Dan Flores

“Persecuting an animal in a battle you can’t win is an act of political ideology.”

Is our determination to completely exterminate this species a direct reflection of ourselves? A reflective person might conclude that and it certainly occurred to me as I listened to this disturbing tale. Coyotes and humans are very similar. We’re adaptable, circumspect, omnivorous, have relatively long childhoods where we have to learn directly from parents, and most importantly, we have show more fission/fusion social structures. That means that we have a wide spectrum of normal interaction with each other - from loners and hermits, to pack leaders and hangers on.

Having them in our cities is nothing new. Ancient cities in the north and central American zones are rife with tales and examples of coyotes moving in and doing well. The best strategy to adopt is to learn about them, keep them wary of us and let them be. That last part is key because, like humans, coyotes are survivors and they are uniquely predisposed to overcome our attempts to poison, trap, shoot and sterilize them. Despite spending millions and millions of Government dollars to kill millions and millions of coyotes, their range and numbers have never been greater or higher.

It’s interesting, but largely depressing and frustrating. Even though we should know better, we always take on nature as if we understand what we’re going to do to it. We always take drastic and often unrecoverable measures that nearly always backfire. We treat nature like an inert object that won’t react to us. We never learn. But coyotes do. And they’re winning. Despite nearly 500,000 that are massacred every year (and that includes now).

If you’re like me you’ll have to skip over the endless narration about the war against this wonderful creature. It was too negative, too stupid, too maddening and too sad to listen to. Humans suck.

It ends sort of hopefully, but it still hasn’t sunk in to most that there are coyotes in New York City precisely because millions of them were killed in the name of saving cattle (and sheep, which isn’t even an issue since hardly anyone raises sheep in big numbers these days). Federal agencies still slaughter thousands every year. The book gives advice about how to live peacefully with them, and to adapt our behavior to theirs - like not feeding them, supervising very small children and keeping pets leashed or enclosed. Personally I love hearing the yips and songs of my neighborhood coyotes. I hear them much more often than the wolves that are their natural population check. Both evolved together and have carved out their own ‘jobs’ in the natural world and need to be present together. I’m glad I have both nearby. As hunters age out and decrease, we’re going to need them to keep everything else in check - deer, rodents and rabbits.

You get the idea. Oh and Mr. Flores, that Chuck Jones Wile E. Coyote portrait was a riff on a self-portrait Vincent Van Gogh did after his tragic self-mutilation incident. You go on quite a bit about this painting, but no reference to its reference and that was weird. show less

To me Konrad Lorenz's essay "The Taming of the Shrew" in his collection [b:King Solomon's Ring|13965|King Solomon's Ring|Konrad Lorenz|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348690970s/13965.jpg|3334566] is a wondrous example of great field biology writing. In it, Lorenz delights in describing the behavior of the water shrew, and he does so with meticulous, loving detail, and through this tiny lens, focused on one tiny animal, I can't help but be struck with wonder about how beautiful and show more complicated the natural world is.

In contrast, Coyote America is filled with breathless anecdote and extends in every direction, introducing topics only tangentially related to coyotes. As a result it felt shallow to me. It felt like the author assumed I would need to be constantly entertained and distracted by interesting anecdotes or I'd lose interest.

It seems to be a style of science writing that has become pervasive, and maybe it reflects accurately the distractions of modern media on our reading attention, but I don't like it. By the end I was very much yearning for a re-read of [b:Voyage of the Beagle|183645|Voyage of the Beagle|Charles Darwin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1309211714s/183645.jpg|177481], a book whose author knew that animals in themselves are worthy of being studied closely, and need no distraction or amplification to hold a reader's interest...what current science writers no longer seem to believe. show less

If you want a solid overview of the history of coyote presence in North America, you will get it here. This is one of our few surviving NATIVE predators -- and it was the precursor of the coyote that crossed the Bering land/ice bridge going west that populated Asia and Europe and evolved into the wolf. So yes, your beloved dog, by circuitous ways, was originally a north american animal of the western states. Unfortunately at least two thirds of the book is the nauseating tale of a hundred show more and some years of the futile attempts of whites and government to rid the continent of the coyote--based on no information about the animal at all, most of it. And I am serious about the nauseating piece. Right here, right now in the US there are still some states spending millions to find ways (including using poison) to kill coyotes. It's all out of habit, out of a refusal for the few remaining serious sheep farmers, it's a minor ag biz these days, to change--because, hey, the government is paying --so a scam, essentially, with the cooperation of the federal bureau folks who don't want to lose their own research funding!

Just last week I saw what is the largest single sheep herd in the east, I'm guessing it was around 400 - in Geneseo, NY, in western New York State. And guess what? The herd is minded by three enormous herding dogs, and a shepherd who doesn't stay out there all the time, but, say, during lambing, yep camps out there. Turns out the best coyote control is three dogs and a shepherd. Sweet and clean. And as things go, inexpensive. Vet bills, dog food . . . dog's with a purpose, a job for someone who likes the outdoors.

Here's another thing. We really need our predators. I learned recently that in the religious middle ages because cats were regarded as agents of the devil, cities would periodically purge themselves of them. Guess what? Good-bye cats and hello PLAGUE! Plague spikes have been definitively connected with cat purges. Well, duh! Coyotes have moved eastward and westward and everywhere they can as a result of being hounded in the West (where there numbers never reduce no matter what anyone tries) and now live in suburbs and cities. Why? Because over millenia as the 'small' wolf, they had to learn to be very clever to not be killed by the gray wolves. They can move to these urban and suburban places because they have no competition and there is lots to eat, even without killing your cat. And actually, studying stomach contents of urban/suburban coyotes only turns up 2 to 10% cat. The main reason they kill cats (and here is a lovely phrase) is that coyotes regard them--and dogs--as "intraguild predators"--e.g. competitors for the real prey. Cities are chock-a-block with prey from (another lovely word) "synanthropic" animals from rats everywhere to deer in the fringier places, that get along fabulously near humans. And there is a vacuum of predator competition, cats notwithstanding. After a few rabies episodes feral dog packs were purged from cities in the early 1900's (with shocking cruelty, causing the founding of the SPCA) creating a vacuum. Today's urban coyotes mainly eat Canadian Geese and rats and mice, and yes, fawns. Even better coyotes are not carriers of rabies, they can get it from bites, but they don't carry and spread it as dogs and many other animals can. They are not, generally pack animals, either although they can act as loners or a pack (one of their main survival strategies.) A few develop do seem to develop a taste for cats, and a few are so fearless they could pose a danger to humans. But after our centuries of animosity to them, all but the most rare and frankly stupid coyote, is afraid of any and all humans. All a human need do is stand their ground and shout and throw things (act big and tough) and the coyote will quickly depart. And keep your cats in at night. In general the east, the coyotes have also interbred with some of the few remaining red wolves --( who have proved from DNA to be hybrid coyotes from far longer ago than our white presence altered everything) They are bigger and, yes, more aggressive, but not stupid either. You leave them entirely alone, do not feed them, do not kid yourself about them, maybe keep your dog on a lead (unless it obeys commands and sticks close) in the wilder places you might go hiking, and you should be fine. The bottom line is, we can either learn to be sensible or we can remain ignorant idiots when it comes to living in harmony with predators whom we need -- we need them to keep down the populations of the animals (like deer) who are overpopulating and overbrowsing.

It's something to be aware of, wherever you live that some counties and states still spend insane amounts of money on coyote "management"-- from poisons to parties where people go off and shoot them for entertainment.

This is a long review but these are matters very dear to my heart. I'm not, by the way, any sort of bleeding heart. I grew up in a mix of urban and then very rural country. Deer populations in the northeast seriously need management--especially as the numbers of human hunters are dropping steadily. I am counting on the coyote and I am more than willing to moderate my own behaviour to return the favor.

I will be looking for some of the books Flores mentions of the collections of native american coyote stories. This animal is truly our iconic, native animal--maybe even more important to us than the eagle or Franklin's turkeys. show less

"How we react to animals is in part primate hard-wiring. The thump in the dark, the start to full waking, the pounding heart can transport us back to our African origins in a fraction of a second. But mostly what we think when "bear" comes to mind emerges from the tangled mess of software programs that is culture. What we've heard, what we've read, what we've inferred, what others have implied, for some of us what we've experienced-- all these and other ways of absorbing information-- go show more into creating a construction in our minds like "bear." When an Idaho governor publicly opposed recovering grizzly bears in the Bitterroot Mountains at the turn of the twenty-first century because he said didn't want "massive, flesh-eating carnivores" in Idaho, the bear he imagined was a very specific kind of historical memory. But many other kinds of bears look back at us, a maddening but fascinating aspect of the world."

"There must have been a powerful cultural psychology at work in nineteenth-century America, a Freudian feedback loop with respect to the continent. North America's wildness produced enough unease about the thinness of civilization's veneer that we reacted with a numb, almost instinctive orgy of destruction aimed at the animals that embodied the wild continent. "Non-human nature," writer D.H. Lawrence once wrote, "is the outward and visible expression of the mystery that confronts us when we look into the depths of our own being." For much of American history that exercise, when we've indulged it, has not pleased us, producing a self-hatred that we've deflected outward. As another writer who sought to understand our relationship with nature, Paul Shepard, put it in one of his last books, "By disdaining the beast in us, we grow away from the world instead of into it." That line stands as an evocative summary of much of the history of the American Great Plains."

"Almost a century later, in 1690 and far, far inland, a Hudson's Bay Indian trader named Henry Kelsey was traveling overland on the grassy yellow plains of Saskatchewan when his party encountered a grizzly. This was not a view from the safety of a sailing vessel, but face-to-face on the ground, and Kelsey's first reaction was to shoot. He thus became the first European of record to kill a grizzly bear, and event pregnant with portents for the future of bears and of the Great Plains. Kelsey's act greatly alarmed his Indian companions, who warned him that he had struck down "a god."

"American attitudes toward wildlife like bears by the Jeffersonian Age were complex and deeply internalized across thousands of years of human history. Genetic programming from as far back as the Paleolithic obviously preservers a human memory of giant bears. Mammals of the Northern Hemisphere, they would have been a new thing for modern humans migrating out of Africa and into Europe and Asia 45,000 years ago. Our Neanderthal ancestors would have long since been familiar with bears, but our own species likely first confronted them in southern Europe."


"In 1800 it was inhabited by perhaps 2 million Indians, 25-30 million buffalo in times of good weather, and perhaps 50-60,000 grizzlies. So many grizzlies, indeed, that Ernest Thompson Seton says Spanish travelers along the rivers of Northern California could easily see 30-40 grizzlies in a single day."

"Of course no one except the Indians thought to stop shooting up grizzlies for a very long time to come. A twenty-first century American has to pose the question- why, once they'd collected specimens for science, did Lewis and Clark and other nineteenth-century Americans feel such a compulsion to react to animals in the West by shooting them? What had history lodged in the American psyche that made the left-and-right, wholesale slaughter of animals- more than 500 million of them in Barry Lopez's estimate, although no one can ever know- such a part of the history of the West, and especially of the grand grasslands of the Great Plains? Why, for example, would the US Army officer and popular writer Colonel Richard Dodge, along with his four companions, feel it a worthy expenditure of their time to slaughter, in three weeks of lounging about on New Mexico's Cimarron River, 127 buffalos, 13 deer and pronghorns, 154 turkeys, 420 waterfowl, 187 quail, 129 plovers and snipe, assorted herons, cranes, hawks, owls, badgers, raccoons, and ever 143 songbirds? According to Dodge's obsessively kept scorecard, that was a total of 1,262 animals, many of which had functioned only as convenient live targets for bloodlust."

"In 1991 the writers Tim Clark and Denise Casey compiled a volume they titled Tales of the Grizzly:" Thirty-Nine Stories of Grizzly Bear Encounters in the Wilderness, which chronicle grizzly/human encounters in the Northern Rocky Mountains from 1804 through 1929. Their collection allowed them to chart what they decided were five distinct periods in the evolution of the American relationship with grizzly bears: (1) A Native American period, when bears were mythic fgures, teachers of medicines, helpers, a species whose physiological similarity to humans offered the possibility for transmigration in both directions- a relationship with nature, Clark and Casey asserted, that would have been "almost incomprehensible to most modern Americans."
(2) An Exploration/Fur Trade period, exemplified by the grizzly encounters of Lewis and Clark and Jacob Fowler, which exposed the fallacy of assumptions about human dominance and faith in technology, and created the initial impressions of grizzlies as the horrible bear, the wilderness fiend that offered Americans a reminder of the dangers of uncontrolled, chaotic nature.
Periods (3) and (4) in this chronology are the periods of conquest and settlement, when homesteaders resolved that it was a Christian duty to eradicate grizzlies and other formidable wildlife in order to liberate the wilderness for God and the Grand Old Party. During this phase, tens of thousands of grizzly bears were shot on sight, and not just to wipe them off the plains for the arrival of the livestock industry. Settlers killed 423 grizzlies in the North Cascade Mountains alone just between 1846 and 1851. In the early twentieth century the Great American War on grizzly bears featured an alliance between livestock interests and the US Biological Survey,, whose hunters made official the war on wolves, coyotes, lions, and bears, in the process creating an early federal subsidy for the ranching industry in the West."
"That same Progressive era witnessed the fifth period, the official rise of sport hunting and its replacement of market hunting, which now had a black eye. For the animals in the sights, of course, it wasn't so easy to tell the difference. But many sport hunters took to heart President Theodore Roosevelt's advice that "the most thrilling moments of an American's hunter's life are those in which, with every sense on the alert and with nerves strung to the highest point, he is following alone... the fresh and bloody footprints of an angered grisly." For hunters, eliminating "bad animals" like predators made sense not just in terms of growing the numbers of huntable elk and deer; going after grizzlies also had become the ultimate nostalgic capture of the vanishing frontier, the hunter's version of a Frederic Remington or Charlie Russell painting. As Roosevelt put it, tellingly, "no other triumph of American hunting can compare with the victory to be thus gained."

"Contemporary animal advocates assert an apparently radical doctrine: that individual animals have rights, and that the circle of ethical treatment- which in the Western tradition has expanded through history to confer rights to individuals of groups once denied legal standing, such as women, Native Americans, African Americans, now gay and transgender people- must and ought to be extended to animals on an individual basis."

"At the same, without trying to appropriate anyone's culture or romanticize anyone's past, it is difficult not to conclude that a way of thinking that recognized bears as essentially humans in another form, thus conferred individuality to bears, and thus a corpus of rights to bears- among them the simple right to exist- must have played some role in the historical fact that more than 5 million people and 100,000 bears were able to live together in America for so long. "

"Why does the buffalo matter? It strikes some as a slightly comic and ungainly holdover from a faded world, yet the truth is that this single animal's end-game exemplifies the whole declensionist story of the relationship between Americans and nature over the past five centuries. The buffalo was the essence of ecological adaptation to North America, perfectly suited to the grasslands of the interior of the continent from Alberta and Saskatchewan southward to Texas and Mexico. It was the wildebeest-plus of the American Serengeti, since the Pleistocene extinctions had left it with grazing competitors, allowing it to attain a biomass wildebeests were never able to achieve. It was a survivor of the great extinctions and of more than 100 centuries of dying at human hands, and yet in the space of less than a century we very nearly erased it from existence. No other environmental story in American history, and there is plenty of competition, produced quite so dramatic an ending."

"The historian Richard White has a single word for the callous disregard for life, the rotting stench that signaled the arrival of civilization to the plains, the brief and inconsequential economic returns of eradicating the buffalo: pathetic."

"In effect we dismantled and demolished a 10,000 year-old ecology, very likely one of the most exciting natural spectacles in the world, in the space of a half-century. There were people who made careers out of that loss, among them the artists Charlie Russell and Frederic Remington and the writer Zane Grey, and what they mourned was what they saw as life in"the wilderness," a thrilled-to-the-marrow life among native people and thronging wildlife and nature. As Grey believed, the West had offered the world once last chance to live in a state of nature as natural men and women. And then modern America had withdrawn the offer." show less