I’m excited to share that early this month the Clark County, Nevada, Board of County Commissioners voted 7 to 0 in favor of a resolution condemning wildlife killing contests and calling on the state wildlife agency to ban the practice.
While unpredictability has defined so many of our lives of late, what is certain is that our work to defend North America’s wild carnivores continues unabated.
Since our last edition of Coyote Chronicles, the world has turned upside down. A pandemic crisis, combined with an historic social justice movement, is redefining what we consider “normal.” We are at a critical crossroads. These challenges present a unique opportunity for systemic change—change that our planet, our society and our culture so desperately need. In fact, we are already seeing that change as people increasingly act; they engage for the causes they believe in.
While our world has been turned upside down over the past month, our work for the wild ones persists.
Unconscionably, wildlife killing contests continue in Texas, Pennsylvania and elsewhere, with participants flaunting government directives to not gather in groups of ten or more in order to avoid spreading the deadly Coronavirus. As you will read below, we continue to expose this barbarity and to work with our growing National Coalition to Ban Wildlife Killing Contests to bring an end to these horrific killfests.
What a last few months it has been—from California paving the way for the rest of the nation by banning commercial and recreational trapping, the manufacturing and sale of fur, and bobcat trophy hunting to Arizona becoming the fourth state in the nation to abolish wildlife killing contests.
With many state legislatures drawing to a close and others taking a summer breather, I’ve been absorbing the many accomplishments Project Coyote, our coalition partners, and like-minded individuals have achieved for animals over the last six months. While there have been some disappointments, most notably in Oregon with the defeat of the bill to ban coyote killing contests in the final hours of the legislative session, there have been several victories that will reduce animal suffering and save countless animal lives over the coming years.