grandmother would bake oatmeal biscuits with lots of meat trimmings for their dog and a warm corn mash for her chickens. Granddad would give the cows and sheep leafy, second-cutting clover and the horses extra oats, even though they wouldn't work that day. My wife, Ramona, and her father would take a toboggan-load of hay to the old buffalo bulls on the Targhee National Forest.

The ewes on our Montana ranch, bred to lamb in March, were on maintenance rations: 7 bales of hay for each 100 ewes. As they became heavy with lambs, we fed more and more of ever more nutritious feed. Yet, on Christmas, we'd give them a treat and a preview of good food to come: second-cutting alfalfa and some soybean cake.

In financial terms this made no sense, but the sheep loved it and we felt warm. We depended on our animals and they on us. Each Christmas we'd give them more than good husbandry.

Urban people can't easily celebrate Christmas by pampering livestock. However, they can still do a good deed for animals, predators and, later, those lower on the food chain, by restoring balance to the system. My proposal even fits with the new mood in Washington, D.C. Here it is.

After writing your holiday letters to friends and loved ones, write another to your senators and member of Congress asking them to cut off the federal Animal Damage Control (ADC) program.

The program is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The ADC's program is quite broad. It helps protect corn and sunflowers from blackbirds, airplanes from hawks, geese, and owls, and pasture land from prairie dogs. However, the ADC's largest single mission is livestock protection (or predator control) in Western states. With overhead, its livestock protection costs run $13 million a year.

Many of us find the ADC's predator-control program offensive. Not only has ADC exterminated wolves, bears, and mountain lions in many of the contiguous 48 states, it employs barbaric methods. Many people find cyanide poisoning, steel leg traps and aerial hunts offensive. We carried rifles to protect stock from rogue animals, but ADC is indiscriminate, killing problem animals and innocents alike.

Even people indifferent to animal welfare should question the value of the ADC. ADC efforts are allocated politically. A series of National Academy of Sciences reports consistently indicate these efforts don't significantly reduce livestock predation. This is again documented by Randal O'Toole in his magazine, Different Drummer.

It shouldn't be so expensive to kill animals, but federal laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act all constrain ADC's effectiveness. These laws divert time and money from predator control to environmental-impact reports. We again find the government doing inefficiently something it shouldn't be doing at all.

Congress' desire to use predator control as a re-election tool means that funds are politically targeted to favored congressional districts not, for example, spent on non-lethal research. Congress targeted $2.1 million to protect North Dakota sunflowers from blackbirds and $248,000 to protect maple trees from squirrels during 1987-1994. These funds overwhelmingly went to states with congressional representatives on the agricultural subcommittees of the appropriations committees. Nearly 40 percent of the ADC's federal funds accrue to the 27,000 ranchers who graze livestock on public lands. The average subsidy is $550 per year, and far more for those ranchers who have permits for cheap grazing on federal rangelands.

Concentrating the ADC's benefits on politically connected people makes little economic sense. Losses to predators or other wildlife are a cost of doing business. We lowered coyote, bear and mountain lion predation by placing guard dogs with our sheep. This was expensive and time intensive but ultimately a good investment.

The mere existence of the ADC encourages ranchers and farmers to take fewer private precautions against predator losses. Subsidies short-circuit market signals telling us which areas are best suited for range stock operations. A bounty for coyote pelts - paid by stock growers associations, not by taxpayers who object to the practices - would be significantly cheaper and surely more ethical. Should a committed vegetarian be forced to subsidize this killing?

Subsidizing the destruction of animals is offensive on ecological, ethical and economic grounds. It is past time to put ADC away. Do something nice for animals this holiday season by writing Washington, D.C. And be sure to copy Newt.