From: Colby Cochran
Greenfield
In response to the professional hunter in the sport pages, not everyone who opposes hunting is uninformed. Many people have valid reasons to discourage hunting, and since wildlife is in the public domain they have a right to question wildlife management.
Wild animals may occasionally need reductions. It can be better than the alternative, and provides meat for families or food banks. However, not all hunting is about food or ecology, and there’s much to say about the methods of harvest. For now, I would like to say a few words about coyote hunting.
No other wild animal in American history has suffered such a deliberate, and casual, persecution as what we have rained down on coyotes. For a long stretch of the 20th century, they were, along with gray and red wolves, designated by the federal government for eradication. This attempt had the opposite effect on coyotes, causing packs to separate and have larger litters, resulting in greater numbers.
Today, roughly 500,000 coyotes are shot every year, often from planes and helicopters. Coyotes can withstand a 70-percent yearly kill rate without any decline in population. The only real effect a century of coyote killing produced was to encourage them to colonize more territory, and spread out of the West and into the East, South and cities.
It’s not only our government going after them. Weekend hunting competitions, often for prizes or gambling pots, 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 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 intelligent, social creatures. They don’t enjoy death. No thoughtful human being, considerate of other life, should sacrifice for pleasure an animal like the coyote. 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 recognition that other creatures enjoy being alive and that depriving them of life is a serious matter.
Killing an animal that for a 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. There is something perverse in our government, and society, marking a species for death, setting it outside the bounds of even our wildlife protection laws.
Modern studies in places like Yellowstone have shown when coyotes are left alone, their populations stabilize. Hunters are not controlling them, or protecting deer herds or anything else. They are shooting coyotes and other “undesirable” animals for entertainment, often on public land and with taxpayer money. There are better ways to make a living, and better ways to coexist with nature.
