Flores writes: "Coyotes are not endangered, and they don't need our help to survive as a species (though recovering populations of wolves, which are often mistaken for coyotes during hunts, could use it). But there is something perverse in the government, and society, marking a species for death, setting it outside the bounds of even our wildlife protection laws."
Coyote in Cheeseboro Canyon in the Simi Valley, California. (photo: Jared Hughey)
Stop Killing Coyotes
11 August 16
ne morning in the late 1930s, the biologist Adolph Murie stood near a game trail in Yellowstone National Park and watched a passing coyote joyously toss a sprig of sagebrush in the air with its mouth, adroitly catch it, and repeat the act every few yards. At the time, Mr. Murie was conducting a federal study intended to prove, definitively, that the coyote was “the archpredator of our time.” But Mr. Murie, whose work ultimately exonerated the animals, was more impressed by that sprig-tossing — proof, he believed, of the joy a wild coyote took in being alive in the world.
Today, more than 80 years later, coyotes are the most common large predators in America, and an increasingly common sight in our cities and suburbs. If we paid attention, we might share Mr. Murie’s fascination with an intelligent, playful creature. Instead, according to Project Coyote, an animal-welfare organization, we kill roughly half a million of them a year.
No other wild animal in American history has suffered the kind of deliberate, and casual, persecution we have rained down on coyotes. For a long stretch of the 20th century, coyotes were, along with gray and red wolves, the rare native American species designated by the federal government for eradication.
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