We advocate on all animal protection and exploitation issues, including experimentation, factory farming, rodeos, breeders and traveling animal acts.
FROM
Dan Flores,
NYTimes.com
August 11, 2016
One morning in the late 1930s, the biologist Adolph Murie stood near a
game trail in Yellowstone National Park and watched a passing coyote
joyously toss a sprig of sagebrush in the air with its mouth, adroitly catch
it, and repeat the act every few yards. At the time, Mr. Murie was
conducting a federal study intended to prove, definitively, that the coyote
was “the archpredator of our time.” But Mr. Murie, whose work ultimately
exonerated the animals, was more impressed by that sprig-tossing — proof, he
believed, of the joy a wild coyote took in being alive in the world.
Today, more than 80 years later, coyotes are the most common large predators
in America, and an increasingly common sight in our cities and suburbs. If
we paid attention, we might share Mr. Murie’s fascination with an
intelligent, playful creature. Instead, according to Project Coyote, an
animal-welfare organization, we kill roughly half a million of them a year.
No other wild animal in American history has suffered the kind of
deliberate, and casual, persecution we have rained down on coyotes. For a
long stretch of the 20th century, coyotes were, along with gray and red
wolves, the rare native American species designated by the federal
government for eradication.
In 1931, just a handful of years after the extirpation of gray wolves in
Yellowstone, the federal Animal Damage Control Act appropriated $10 million
for the erasure of coyotes in America. From 1945 to 1972, when a
presidential proclamation by Richard M. Nixon curtailed the war of
extermination, a Department of Agriculture agency now called Wildlife
Services collected the carcasses of 3.6 million coyotes. Many in the agency
believed its poisons had killed an additional three million coyotes whose
bodies were never found.
Amid this coyote war, a pair of biologists, Fred Knowlton and Guy Connolly,
published a study explaining how it was possible for coyotes to withstand
such withering, scorched-earth warfare. “The Effects of Control on Coyote
Populations” was a mind-bending revelation. Under persecution, the
biologists argued, evolved colonizing mechanisms kicked in for coyotes. They
have larger litters. If alpha females die, beta females breed. Pressured,
they engage an adaptation called fission-fusion, with packs breaking up and
pairs and individuals scattering to the winds and colonizing new areas. In
full colonization mode, the scientists found, coyotes could withstand as
much as a 70 percent yearly kill rate without suffering any decline in their
total population.
As modern studies in places like Yellowstone have shown, when coyotes are
left alone, their populations stabilize. The only real effect a half-century
of coyote killing produced, then, was to introduce coyote Manifest Destiny,
as they spread out of the West and into the East and South and big cities.
Despite Nixon’s decision, Wildlife Services continues its pursuit, spending
$140 million a year to kill coyotes and other “undesirable” animals. The
agency exists to serve one constituency, a dwindling American sheep
industry, for which it still sends planes and helicopters after 80,000
coyotes a year. On behalf of our nation’s sheep, from 2006 to 2011 the
agency “retired” 512,710 coyotes.
The government isn’t the only one going after coyotes. Hundreds die each
year in weekend hunting “competitions,” often for prizes or gambling pots,
that are promoted as a way to attract young people to hunting. Their victims
are not only coyotes but the very image of rural America, tarnished by
widespread photos of beefy, middle-aged men in camouflage, with guns in hand
and dead animals no one is ever going to eat piled up in the backs of
pickups.
Coyotes are not endangered, and they don’t need our help to survive as a
species (though recovering populations of wolves, which are often mistaken
for coyotes during hunts, could use it). But there is something perverse in
the government, and society, marking a species for death, setting it outside
the bounds of even our wildlife protection laws.
We know coyotes are intelligent, social creatures. They do not enjoy death.
No thoughtful human being, considerate of other life, should sacrifice for
pleasure or a bet an animal like the one Adolph Murie observed in
Yellowstone in the 1930s. Doing so is immoral — not in a religious sense,
but in reference to morality’s origins, the evolution of a sense of fairness
among members of a social species, which early on came to include a human
recognition that other creatures enjoy being alive and that depriving them
of life is a very serious matter. Over 2,000 years ago, the philosopher Bion
of Borysthenes elucidated why modern, competitive hunts for coyotes are an
absolutely abominable idea: “Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the
frogs die not in sport, but in earnest.”
Killing an animal that for five million years has had an important role to
play in nature is an act of adolescence. As long as urbanites keep their
dogs and cats inside at night, coyotes pose no unique or overwhelming
danger, certainly no more than other wild predators. So why do we continue
to mark them as targets for our blood sports?
Dan Flores is the author, most recently, of Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History.
Return to: Articles and Media Coverage
Read more at Stop Hunting/Trapping
WESTCHESTER4GEESE is an adjunct of ANIMAL DEFENDERS OF WESTCHESTER. We advocate against all forms of animal abuse and exploitation, including hunting, experimentation, fur, circuses and rodeos - https://www.facebook.com/Westchester4Geese