FROM
NationalGeographic
May 5, 2022
LIBERTY, NEW YORKHunkered down in a camouflaged hut at dawn, Timothy
Kautz trains his rifle on a deer carcass laid as bait in a snow-covered
valley abutted by swamp and forest. Glancing at his cell phone, he reviews a
recent remote camera video showing a grayish brown canine with pointy ears,
a long, narrow muzzle, and a bushy tail snatching some venison.
So far this February morning, the coyote is a no-show.
“Maybe he’s seen too many of his friends shot here,” Kautz says, warming his
hands by a portable gas space heater as fluffy snowflakes swirl outside the
window. “He was probably sitting nearby when I got one of his buddies.”
A deputy in the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office in New York’s Catskill
Mountains, Kautz, 42, is participating in an annual three-day weekend
tournament in which nearly 400 hunters are vying to win a $2,000 grand prize
for killing the biggest coyote.
The United States is the only country in the world where wild animals are
killed by the tens of thousands strictly for prizes and entertainment,
according to the Humane Society of the United States. It estimates that
before the coronavirus pandemic, there were more than 400 contests annually,
accounting for an estimated 60,000 dead animals each year. Texas alone holds
at least 60 contests annually. Many competitions offer an array of wildlife
to shoot, from raccoons, squirrels, rabbits, and groundhogs to foxes,
bobcats, stingrays, and crows. Coyotes, widely considered a nuisance animal
across the country, are the most popular target. (Some states hold contents
intended to reduce invasive wildlife, such as Burmese pythons in Florida,
feral hogs in Texas, and nutria in Louisiana.)
The contests are increasingly controversial, criticized as blood sport. So
far, eight states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts,
New Mexico, Vermont, and Washington—have outlawed the contests under
pressure from conservation and animal welfare groups. Calls for a national
ban got louder after a 2020 undercover investigation by the Humane Society
revealed the emergence of killing tournaments through members-only Facebook
groups, raising questions about whether online contests violate state
wildlife and gambling laws. In early April, Congressman Stephen Cohen, a
Democrat from Tennessee, and 15 co-sponsors introduced a bill to ban
contests on all public lands.
Where killing contests are outlawed
Federal legislation banning wildlife
killing contests on all federal public
lands has recently been introduced.
States with bans on coyote
killing contests. States with bans on predator, non-game, and furbearer killing contests
(including coyote, fox, bobcat,
squirrel, rabbit, and crows).
States considering bans:
MASS.
WASH.
VT.
N.Y.
N.J.
UNITED
STATES
MD.
CALIF.
COLO.
N.
MEX.
ARIZ.
In past years, award-winning coyotes at the contest in the Catskills,
co-hosted by the Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs of Sullivan County and the
White Sulphur Springs Volunteer Fire Department, weighed in at around 50
pounds. One of the first two coyotes Kautz shot this year registered 48.65
pounds. “It’s a big dog,” he says, though previous contests have taught him
to temper his enthusiasm. “I always get beat by a few ounces. I hope I don’t
get beat this year.”
If Kautz doesn’t win the grand prize, he could come away with $500 for
second place or $250 for third. To be eligible, hunters must pay $35 to
enter the contest, which covers the cost of a Sunday dinner banquet and a
five-dollar raffle ticket. In addition to paying for prizes, contest
proceeds fund outdoor programs for families and environmental conservation.
Aside from the biggest awards, hunters compete for the day’s heaviest kill
($200), and there are separate prizes ($100 each) for women and children to
win. For each qualifying coyote, hunters receive $80. Awards and raffle
prizes are distributed at the banquet. The raffle prizes include firearms,
ammunition, and high-tech calling devices that lure animals to hunters’
waiting guns. Kautz already has a plan for what he’ll do with the prize
money if he wins.
The rules of the Catskills contest stipulate that coyotes must be killed within the designated area that includes New York State, five counties in Pennsylvania, and one county in New Jersey. To validate that the animals were freshly killed, their body temperature must be between 68 and 100 degrees. Contestants are expected to follow state hunting laws, which liberally allow hunters to use bait, high-powered rifles, thermal imaging nightscopes, electronic calling devices, and tracking with hounds.
In the span of American history, coyotes are recent newcomers to the East.
During the early 1800s, explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
encountered coyotes only west of the Mississippi, where they described a
“prairie wolf” about the size of a gray fox with a bushy tail and wolflike
head and ears. Since then, coyotes have gradually moved east to fill the
niche of vanishing wolves and mountain lions. Today, eastern coyotes—larger
than their western ancestors because they interbred with wolves and domestic
dogs—are cozy among humans, even thriving in some of the country’s biggest
cities and suburbs, including New York and Chicago.
The coyote competitions may have started with the idea that exterminating
them would help farmers and ranchers, but wildlife advocates say there are
more humane ways to protect livestock. What’s more, they say the
accessibility of high-tech hunting equipment, including night vision and
high-powered firearms, has transformed the events into gratuitous slaughter.
“Wildlife-killing contests serve no legitimate purpose,” says Kitty Block,
president and CEO of the Humane Society of the U.S. “Coyotes, foxes, and
bobcats—animals essential to the health of our ecosystem—have long been
persecuted because of misconceptions used as an excuse to kill them for fun
and bragging rights. This cannot be allowed in a civilized society where our
wildlife serve a critical environmental role.”
Weighing in
An ice storm followed by a full day of rain brings a slow start to this
year’s Sullivan County hunt compared with the previous one, in February
2020, when participants killed a record 118 coyotes. The event begins
officially at 12 a.m. on Friday, and by noon on Saturday, the pace is
stepping up. Hunters in pickup trucks arrive with coyote carcasses wrapped
in plastic and stuffed in insulated coolers to keep them from freezing in
the subzero temperatures outside. There’s a line of dead coyotes—tongues
dragging, fur stained with blood—on the ground at the weigh-in station
behind the firehouse, where the rank smell of death drifts across the
parking lot.
John Van Etten, the sportsmen’s federation president, dressed in an NRA
camouflage baseball hat, Carhartt overalls, a flannel shirt, and rubber
boots, mans the weigh-in. He jabs the coyotes in the gut with a meat
thermometer to record their temperature, then attaches chains to the
animals’ legs and hooks them onto a scale. As they hang, spinning in midair,
blood trickles onto the snow. After the weight is recorded, Van Etten clips
a toenail from a back paw—to make sure no one gets away with entering the
same coyote twice. “The things people will do when there’s money involved,”
he says dolefully.
Bill Miller, 61, dressed in camo coveralls, unloads three coyotes from
his vehicle. He and his son, Kyle, 26, have been entering the contest for at
least 10 years. “It’s one of the most exciting hunts going,” he says, adding
he’s pleased that killing coyotes keeps Kyle from mischief. “These young
guys aren’t out drinking, doing drugs, and getting in trouble,” he says.
“They’re out hunting.”
“It’s a good adrenaline rush too,” Kyle adds.
Many of the hunters at the weigh-in talk about liking the challenge of
killing such wily animals. “These guys are smart,” Kautz tells me. “If you
trick one of them, you trick one of the best out there.” His technique for
luring coyotes is baiting them at his hunting blind for about a month
leading up to the contest.
Jeremy Harvey, 45, is disappointed that the coyote he’s brought from
Burlington Flats, two hours away, is more than six pounds shy of Kautz’s
front-runner. Harvey prefers hunting coyotes with hounds. He goes out at
first light to locate a coyote track, then unleashes his dogs, Jett and Ace,
whose special GPS collars allow him to track them using a handheld device.
“It’s so much fun,” he says. “I used to hunt rabbits, but I could never get
anybody to go with us. It seems like everybody wants to hunt coyotes all the
time. You can get camaraderie, more guys. We have a blast. Play cards, drink
beer, and have a lot of fun.”
Brittney Engle, 36, deposits a female coyote at the weighing station—38
pounds, according to the hanging scale. Engle says she loves hunting
coyotes. She recently bought a nightscope to facilitate shooting in the
dark. As the only woman to enter the contest this day, she’ll get a hundred
dollars on top of the standard $80 for a qualifying coyote. Not bad for a
night’s work, she says. “Not bad at all.”
‘This isn’t hunting’
The first documented wildlife-killing contest in the U.S. is believed to
have been held by a group of ranchers in Chandler, Arizona, in 1957. The
most lucrative of today’s contests is the West Texas Big Bobcat, held three
times a year, in January, February, and March. This January, a three-person
team of participants won the first-place prize—$43,720—for a 32.5-pound
bobcat. (For the cat to qualify, the team also had to kill five foxes or
coyotes.) More than 1,700 teams competed in the 2022 contests combined,
providing a total payout of almost $400,000.
Michelle Lute is a conservation scientist with the nonprofit Project Coyote,
which, in partnership with the Humane Society, has established a national
coalition of more than 50 organizations fighting to ban wildlife-hunting
competitions. They encourage wanton slaughter, Lute says. “A basic moral
tenet is that it is wrong to take life without appropriate justification,
and there’s no good reason for this whatsoever. Our group isn’t
anti-hunting,” she says of Project Coyote, “but we are against hunting of
carnivores because it is ethically indefensible and scientifically
unjustified."
Not all hunters approve of the contests either. “This isn’t hunting,”
says Robert Brown, a member of the ethics committee of the nonprofit Boone
and Crockett Club, established in 1887 by Theodore Roosevelt and other
hunters for the protection of wildlife resources. “It’s just shooting.” The
techniques commonly used in contests are “unethical,” Brown says. “They give
the hunter an unfair advantage.”
Back in February 2020, an undercover investigator with the Humane Society
attended the Sullivan County coyote hunt and reported finding dead coyotes
in the firehouse’s dumpster, including a large female that had been pregnant
with a litter of pups.
In the wake of such investigations and the 2021 release of Wildlife Killing
Contests, a graphic documentary produced by National Geographic Explorer
Filipe DeAndrade, participants have become extremely wary of covert
activists lurking in the crowd. Some hunters I meet question whether I’m a
“legit” journalist writing for National Geographic. One man confronts me in
the fire station saying I’m probably working undercover for PETA—People for
the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Carl Lindsley, a Sportsmen’s Federation trustee, is wary at first but agrees
to host me at the contest because he assesses that I’m genuinely interested
in learning the hunters’ point of view. He remembers the activist who
infiltrated the 2020 event. “Some people are upset with the idea of killing
coyotes,” he says, sitting in a folding chair in the firehouse. But what
that activist didn’t know, he says, is most of the coyotes in the dumpster
were collected by a local fur buyer who skins them and sells their coats
(for about $25 apiece) and advertises their skulls to buyers online.
What’s more, he adds, the contest serves as an important fundraiser for
outdoor programs for children and their families and habitat restoration.
“If all we did is sit around and brag about how many coyotes we got, and our
pile of money, there would be no purpose for this,” says Lindsley, who
retired in 2016 after working in wildlife management for 48 years with the
New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. “Actually, if we
don’t get any coyotes, I’m ecstatic—we get to keep more money for our
programs.” It would be good if people would buy tickets just to eat at the
banquet, he says, but he acknowledges that most people come for the shooting
and the prizes.
Most wildlife killing contests aren’t fundraisers. They’re solely for sport.
Hunters defend the competitions, online or in person, on grounds that
participants aren’t breaking any laws—it’s widely legal to kill many
predatory species, including foxes, bobcats, and coyotes, often without
limits. And if it’s legal to kill them, they say, what’s the harm in holding
a killing contest? A coyote’s “headed for the dirt anyways,” one hunter
wrote on Facebook.
The ecological argument
“The ‘antis’ don’t understand we’re actually helping in the grand scheme,”
Kautz says. Coyotes are overpopulated, he asserts, and they eat
everything—fawns, turkeys, rabbits, squirrels—causing ecosystems to be out
of balance. They also attack pets and livestock, including, recently,
several of his mother’s sheep. “It was the first time it ever happened but
probably won’t be the last,” he says. “I think the coyote population is up a
bit.”
“Coyotes need to be put in check,” agrees John Van Etten, the sportsmen’s
federation president, warming up inside the firehouse where contestants are
milling about, admiring the entries, listed by the hunter’s name and the
coyote’s weight, on giant pieces of white paper covering corkboards.
“Hunters perform that role.” If not, he says, the coyotes suffer from
illness, such as mange, a skin disease caused by mites, and starvation.
Project Coyote’s Lute often hears that argument, “but it holds no water,”
she says. “Illness and starvation are a natural part of life processes in
the wild, and their occurrence isn’t simply a matter of population size.”
She argues that coyotes don't need to be controlled. "They're a native part
of North American systems," she says. "They provide a full suite of
ecosystem services—from rodent and rabbit control to reduced disease
transmission and carcass cleanup—just as they have done for millennia."
A number of studies, including by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)
and several states’ departments of wildlife management, have found that
killing coyotes actually can cause their populations to grow. When some
coyotes are eliminated, the survivors have more small mammals to prey on,
and as food becomes more abundant, coyotes produce bigger litters. Surviving
females reproduce earlier, and more coyotes replace those that were killed.
Soon, researchers have found, there are at least as many coyotes as there
were before the killings began. A USDA study found that after 60 to 70
percent of coyotes in a roughly 260,000-acre Army base in southeastern
Colorado were removed over two years, the animals recovered their losses in
as little as eight months.
Often, the desire to eliminate coyotes is driven by a deep-rooted fear of
wild predators. “Coyotes cause a lot of damage on farms and to the local
wildlife,” says New York assemblywoman Aileen Gunther, who lives in the
Catskills and has come to the competition to support her constituents. She
says she’ll fight any legislation aiming to ban hunting contests in her
state. “These contests protect our citizens. I have grandchildren running
around outside, and you don’t want to see a coyote come up.”
There have only ever been two documented fatal coyote attacks on humans in
North America, says Ohio State University ecologist Stanley Gehrt, who has
been studying the animals in and around Chicago for more than two decades.
In August 1981, a coyote snatched a three-year-old girl in the driveway of
her parents’ home in Glendale, California. The attack likely resulted from
neighbors feeding the coyotes, leading it to lose its fear of people, Gehrt
says. Then in October 2009, two eastern coyotes mauled a 19-year-old woman
in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, in Nova Scotia. That case was more
mysterious. Biologists theorize that the coyotes were starving because the
mammals they normally preyed on, such as snowshoe hares, had become scarce
on the island, forcing them to hunt moose. The woman may have been an easier
target.
A surprising discovery
A Humane Society investigator, who agreed to speak on condition of
anonymity, recently made a surprising discovery online. In early 2020, as
in-person wildlife-killing contests were being canceled to prevent the
spread of COVID-19, hunters formed several members-only Facebook groups to
provide a socially distanced alternative.
Group members pay a fee, usually between $30 and a hundred dollars, to
register for 24- to 48-hour contests in which they aim to shoot the biggest
and most animals of a designated species for cash prizes ranging from
hundreds to thousands of dollars. Contestants are required to submit a video
showing themselves saying a pre-established code word or phrase and jiggling
their limp prey, confirming that the animal was newly killed because rigor
mortis hadn’t set in. In contests for the heaviest kill, the videos must
show the animals’ mouths and anuses to prove they aren’t stuffed with rocks.
Administrators collect and distribute prize money through PayPal,
instructing contestants to select “sending to a friend” to avoid scrutiny.
“Our investigation showed online killing-contest groups include thousands of
individuals representing almost every state in the country—some where
killing contests are prohibited, and many where they are not,” says Humane
Society president Block. “Federal legislation is necessary to clearly and
uniformly end these vicious competitions nationwide.” Regulation and law
enforcement are complicated at the state level, she says, but the federal
government has clear authority to police interstate commerce. In February
2021, the Humane Society took the investigator’s findings to Michigan
attorney general Dana Nessel. The organization reported that a Facebook
group called Coyote Nation, created in March 2020 by a Michigan resident
named Cody Lee Showalter, 35, is the largest and most significant of the
online killing-contest groups detected so far. According to the group’s
Facebook page, it has 3,200 members.
In a letter to Nessel, the Humane Society details how Coyote Nation’s
competitions occur on a near-weekly basis, with cash prizes of as much as
$8,000 and member demand for expanded contests, including for foxes,
raccoons, and competitions for kids. The society also lays out what it
alleges are the relevant legal violations in the state, including case law
that illustrates the broad scope of the state’s gambling and private lottery
statutes.
A spokesperson for the attorney general said the matter is under review.
Without discussing Coyote Nation specifically, Jen Ridings, Facebook’s
policy communications manager, says the company’s rules prohibit online
gambling and gaming involving money without the prior consent of the social
media giant. But she noted that hunting, along with fishing, is exempt from
policies forbidding people from promoting acts of physical harm against
animals on the platform.
Coyote Nation’s Showalter declined to be interviewed and changed the name of
his group to CN after being contacted by National Geographic. “Please do not
discuss anything to do with our group,” he wrote on Facebook. “We have not
had any issues with anti-hunters yet and I would like to keep it that
way….What we do here brings the hunting community together for some honest
competition, that was why we started it and that is why it’s still going
strong today.”
‘Good job, man!’
At the White Sulphur Springs fire station, the last coyotes of the day have
been strung up on the scale. It’s 2 p.m. on Sunday. The contest is
officially over. Organizers do one final review of all the entries and tally
how much each winner will receive by check. Then they hurry across the
parking lot to the giant four-door garage, where a lavish banquet is under
way, to announce the winners. Plates are piled high with roast beef, mashed
potatoes smothered in gravy, corn, green beans, and coleslaw, washed down
with beer and soda.
Eager to hear the final results, Kautz, still dressed in his camouflage and
heavy boots, is sitting at a table with a hunter named Chuck Lewis, from
Melrose, New York. Lewis drove two hours to enter six coyotes. None of his
canines are prizewinners, but he says the two sleepless nights and the long
drive were worth the effort because he’ll receive $480. “Right now, I’m
fueled on cigarettes and coffee. I’ve had no sleep,” Lewis says. “I have
coyote hangover.”
As he and Kautz discuss other contests they’ve done, Lewis mentions that he
likes the online Coyote Nation competitions for something to do between
in-person derbies.
Standing behind a table covered with raffle prizes, Van Etten finally speaks
into a mic to announce the winners. All told, he says, 66 coyotes were
killed. The heaviest was 48.65 pounds, shot by Timothy Kautz.
“Good job, man!” Lewis says.
“I can’t believe I won,” Kautz replies.
As the sun sets on the Catskills, Kautz is $2,440 richer. (In addition to
the $2,000 grand prize, he receives $240 for entering three qualifying
coyotes, and a bonus $200 for the heaviest on Friday.) He plans to put his
winnings toward the purchase of a $6,000 thermal scope—upping his night game
in future contests. He hopes the next time a coyote takes his bait, it won’t
see him aiming for it.
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