Overview
With the California Fish and Game Commission’s decision last week to ban most wildlife-killing contests in the state, California now caters somewhat less to the worst impulses humanity has to offer.
Last week the California Fish and Game Commission banned any contests that offer cash or other prizes for participants who kill the most, or the nicest, coyotes, bobcats and other predatory mammals. This makes most wildlife killing contests a thing of the past in California, and it makes California the first state in the Union to ban such contests.
The move was prompted in part by a notorious coyote-killing contest in the northeastern-most corner of the state, but it harshes the buzz of would-be participants in informal and less-well-publicized contests throughout the state.
With that decision, California now caters somewhat less to the worst impulses humanity has to offer.
For thirty years now I’ve tried to imagine what it’s like to be the kind of person who’d shoot a coyote. And I’ve failed.
I’m not talking about wildlife managers who sometimes have to make unpleasant decisions about animals that have gotten too used to raiding chicken coops, or that have taken one too many backyard cats. Those folks have thankless jobs. If I was wearing a hat, I’d tip it to them. I wouldn’t want to have to make that kind of decision every day.
I’m talking about the guys whose first reaction to seeing a coyote in the desert is to want it dead. The guys who think piling up the bodies of coyotes they’ve killed is a fine way to spend a Sunday afternoon. They’re not gonna eat them. Most of them won’t use the fur for anything. For them, the whole point of killing coyotes is to kill coyotes, and I just don’t get it.
What bent these coyote killers’ souls so badly, I wonder, that they feel such revulsion and hatred for the critter? That they take the qualities they most loathe in themselves – cowardice, stupidity, lack of a point in their lives – then project those qualities onto the coyote in order to kill it, like the biblical scapegoat driven into the wilderness after being laden with the sins of the villagers?
And of course it never works. There is no pile of dead coyotes high enough to expiate the self-loathing of the coyote killers.
I feel sorry for those people, to be honest. How can you call your life complete if you can’t feel joy at seeing one of the beasts loping slyly and effortlessly across an alluvial fan? How can you not admire their tenacity, their resourcefulness, their wild and uncontrollable intelligence? How can you not just flat out love Canis latrans, Latin for “barking dog,” often called the songdog for its unmistakable and evocative group yodeling like the kind distracting me from my backyard right now as I try to focus on writing?
Sure, they cause trouble. They’re not puppy dogs. They’re the soul of the wild desert distilled, the arid lands’ top predator keeping the rest of the system more or less balanced.
Not that admiring coyotes doesn’t come without pitfalls. A few years back I was a little bit lost in the Mojave Desert in southern Nevada. It was a summer afternoon and my water had run out. I needed to get back to my Jeep, which was, I guessed, two miles away. I walked up a wash in what I thought was probably the right direction, my mind ever so slightly clouded by a thin, thirsty film of dust and sweat and a mounting nervousness, and then I saw my salvation.
A line of coyote tracks headed up a side wash, around an ancient palo verde, and out of sight.
“That’s it!” I thought. “All I need to do is follow those tracks, and they’ll…” and then I stopped. What was I thinking? The coyote would lead me to my Jeep? To a secret well? The fountains at Bellagio?
Even now I’m still not sure just what I was thinking. Suddenly I was worried. I hadn’t been without water for that long, and the air temperature was only about 105°, but still I felt the bony fingers of disorientation and death scratching at the hairs on the back of my neck with ill-trimmed fingernails.
I headed up the other fork of the wash instead. My Jeep wasn’t far in that direction, it turned out. I opened the back hatch and refilled my water bottle from the seven-gallon jug behind the passenger seat, the water already hot enough to make tea.
A yip came from behind: there she was, sitting on a little rise a hundred yards away, watching me drink. Was she panting or laughing? Hard to tell.
That wasn’t the only time I’ve wondered whether a coyote was deriving amusement from my misfortune. The first time I ever saw a coyote in the wild I’d wondered just that. It was 30 years ago this year, and my then-girlfriend was driving her Honda on a twisty two-lane highway about 50 miles northwest of Wickenburg, Arizona. I was asleep in the back seat; another friend was nodding off in the passenger seat. All that sleep surrounding her proved too much for our driver, and she dozed off at the wheel for a moment. She awoke with a start, hit the brakes reflexively and skidded off the pavement onto the one piece of shoulder for a hundred yards in either direction.
We pried the left front fender away from the tire where it had clipped a reflector pole and I got behind the wheel. A quarter mile toward Wickenburg he was standing astride the double yellow, staring at us with a rakish grin on his face.
I’ve been taken with Canis latrans ever since, though it took me a good five years to get back to the desert to see one after that morning.
It’s not hard to understand the common image of coyotes as sly tricksters. The critters are clever.
Take, for example, the way a pair of coyotes will often team up to hunt ground squirrels. One acts as the decoy, walking up to the ground squirrel hole with not the slightest pretense of slink, and sniffing at the burrow, then sauntering away noisily and unhurriedly. When the aggrieved ground squirrel emerges to watch the departing coyote, the other coyote, who has been as quiet and stealthy as the other one has not, grabs the unsuspecting squirrel from behind.
Clever. Look at it this way. Coyotes have been declared an enemy by the most heavily armed government in world history, and that government is losing the war against them.
Between 2006 and 2011 the controversial federal agency known as Wildlife Services killed more than a half million coyotes. The only animals with more representatives on the Wildlife Services body count in that span of time were starlings, brownheaded cowbirds, red-winged blackbirds and street pigeons. More than 75,000 of the coyotes killed by Wildlife Services were killed in 2013 alone. And that’s just one agency. Nationwide, about the only laws regulating the killing of coyotes are the ones that keep would-be coyote killers from discharging firearms in populated areas. Forty-four of 50 states allow coyote hunting all year, only Alaska enforces daily limits on the number of coyotes you can kill, and in six states, you may not even need a hunting license to shoot the things.
Of all the wildlife species native to North America, in other words, coyotes are about the least protected. In fact, they’re the opposite of protected. They’re essentially classed with Norway rats as far as many Americans are concerned, worthy of being shot on sight and not much else.
Shot, that is, or gassed in their dens, or poisoned with strychnine or the horrendously toxic Compound 1080, bodies strung from barbed wire fences or left in piles around the West, and a hundred other insults and injuries piled upon the species.
And yet they are winning. Despite the all-out war waged upon them, they have expanded their North American territory fourfold, and there are far more coyotes in 2014 than there were in 1492.
No wonder we think of them as tricksters.
Originally reported by Chris Clarke on Beacon, December 10, 2014.
