Living in the evolutionary heartland of America’s native canines, as I have for a decade in the piñon-juniper mesas south of Santa Fe, I have borne witness to one certain truth about coyotes as neighbors: you do not see them so much as hear them. Even in rural New Mexico I only see a coyote trot through the yard or lope across the road in front of my car perhaps once a month. But howling coyotes mark my nights almost without fail. I hear their salutations through my open windows or skylights often enough to awaken from my summer dreams. Yodeling coyote music is inseparable from the silvery wash of planets and the high moons of the winter night skies of this part of the world.
Sometimes one coyote’s melody becomes a general regional symphony, as individuals and pairs and packs join in, and when that happens you can hear—or perhaps you imagine in the mind’s eye and ear—coyote song spreading like a contagion, picked up by pack after pack until it fades into far distances, faint howls winking out in the mind in a kind of aural canine redshift. It is sometimes easy to think, in the summer New Mexico dusk, that what begins with a single coyote pouring out his soul across these canyons and dwarf forests has by morning rippled in concentric circles from this spot of origin across the full sweep of North America, as far the last coyote at the farthest edge of the last ripple. Which of course today could be in Maine. Or Alaska or Costa Rica or Florida.
Young coyote howling North America’s original national anthem.
Courtesy Dan Flores.
In my view the coyote’s howl is the original national anthem of North America, a canine “Star-Spangled Banner” that has been playing for nightly sporting events on this continent for nearly 1 million years.
But over the past couple of centuries, most Americans, at least judging by the literary types who wrote about the subject, formed quite different mental images when they heard a coyote howl. I won’t belabor the small variations among the examples (and there are a very great many examples) because the general thrust is always the same. The coyote’s cry, for many Americans riveted by the sound, did not intone the ballad of the continent—America’s ancient native song—that some of us hear today. Instead, someone like Lieutenant Robert Carter, a New Englander and West Pointer who in 1935 wrote a book about his youth on the Great Plains, when “that section was overrun with Indians, buffalo, wolves, jack rabbits, prairie dogs, sage brush and cactus,” viewed the howl of this indigenous canine as positively alien. Carter’s description is so typical, it’s a frontier cliché. “Their blood-curdling howls—which is first a sharp bark, followed by a succession of sharp, staccato yelps running into each other and ending in a sort of long drawn out quavering howl—were, at times almost indescribably melancholy, and awakened us at all hours of the night, which caused [my] newly-made bride to sit up in bed and shrink back in alarm.”
A sense that so much about North America was strange and frightening and that we ought to terraform and remake it extended to every element of continental ecology, from grasses to animals of all kinds. But in truth, almost no other creature reaped the whirlwind of condescension and hostility toward “alien” American nature in quite the way coyotes did. We campaigned to erase those “manic, lunatic” howls for all time and good riddance. And even as evidence mounted of the wrongheadedness and futility of that course, we spent more than half a century in furious pursuit of it.
On September 8, 1887, the Salt Lake Weekly Tribune ran a piece with an unanticipated storyline. Rather than indulging in the usual coyote character assassination of the 1880s, the writer took a surprising tack. The coyote, he argued, “is the salvation of the Utah farmers in some sections. About Fillmore, a few years ago, in a co-operative way, they exterminated these wild canines by poison, since which time they are under the necessity of fencing their crops with a coyote-de-frise of sagebrush to exclude the rabbits which have multiplied into swarms, so that the farmers pray for coyotes now.”
So that the farmers pray for coyotes now. If, somewhere in the American West, there actually were farmers who prayed for coyotes in the late 1880s, their prayers were faint and fell on uncomprehending ears. With the exception of the odd scientist or two, impressed that for some reason this little junior wolf seemed an especially irrepressible creature, in the half century from the 1880s, coyotes had about as many friends in America as did rattlesnakes, tuberculosis, homosexuals, and, yes, Bolsheviks. Farmers, ranchers, writers for any manner of national publication, and eventually employees of almost every state and federal agency involved with wild predators seemed almost to vie with one another in labeling the coyote a vile species of vermin that should not be allowed to breathe up good air. At a distance, the hatred seems hard to square with anything rational. It certainly wasn’t based on science and sometimes looked suspiciously like the collateral damage of a puritanical loathing of our own animal natures. But from the 1880s until the 1930s, the received wisdom in America, very rarely questioned, was that the only good American prairie wolf was a dead one. The real question was how to kill as many coyotes as possible in the very shortest period.
For the coyote, who, after all, saw this phase of its story from the wrong end, thousands of years of veneration by Indians had seemed to turn on a dime.
From the time the bison slaughter commenced in the 1820s, it took little more than half a century to clear the Great Plains of that ancient population of animals, which during spans of good weather must have approached 25 to 30 million animals. One effect of that species cleansing was to open up the great grasslands to domesticated animals. Cattle- and sheepmen began taking their herds and flocks into the open-range West in the 1860s, and as the vast lake of bison puddled into a few remnants, ranchers and sheepmen replaced the native animals wholesale with pastoral domestics that they turned into an economy.
Fur traders at western trading posts during this war on the wild fairly soon realized, however, that coyotes had some utility in the global market. Like so many other mammals in the West—beavers, famously, but also bison, elk, deer, otters, minks, muskrats, indeed virtually everything that grew fur on its back—coyotes and wolves wore pelage that interested those involved in the international market in animal skins. Opinions differed about the quality of coyote fur. Meriwether Lewis argued that it was much inferior to fox fur, but George Ruxton thought it “of great thickness and beauty.” In a trade where beaver pelts and buffalo robes were worth $3 to $4 or more, a trapped or poisoned, then skinned coyote was worth only a fraction of that. But the skins were much lighter to ship east, and the animals were so common—recall Josiah Gregg’s comment that coyotes were “found in immense numbers on the Plains”—that in some parts, coyote pelts began to function as money. Frontier trader James Mead, who in 1864 built a trading post near today’s Wichita, Kansas, recorded that to settle a debt of $3,000, the famous trailblazer Jesse Chisholm offered him buffalo robes, wolf skins, beaver pelts, or buckskins. “I chose coyote skins,” Mead wrote, “which were legal tender for a dollar, and he counted out three thousand.”
Not accustomed to fearing humans, coyotes were not at first in the least wary. Soon enough they learned their error, for by the mid-nineteenth century we possessed a killing agent that did not require stalking or trapping or shooting skills—or even our presence, for that matter—and exploited a predator’s willingness to scavenge rather than risk injury in a hunt. Strychnine, made from the seed of an East India fruit, was in commercial production in Pennsylvania as early as 1834. Cheap and entirely unregulated, it became a key tool of biological warfare against the natural world in America for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Strychnine was also horrifically deadly in tiny amounts, usually administered in the form of white tablets. Within ten to twenty minutes, a tab of strychnine gulped down as part of a predator’s meal wreaked havoc on the central nervous system, launching the victim into waves of wrenching, convulsive cramping—a truly shocking sight when anyone was around to see it, which was rare. Asphyxiation was the cause of death, but strychnine seized living animals with such violence that it left a characteristic signature: dead bodies with rigidly arched spinal columns and straight motionless tails, spotted at distances across the prairies as toppled-over question marks.
By the 1850s, trading posts in Westport, Missouri, where overland travelers struck out across the Great Plains, regularly stocked strychnine for western travelers. This is how predator pelts began to join the international fur trade in that decade. With strychnine pellets in their saddlebags, travelers and traders could lace every dead bison or horse they saw with the poison, hang around a day or two to see what happened, and reap the benefits. Confronting strychnine, western predators were suddenly very vulnerable.
The nadir of the commercial buffalo harvest in the 1860s to 1880s turned the plains into a pathetic slaughterhouse. This created unprecedented boom-time conditions for grizzlies, large scavenging birds, and wild canines, but the time also inaugurated the first of many scorched-earth biochemical wars against such animals. For a few years wolves and coyotes lived large off the blood sport. But as even creatures as numerous as bison began to dwindle away before the market hunt, ultimately hunters had to expand their target species to keep working. So elk, pronghorns, wild sheep, deer, and sometimes even wild horses fell under the gun sights of the grand killing fests of the 1870s and 1880s.
No one, then or now, has ever been able to measure a war on wild things on this vast a scale. There were between 5,000 and 20,000 hunters on the Great Plains in those years, and we have the anecdotes of only a few of them. But western writer and conservationist George Bird Grinnell, founder of Forest and Stream magazine, believed that in the case of coyotes, hide and fur hunters killed some “hundreds of thousands” on the Great Plains during those two decades.
Hundreds of thousands is an abstract figure, too big and vague to linger in the mind. But maybe this will. While we’ll never get closer to a true figure of all the coyotes killed in those decades of their first encounters with Americans, we can speculate with some certainty that every one of those coyotes wanted to live rather than be shot down, struggle in bewildered fear in a steel trap, or suffer a wretched death from poison. They would all, to use Shakespeare’s phrasing, have died in earnest.
These western settlers rarely agreed with one another on much, but they did share a hatred of predators. It was an enmity that had begun 10,000 years ago when humans first began herding goats and sheep, ripened in Europe down the centuries, festered in eastern North America and the Southwest when Europeans introduced the pastoral lifestyle there in the 1600s, then reached a crescendo of venom in America after the Civil War.
Cattle ranchers never got too heated up about coyotes so long as wolves lurked about their herds, but sheepmen quickly came to regard them as a “parasite on civilization.” Virtually on the heels of organizing stock associations to compensate for losses to predators and rustlers, cattle and sheep raisers began to push for a predator-control tool that New Englanders had used as far back as the 1630s: a cash bounty paid to the man who presented the head or ears of an extinguished predator. The first territorial and state bounties in western America targeted wolves as the primary threat to livestock. But coyotes did not escape notice from ranchers or bounty hunters for long.
Having little initial familiarity with coyotes, new residents often lived in the West for a decade or so before deciding that coyotes deserved a price on their heads. Kansas, for example, bountied wolves in 1864 but did not add coyotes to the list until 1877, when payment for either a wolf or a coyote was set at $1 per “scalp.” Colorado Territory created its first bounties in 1869; Montana Territory followed suit in 1883 and Wyoming in 1893. The territory of Arizona and New Mexico created its bounty system in 1893; its list included coyotes as well as wolves, bears, lions, and bobcats.
In the bounty phase of the predator war, Colorado was typical, going for wolves first but adding coyotes in 1876, then raising bounty payments over time, from 75 cents “a scalp” in 1879 to $1.50 in 1881. In 1893 the Colorado legislature began to differentiate between wolf and coyote bounties, paying $2 for the former and $1 for the latter. Urged on by stockmen’s associations, whose members tended to dominate western legislatures, by 1914 western states were paying $1 million a year in bounties that overall averaged $1 per animal. It’s an easy bet that coyotes formed a plurality of those 1 million bountied animals per year. Not winnable, but easy.
As large apex predators whose presence and domination had always served to suppress coyote numbers, wolves were never as numerous as their smaller cousins, but due to their reputation alone, initially they got the brunt of this lethal attention. A new federal agency, dedicated to the destruction of predators, would soon call bounties into question as an ultimate solution, but bounties undoubtedly produced results, especially with wolves. With packets of strychnine available in every hardware store in America, scattering a few poison tablets across the countryside to help beat back the continent’s wild predator horde was almost a patriotic duty for ordinary citizens.
Some governments in the West—in Montana, for example—absolutely prostituted themselves before the ranching industry. Between 1883 and 1928 Montana paid bounties on 111,545 wolves and 886,367 coyotes, a ranching subsidy that grew so large during the territorial stage that it devoured a stunning two-thirds of Montana’s annual budget! As a state, Montana bountied 23,575 wolves in 1899, but by 1920 wolf populations had collapsed to such an extent that in that year Montana paid bounties on only 17 gray wolves. Since bountied coyote numbers remained consistent—about 30,000 a year, with no drop at all between 1883 and 1928—in 1905 the state’s legislature upped the pressure on coyotes by actually passing a law requiring veterinarians to introduce sarcoptic mange into the wild canine population. This early form of state-sanctioned biological warfare still afflicts twenty-first-century coyotes and wolves in the region.
To many, these measures were not enough, not for wolves and certainly not for coyotes, whose numbers inexplicably remained undiminished despite the extraordinary numbers reported killed. The source of the problem, many westerners came to believe—naturally enough, it had to be so—was the federal government. At the turn of the twentieth century a new federal policy underway in the West represented a sea change, and as it originated with scientists and a handful of eastern intellectuals, westerners were suspicious from the start.
From the time of the first homestead acts, designed by Thomas Jefferson in the 1780s, the public domain that the United States steadily added to the country in the nineteenth century had been administered by the General Land Office, which offered it for sale (or sometimes as free homesteads or grants) to citizens or to infrastructure-building corporations like railroads. For more than a century the public domain’s intended destiny, in classic American tradition, was to become private property. Through purchase (Louisiana, Alaska, parts of Arizona and New Mexico), diplomatic agreement (the Northwest), war (the Southwest), and annexation (Texas, Hawai’i), the United States acquired an enormous amount of public domain between 1803 and 1898, and as various federal expeditions explored it, a prescient handful of Americans began to wonder about privatization as a blanket policy aimed so bluntly at such an ecologically diverse range of landscapes.
Two influential Americans in particular worried about this tradition in printed volumes, one a best seller, the other a congressional report. The author of the best seller was American diplomat George Perkins Marsh. A polymath New Englander who read twenty languages and filled diplomatic appointments all over the globe, Marsh in 1864 wrote Man and Nature, in effect the first modern history of the environment. Although it took on a huge range of topics relating to humanity’s relationship with the natural world, Man and Nature became most famous for its discussion of a pattern Marsh had observed in places as disparate as France, Turkey, and China. Rivers, he wrote, had always been crucial to human civilization, and almost everywhere they originated in mountains. But the privatization of mountains, the wellsprings of water that were so critical to human development, had been a disaster almost everywhere that countries had let it happen.
The United States still had time to avoid such a mistake, Marsh believed, by excluding its mountain landscapes from settlement that would invite overlogging and overgrazing and by retaining them instead as public preserves to protect watersheds. Marsh’s book went through eight printings and appeared in a new edition in 1871, and its success brought his argument to the attention of the National Association for the Advancement of Science, which in 1873 endorsed this new policy recommendation.
The other author was a one-armed Civil War veteran who became the most famous American explorer of the postwar era and eventually the most powerful bureaucrat in government late in the century. John Wesley Powell had lost an arm at Shiloh, but that could not prevent him from leading the first party to take on the dangerous and descent of the unknown Grand Canyon, which he accomplished not once but twice, serializing the account of his adventure in the most popular magazines of the day. Then, in 1878, the year before he became the director of the new United States Geological Survey, Powell laid before Congress his masterpiece for rethinking public domain policies in America. The Lands of the Arid Region of the United States didn’t exactly endorse Marsh’s plan. Powell focused more on the diversity of public domain landscapes and why Congress should tailor settlement plans specifically for valleys, foothills, and mountains. Yet by emphasizing the special difficulties settlers were facing in a West that was far more desertlike than anyplace Americans had ever tried to homestead, Powell added yet another layer of reasoning as to why protecting western water was so crucial.
Neither writer had said the first thing about wolves, coyotes, or any other wild creatures, but in 1891 Republican president Benjamin Harrison’s administration passed an appropriations bill for the General Land Office that included a rider placing 13 million acres of western mountains off-limits from settlement. It was the beginning, in the Sierra Nevada and Rocky mountain ranges, of what would evolve into America’s National Forest System, a linchpin of Teddy Roosevelt’s crucial conservation program a few years later that eventually included a National Park Service and more than fifty National Wildlife Refuges, all created out of federal public domain lands. By 1907, squat, bespectacled, squeaky-voiced Teddy Roosevelt, rivaled only by Thomas Jefferson as the most nature obsessed of all American presidents, had set aside 151 million acres of western mountain lands as national forests, and by 1910 the new policy began to work on acquiring cutover lands in the East, Midwest, and South as additional public forests. A new National Park Service followed in 1916. By 1932 it was administering twenty-two national parks and thirty-six national monuments, almost all of them fashioned from lands everyone once assumed would be parceled out to private individuals, as American lands had always been before.
Farms, ranches, and towns would be located on the borders of, but not within, these vast expanses of public forests and parks. Despite roads, trails, campgrounds, and tourists, within them big nature prevailed. Instead of replicating the East, settlement in the western third of the country was angling off on a new historical course. For big predators like coyotes and wolves, a historical course that preserved vast expanses of wildlands in America couldn’t help but look really promising. Naturally the story turned out to be a lot more complicated.
René Descartes famously thought of animals as so distinct from humans that they were almost automatons, incapable of joy, sorrow, or emotional lives of any kind. According to centuries of Western scientific thinking nearly down to our own time, higher animals’ behavioral responses are based purely in instinct, not—like human behavior—centered on morality or advanced emotions like fairness or empathy. Until very recent work by behavioral biologists, we firmly believed that no animal other than ourselves had anything remotely approaching a so-called theory of mind, the ability to recognize that other beings are also engaging in thought and to attempt to discern what other minds outside our own might be thinking.
Most of those who pioneered the systematic, professionalized destruction of creatures like wolves and coyotes in America from the 1880s to the 1930s no doubt regarded wild predators in the Descartes mold. Wild canines were profoundly, fundamentally different from humans. Most, like professional wolfer Ben Corbin, who wrote The Wolf Hunter’s Guide in 1901, had internalized the Judeo-Christian teaching that humans possessed “souls,” which other animals lacked. Corbin was far from alone in imagining this war in terms of a Christian crusade against the depravity of predators. Wasn’t morality—at its core, a code for treating others as fairly as we wish to be treated ourselves—an invention of human culture, its precepts disseminated through religious teachings? For centuries the most enlightened position we could muster about our “brute neighbors” was that they deserved some semblance of decent treatment, but certainly not because they possessed emotional lives, experienced pain or loss, or understood anything at all about morality.
Prior to this first phase of America’s war on wild things, Charles Darwin’s experiences with his own dogs had convinced the great naturalist that canines did indeed possess emotional lives and perhaps even had some fundamental form of morality. The nineteenth-century activists who formed the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals moved in Darwin’s direction, and post-Darwinian writers like Jack London, James Oliver Curwood, and Ernest Thompson Se-ton attempted early-twentieth-century fictional stories built around Darwin’s idea that animals experience joy and anguish and understand the essentials of fairness. But the scientific community quickly and famously squashed such notions. The activists were sentimentalists, scientists of Roosevelt’s day averred. As for the writers, not only were they anthropomorphizing animals, trying to turn them into little humans, but they were deliberately falsifying natural history for purposes of sentimental entertainment.
The outcome of what has been known in the history of science ever since as the “Nature Faker Controversy” may have comforted those about to wage a war of extermination against American predators. In our time, though, it no longer works to seek solace in the notion that other higher animals are so different from us that they entirely lack emotional lives. The Stephen Pinkers of the modern world have made us understand that the human senses of fairness, equity, and empathy, the fundaments of the moral code, do not in fact spring from organized religion or advanced culture but have roots in our very evolution as a social species. We are beings with brains that are endlessly taking stock of favors and slights, reciprocity and advantage. Morality did not emerge from religious teachings. Rather, religious teachings encoded a morality that sprang from human social evolution.
That breakthrough in understanding our own animal nature has led, in the present age, to the work of scientists such as Marc Bekoff and Brian Hare, who study primarily the social lives of dogs but also those of wolves and coyotes. Their work leaves little doubt that as social species themselves, canines also understand equality and inequity—morality, in other words—and experience both a rudimentary form of empathy and some basic theory of mind. In practice, theory of mind involves efforts by higher animals to read expressions and body language to discern the outlines of other creatures’ thoughts.
In other words, just like us, canines are animals whose evolutionary history as social species has given them an essential sense of what in human terms we would call “right and wrong.” Numerous studies have demonstrated that both canines and chimps know when they are being treated equitably among their peers and when they are not, and their behavior registers this knowledge. According to Bekoff, much as humans use prisons and enforced socialization, wild coyotes have a sense of proper coyote behavior and ostracize individuals that fail to observe it. As for theory of mind, domesticated dogs famously demonstrate remarkable canine abilities in common acts that they and their owners perform on a daily basis. When we point at a dish or a toy, with their 15,000 years of coevolution alongside us, dogs read our intent and look in the direction we’re signaling. Wolves, coyotes, and chimps demonstrate theory of mind in other ways (often by reading intent in play gestures), but even chimps stare at our fingers when we point. Unlike dogs, they fail to infer the mental signal.
Knowing what we currently understand about the evolutionary origins of human morality and the emotional lives of higher animals, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the fate that befell those millions of wild American canines from the 1880s to the 1930s must have caused them some staggering level of emotional trauma and perhaps even a profoundly experienced, rudimentary sense of unfairness, the kind of mental sense that in us becomes a powerfully felt idea: injustice.
In 1897 New Mexico rancher Arthur Tisdale, resident of a territory where the new conservation policies were in the process of creating the Santa Fe and Carson National Forests in the Southern Rocky Mountains, became the first known individual to call on the federal government to assist ranchers facing what was becoming known as “the predator problem.” Ranchers like Tisdale reasoned out a syllogism whose logic went like this: Private efforts alone had sufficed to wipe out most of the wolves out on the plains. But because federal policies setting aside new public lands in the mountains were creating predator refuges there, having thereby created the problem, it was only right that some government agency help ranchers and farmers clear out the predators that were holing up in preserves precious few westerners had wanted in the first place.
No one either in or outside government investigated this trail of reasoning very closely for evidence. The idea of public lands as animal refuges seemed intuitive. And looking back, there is some good evidence that several species of animals formerly found on the Great Plains—grizzlies, certainly, but also elk and very likely coyotes too—began in the 1880s and 1890s to retreat into the more protective mountains. Always more common on the plains and in the western deserts than anywhere else in the West, coyotes do appear to have begun colonizing westward in the direction of the Sierras and the Pacific in the 1890s. Likely they were pulled there by possibilities around mining activities and pushed there by persecution on the Great Plains.
Since federal administrators of the new federal land preserves, like Forest Service chief Gifford Pinchot, knew they needed the support of locals in the West, and scarcely any of them felt sympathy for predators anyway, the federal agencies responded to Tisdale’s arguments. The Forest Service, in charge of the National Forests, thus became the first government agency to kill predators on behalf of ranching interests. Eventually even rangers working for the new Park Service would join the predator war with gusto. Later both the famous Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal era and the Grazing Service, the latter created to manage the remainder of the public domain once the Dust Bowl ended homesteading on federal lands in 1934, would make sure that some of the money for conservation and public-lands grazing fees actually went to predator extermination.
But the Biological Survey, an apparently benign federal department designed to continue the natural history work in America that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had begun, became the federal agency whose very reason for being was predator control. Renowned American scientist C. Hart Merriam planted the seed for today’s US Fish and Wildlife Service—and its predator-control stepsister, now known as the Division of Wildlife Services—in 1886 in the form of a federal agency known as the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy. Merriam renamed it the Division of Biological Survey ten years later.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, Merriam’s son-in-law, a scientist named Vernon Bailey who struck many on first meeting as a kindly soul, directed the Biological Survey’s ongoing, nationwide cataloguing of the fauna of America. That was the survey’s official mission statement up until 1905. Bailey was hardly a St. Francis though—indeed, he would have shot the wolf at St. Francis’s side as fast as he could draw on it—and he set the agency on a mission quite different from the one his father-in-law had imagined for it.
Somewhat like today’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Biological Survey, due to its original pure science tack, endlessly found itself scraping for funds (and survival) when Congress passed appropriations bills. By the early century the Biological Survey realized it needed a mission statement that would make it seem a critical, if not downright indispensable, government player. The search for that economic mission kept leading the bureau back to the Forest Service, its National Forest System, and the public image problem it had with western stockmen who protested that the national forests were nothing more than a series of woodsy hangouts for the predators that decimated livestock. To Bailey this seemed an opening, so in 1907 he authored a pamphlet titled Wolves in Relation to Stock, Game, and the National Forest Reserves, wherein he argued, among other things, that the national forests were serving as predator refuges, and his agency could well be the solution. While he was at it, he expressed the sentiment that although wolves were certainly a menace to sheep and cattle, other, equally worthy targets were holing up in the national forests. He continued, “Wolves kill far less game in the western United States than either coyotes or mountain lions.”
Embroiled then in a case that would go to the Supreme Court related to efforts to levy fees for grazing in the national forests, Forest Service chief Gifford Pinchot was in a conciliatory mood toward ranchers. He turned to Bailey to clear the national forests of predators. By their account, Bailey’s bureau men proceeded to enjoy an outstanding success in locating predator dens, killing pups, and trapping and poisoning the adults. According to the bureau’s next circular, Destruction of Wolves and Coyotes: Results Obtained During 1907, his men had dispatched 2,000 wolves and 23,000 coyotes in just a single year. With that outcome, Bailey initiated what would become a long-running campaign against the bounty system, which he argued was an unworkable private and state effort to deal with a problem that really required federal professionals. By the end of 1907, a government bureau that until then had seemed an innocent troop of deer counters was positioning itself as the solution to the “problem of predators.”
The Biological Survey needed a clear, pragmatic justification for its existence, and the notion that public lands were harboring and breeding a menace to private enterprise provided its main chance. The Progressive Era—the years from 1901 through 1916, during the administrations of Republicans Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft and Democrat Woodrow Wilson—represented the real beginning of growth and reach in the US federal government. As with many other projects of this initial age of social engineering, many Americans believed that a large-scale effort like exterminating predators was simply too big a task for individual ranchers. Indeed, most westerners were coming to the conclusion that it was too big even for livestock association or state bounty programs. Coyotes, in particular, for some reason seemed impossible even to thin out. Getting rid of predators called for federal men, experts who understood animals—and who were preparing themselves by training in the techniques of mass killing.
The first congressional “eradication appropriation” finally went to the bureau in 1914: it awarded $125,000 for use “on the National Forests and the public domain in destroying wolves, coyotes, and other animals injurious to agriculture and animal husbandry.” Finally armed with the budget and mission it had been seeking for nearly a decade, the bureau hired three hundred hunters around the West to engage in a brand-new, federally mandated war against wild things. Within two years it also asked Congress—and western senators and representatives made sure Congress agreed—to allow the bureau to accept additional private funding from stockmen’s associations, as well as money from state legislatures.
At last the Biological Survey had found an argument for its existence that not only brought money rolling in from a variety of sources but seemed to make sense to everyone. That included middle-class Americans of the age, who had internalized Alfred Lord Tennyson’s flawed but potent redaction of evolution. “Nature, red in tooth and claw” convicted predators of all manner of crimes and cruelties. Even the Audubon Society endorsed the Biological Survey’s antipredator campaign.
There was one other new ally. Public relations experts within the bureau began to mount a campaign to spread the idea to sport hunters that its project of destroying predators, which state after state was now classifying as unprotected “varmints” or “nongame,” would have the added benefit of creating bumper populations of “game” animals for hunters to shoot. The idea was that in this brave new world that American wildlife experts were engineering, sport hunters would replace predators in harvesting creatures like deer and elk. It was an absolute stroke of genius. Trappers who had long made money on the pelts of coyotes and wolves didn’t welcome the federal competition, but the bureau’s argument brought all manner of sportsmen’s groups, firearms manufacturers, and state game and fish agencies to the cause.
The Progressive Era was the age of the bureaucratic professional, and professionalism prevailed at the Biological Survey. The quickest, most “efficient” way to mass-kill wolves and coyotes was not shooting individual animals but poisoning entire populations. So with the goal of blanketing river valleys and mountain ranges with poison bait stations that aimed to kill every predator of every species in a region, with its new funding the bureau now proceeded to build a plant in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to produce strychnine tablets in volume. Chillingly and unsentimentally dubbed the Eradication Methods Laboratory, this federal killing facility moved to Denver in 1921, where it would go on to perfect an amazing witch’s brew of ever more efficient, ever deadlier predacides. Chemists and researchers in the Eradication Methods Laboratory, with government jobs and benefits, presumably realized the American Dream in the 1920s, buying houses, automobiles, radios, and washing machines, all the latest technologies of the decade. Their products, meanwhile, destroyed America’s wild animals, the foundations of an ecology that 20,000 years of evolution had perfected, as if their victims were of no consequence whatsoever.
For the hunters employed by the Biological Survey, the approach in the field was simple. The bureau’s professional hunters’ first step was “prebaiting,” strewing cubes of fat and meat across the countryside to get wolves and coyotes habituated to them. That accomplished, the actual “poison bait stations”—in the age of the automobile, each bait station was commonly one of America’s surplus horses, which could be led to the selected spot and shot and whose carcass was then laced with strychnine tablets and surrounded by poisoned fat and meat cubes—went in next.
Stanley Young, one of the bureau’s initial hunters who rose to subsequent prominence in the agency, became something of a coyote specialist in this new game. Young had grown up in Oregon idealizing Lewis and Clark. Now, in places like the Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico and along the rims of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, he discovered that with strychnine it was possible to kill 350 of Lewis and Clark’s “prairie wolves” in less than ten days. Approaching his bait stations, he later wrote, he found that he could tally a quick total of his victims even from a distance because of the way they died. Every single dead coyote was frozen into that signature strychnine convulsion—a wrenched, alien shape easily visible against the landscape, its tail sticking straight out and frizzed as if the animal had been struck by lightning.
Young’s visual imagery of the US government’s coyote extermination campaign was soon writ large across the West. With wolf populations rapidly collapsing in the face of the bureau’s war on the wild, señor coyote’s turn was coming fast. But there remained one very large and visible public-lands arena in which wolves were still the main target and coyotes still mostly collateral damage in the wolf war. That was the national parks.
Yellowstone, set aside as the world’s first national park in 1872, and Glacier, created along the Continental Divide in Montana in 1912, became symbolic national scenes of America’s wolf and coyote jihad in the 1920s. The United States created national parks in order to allow the public to experience wild nature in its pristine state, so you would assume that when Secretary of the Interior Henry Teller banned all hunting in Yellowstone, even predators would have found refuge. But naturally, park managers saw things differently. Despite having been on the “pristine” Yellowstone Plateau for 1 million years before the park ever existed, wolves, lions, bears, and coyotes somehow were unwelcome enough to produce extermination campaigns even in America’s grand nature preserves. Sport hunters, hoping the parks would breed game animals, and ranchers, hoping they wouldn’t become asylums for predators, pushed for this, but they didn’t have to push hard.
Yellowstone aimed its first predator-extermination campaign directly at the park’s “numerous and bold” coyote population. At first the army rangers who patrolled the park randomly shot every coyote they saw. But as early as 1898, park personnel actually began to poison coyotes, mountain lions, and wolves inside park boundaries. When Congress signed the Biological Survey’s predator death sentence appropriation in 1914, Yellowstone went so far as to invite Vernon Bailey to show park personnel the proper mass-extermination techniques. Following Bailey’s approach, which focused heavily on dens and pups, between 1914 and 1916 Yellowstone rangers destroyed eighty-three coyotes and twelve wolves inside park boundaries. Stephen Mather, the charismatic New Englander who became the National Park Service’s first director in 1916, is a conservationist hero to many, but Mather thought that if a Yellowstone ranger “didn’t kill off his 200 to 300 coyotes a year,” the park’s coyotes would spread across the West and wreak havoc. Yellowstone’s tally until the death of the last wolves in the park, in 1926, was 136 gray wolves, 80 of them puppies. Coyote deaths, of course, did not end in 1926. With bureau assistance, the number of coyotes that died in Yellowstone from 1918 until 1935 reached nearly 3,000: 2,968, to be precise.
Glacier National Park, 250 miles north of Yellowstone, played a tail-to-a-kite role to the older park, primarily because its clusters of rounded mountains and glacial valleys did not provide as rich a habitat for herbivores or predators as Yellowstone. Yet James Galen, Glacier’s superintendent in 1913, thrilled by the state of Montana’s experiment with biological warfare against predators, wrote the state veterinarian, “I am desirous of inoculating, with mange, some coyotes to turn loose here in the park, with the idea that I may eventually kill off all the coyotes in the park in this manner.” Montana dutifully supplied a pair of mange-ridden coyotes to Glacier in late 1913, and Galen turned them loose with best wishes for success. But Department of Agriculture bureaucrats in Washington eventually scotched his bigger plan to spread mange to wild canids. Poison, they thought, would be far more effective, especially if the baits were placed on the border between Glacier and the Blackfeet Reservation, a “breeding ground for coyotes.” As for wolves, Glacier killed only fourteen between 1910 and 1920, although the park’s proximity to a healthy Canadian wolf population made it a sporadic wolf colonization destination throughout the twentieth century.
All the government’s hunters, whether on private ranches, in the national forests, or in the parks, initially concentrated their greatest efforts on wolves because, frankly, the war was all about the interests of the livestock industry, and ranchers particularly hated wolves. But within a decade after the Biological Survey’s mandate, its hunters had so thoroughly reduced the gray wolf population that after about 1926 the bureau’s hunters rarely killed more than a single wolf a year in any state. Nonetheless, in 1923 in the single state of Colorado, the bureau had set out 31,255 poison bait stations. This was the start of a new phase. With almost no wolves left alive in America, coyotes had now become public enemy number one.
In fairness, bureau explanations for an increasing focus on coyotes were not entirely matters of expediency to preserve funding after the poisoning campaign against wolves turned out to be a little too successful. With the country’s keystone predator now gone, an ecological chain reaction set in across much of America. Their 20,000-year competitor canines now almost erased, coyotes began to exercise their ancient fission-fusion capabilities. Some coyotes began to form packs and hunt larger prey, including sheep and occasionally (although very rarely) calves. Either as pack members or in singles and pairs, coyotes proved far more elusive to federal hunters than wolves, whose social bonds were so strong that pack members tended to fall one after another into traps baited with the scent of their pack mates and puppies.
Coyotes were also on the move. With wolves disappearing, coyotes of the 1920s and 1930s found themselves in a world where humans seemed their only threat, but whose forest clearing, cities, and built environments also offered coyotes brand-new opportunities. Harassed and endlessly pursued, but now by people rather than wolves, coyotes in the 1920s ratcheted themselves into survival high gear. Not only did they employ several then unsuspected evolutionary stratagems for maintaining their populations in the West, but they began another historic expansion of their range—first westward toward the Pacific and northward in the direction of the Yukon and Alaska, then eastward across the Mississippi River into the East and South, where they would gradually begin to fill a niche left almost entirely vacant by eradication campaigns against wolves.
The federal coyote killing program exists as a subsidy for a fading US sheep industry.
Courtesy Dan Flores.
With the wolf cleansed and the bureau’s Denver plant cranking out the strychnine, by the mid-1920s bureau hunters reached the rather phenomenal milestone of having set out 3.567 million poison bait stations across the West. This scorched-earth policy against coyotes yielded some 35,000 dead coyote bodies a year, although the bureau publicly estimated that its hunters never found another 100,000 poisoned annually. But soon enough it began to dawn on the bureau’s overconfident operatives that even after they had saturated the landscape with poison, coyote numbers somehow weren’t diminishing. Like Old Man Coyote in the native traditions, the real coyote simply refused to die. First surprised, then increasingly angry, bureau personnel began to confess privately to one another that for a reason no one could figure out, a bureau with wolf notches on its gun was struggling to win the war of civilization against the slinking, lowlife junior wolf.
The bureau’s success against wolves combined with hubris to blind its functionaries, at first, to an observation that had actually been around for a while. The truth was, people who had experience with coyotes had been puzzling since the late 1800s over their extraordinary resilience. Unlike so many of the West’s animals—bison, bighorn sheep, antelope, elk, grizzly bears, and ultimately wolves—all of which had turned up their toes in capitulation to American western expansion, coyotes seemed an anomaly. And as early as 1900, one of America’s leading national magazines had published a short story by a famous nature writer that directly addressed the coyote’s singular situation in America’s war on wild things.
Ernest Thompson Seton was a Canadian who ended his long and productive career as a writer (and founder of the Boy Scouts) living in New Mexico. Seton has taken his licks across the years as a fellow traveler of the “Nature Faker” writers of the early twentieth century, the group famous for anthropomorphizing the animal characters in their books. In some of the nature writing of that time, the animals reasoned and had morals, societies, and advanced cultures with laws. One critic of Seton’s book Animals I Have Known even wrote, sarcastically, that its proper title ought to have been Animals I Alone Have Known.
Nonetheless, Seton’s most famous coyote story, “Tito: The Story of the Coyote That Learned How,” which was the lead piece in the August 1900 issue of Scribner’s, had taken up coyote resilience back at the turn of the century and tried to explain it allegorically. Like the Indian stories featuring Coyote, Seton’s “Tito” took on an observable truth and offered an explanation. Species after species was disappearing in twentieth-century America. Yet, despite a “fierce war” that “had for a long time been waged against the coyote kind,” coyotes somehow had not done the proper and expected thing. For some reason, they had refused to disappear.
To offer an explanation, Seton invented “Tito,” a little bobtailed female coyote captured as a pup and chained in a ranch yard as a curiosity. But she was observant and coyote-smart, and this close association with humans taught her not just about the range of dangers from humans but how to avoid lassos, metal traps, gunfire, and poison bait. From experience as an “insider,” she learned to hoodwink hounds and finally grasped the ultimate trajectory of man’s designs against “the coyote kind.” Tito had made a lousy dog, so was never a pet, and ultimately she escaped, found a mate, had a litter of her own, and then proceeded to teach her pups and “their children’s children” all the wisdom she had learned.
In the story’s formulation, through transmission down the generations from a Hero Coyote, all coyotes after her would be “wise in the later wisdom that the ranchers’ war has forced upon them.” Seton’s human analog to Tito? Moses, of course, who by growing up among the Egyptians learned their ways, which enabled him to save the Israelites from Egyptian slavery and persecution.
So just how were coyotes able to survive a nineteenth-century fur trade followed by a twentieth-century war of extermination without going under? As Seton’s story implied, intelligence and the sharing of learned behavior certainly enabled such coyote resilience. But in truth, the coyote’s evolutionary biology played as large a role. The fission-fusion flexibility that went so far back in their evolution made coyotes—very much like us—opportunists able to thrive in wholly new circumstances. In our own case, fission-fusion abilities early in our evolution allowed us to survive bottleneck die-offs, probably from disease epidemics that threatened to exterminate us. In the case of coyotes, fission-fusion helped position the species to survive twentieth-century America’s war on predators when wolves could not. A primary reason coyotes are in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City this morning has to do with an evolutionary adaptation they share with us.
Coyote evolution also produced a litany of other traits that help explain the species’ resilience, some of which should appear familiar to us as well. Like us, coyote young have lengthy childhoods during which they learn from their parents cultural skills and critical information about the world. Juvenile coyotes, like human children, have to be taught through their adolescence the cultural wisdom of their species. So Seton was right about Tito, to a certain extent. Our intuitive grasp of this aspect of the social life of canids is one reason wolves were our first and oldest domesticate. We can also relate to the inclination of wild canids like coyotes to pair up as long-term mates and for both parents to assist in rearing young. These are not especially common mating strategies in nature, but they seem normal to us.
Decades after Seton’s story appeared, though, biologists discovered another highly important coyote adaptation that helps explain their resilience, and it amazed even the scientists. The average coyote litter size is 5.7 pups, but that number can range from as low as 2 to as high as 19. The reason for such variability is that coyotes possess an autogenic trait that allows them to assess the ecological possibilities around them. If not persecuted, they saturate a landscape to carrying capacity, then usually have small litters that produce only a couple of surviving pups. But if they sense a suppressed coyote population relative to available resources, they give birth to very large litters. The coyote’s yipping howl, known around the world as the iconic music of wild North America, has several functions, one very important one of which is to assess the size of the surrounding coyote population. In the face of persecution that thins their numbers, they respond with whopping litters with high pup survivability.
Other evolved traits also enable coyotes under stress to maintain or even grow their populations. Coyote packs commonly consist of a breeding alpha pair along with one- and two-year-old pups, often females, from previous litters. If something kills the alpha female, lower-ranking beta females, which can breed as early as ten months, will come into estrus during the normal late-winter mating season and have litters of pups as, in effect, adolescent mothers.
Coyotes are remarkable in other ways too. Fission-fusion flexibility makes them omnivorous, and they may scavenge, but nature designed them to succeed as predators. We often express horror at animals that pursue and kill other animals, but such a response demonstrates a misunderstanding of our own evolutionary history. We have been a wildly successful species in part because of our predatory skills. We ought to look with clear eyes and admiration at the coyote’s skill set. Darwinian evolution gave its species something like 1,000 times the number of scent receptors we have. Its ability to hear extends into extremely high frequencies in the range of 80 kHz, about 25 percent higher than dogs. As is the case with many other species, a coyote’s eyes lack cones to separate wavelengths into color. Bureau hunters trying to eradicate them got scant advantage from those yellow-orange coyote eyes perceiving the enemy in black and white though. Coyote vision is at least as good as ours, and their peripheral vision is much better.
Along with cultural transmission that instructs pups about how to be predators, stalk a deer mouse or vole and pounce on it with stiffened front legs, or suffocate larger prey with a bulldogging neck grab and a bite hold that collapse the windpipe, coyotes bring to bear on the world great observational learning intelligence. Occurring for 20,000 years alongside wolf evolution, coyote evolution selected for animals that were naturally wary, even nervous, traits usually associated with a species that is itself sometimes prey (again, behavior we ought to recognize in ourselves). In fact, coyotes are not “cowardly” but instead are circumspect to the point of extreme wariness. Lacking a fearsome predator until we arrived, gray wolves possessed a comparative boldness that rendered them relatively easy to extirpate in the twentieth century, whereas coyotes were not. Yellowstone wolf biologist Doug Smith once put it to me this way: “When you’re top dog in evolutionary history, you get bold and cocky . . . but when, like the coyote, you’ve been persecuted your entire existence, you learn how to be clever.”
A coyote’s nervousness makes it highly suspicious of new developments, new objects, and new smells in its habitat, and it learns extremely quickly from experience. Here is one way I know that. Coyote packs establish fixed ranges that in rural areas may be as large as ten to twelve miles around a den site, territories they defend against other coyotes, scent-mark with urine, and navigate via routinely traveled trails. In the 1980s I was building a house in a canyon called Yellow House out in West Texas, and over coffee in the mornings I began to notice an alpha female coyote and two yearling pups traversing the same trail, day after day, along the edge of a mesa about a hundred yards from my construction. Every morning, at a particular clump of yuccas, the adult female would pause, hump her back, extend a rear leg toward her nose, and scent-mark.
One day, curious about what would happen and maybe feeling a little perverse, I walked over to the same yuccas and relieved myself in her spot. Early the next morning, as usual, there she was, trotting with lolling tongue along her footpath, pups fifteen feet behind. This time, though, at her yucca scent-mark she stopped cold, extended a pointed nose, sniffed, and sniffed again. Then she walked stiff-legged around the clump, a series of steps the pups mimicked exactly. I worked on my house for several more months, and once or twice the pups came and sat on their haunches in the yard fifty feet away and watched in fascinated wonderment. But I never saw the alpha female on that mesa trail again. I’d introduced something new into her routine, and she was too wary to tolerate it even once.
So the coyote’s innate wariness, the kind of nervous brainpower that emerges in an animal that is both predator and prey, made it a far more formidable target than Biological Survey bureaucrats ever realized. Coyotes could call on the perfect suite of traits to survive a war against them when wolves, bears, and almost no other North American animal could turn that trick. Many of the coyote’s resilience traits were actually adaptations to thousands of years of living alongside wolves. But ultimately human harassment triggered the same set of hardwired responses persecution by wolves had. Pressuring coyote populations by killing large numbers of them kept the species in a constant state of “colonization,” employing fission-fusion strategies to enlarge their prey base, attempting to grow their population with larger litters, and raising a higher percentage of pups to adulthood because there was more food in a landscape where coyote numbers were suppressed.
Tito made a lovely analogy to Moses, but considered all together, these factors explain why coyotes evaded the slaughterhouse we had prepared for them. Try as we might to destroy them—and in this we were stubbornly, obsessively, blindly happy to indulge—they responded with maddening nonchalance.
By the late 1920s, when the bureau finally designated the Division of Predatory Animal and Rodent Control to specialize in its professional killing program, the total eradication of coyotes had come to seem the only reasonable policy in America. Ernest Thompson Seton’s fellow nature writer John Burroughs had argued as early as 1906 that predators “certainly needed killing.” The “fewer of these there are, the better for the useful and beautiful game.” William T. Hornaday, a conservation hero who saved the last of the bison and led the charge to replace commercial hunting with sport hunting, insisted that where predators like coyotes were concerned, “firearms, dogs, traps, and strychnine [are] thoroughly legitimate weapons of destruction. For such animals, no half-way measures suffice.” Not even John Muir, who found coyotes “beautiful” and “graceful,” mounted a campaign against the destruction of predators, although he worried in print that slaughtering coyotes would induce a “penalty for interfering with the balance of Nature.”
But in the 1920s, almost out of the blue, coyotes began to acquire champions. At their annual meetings beginning in 1924, the American Society of Mammalogists began to debate whether predators might actually serve some essential functions in nature and whether American poisoning policies were drastically wrongheaded. A cadre of famous scientific luminaries soon spoke out against the bureau, to the shock of many of its employees, biologists themselves and their critics’ colleagues.
In reaction to this new reflection from the scientific community, the bureau would double down on its denials of a role for predators and propose a shocking final solution. In the late 1920s it had a predator war budget of nearly $2 million from its various sources, yet repeatedly conveyed to Congress that it was underfunded in so herculean a task. Those repeated pleas led Texas representative James Buchanan to wonder aloud if a significant increase in the bureau’s budget might not enable it, finally, to “wipe out” coyotes entirely as it had done with wolves.
Ignoring signs of growing restlessness within the scientific community, in 1928 the bureau’s Major E. A. Goldman, its point man on all things canid, offered up the agency’s predator endgame. If Congress would fund the bureau at $10 million for a decade, it would wipe out coyotes completely, once and for all. The bill the bureau drew up and sought out Congressman Scott Leavitt of Montana to sponsor was not to be called the Coyote Extermination Act, however. Even in the 1920s that sounded tin eared. Internally, the bureau called it the Ten-Year Bill. If enacted into American law, it would be called the Animal Damage Control Act, a fantasy law for the agricultural industry and for the bureau too. The figures involved were certainly fantasy: the sum of $1 million a year for ten years to effect the outright “eradication” of coyotes appears to have been drawn out of thin air, designed more for effect in Congress than anything else. But even with coyote numbers still high and science beginning to turn against it, with the Ten-Year Bill the bureau did actually seem to believe that a civilized kingdom in America was at hand.
It had been only 125 years since Lewis and Clark first encountered “prairie wolves” and wondered what to think of them. Now bureaucratic coyote killers were salivating at the chance to wipe 5 million years of North American canine genetics from the face of the Earth. What could have been more American?
Standing on my patio in the ancient coyote range outside Santa Fe, with coyote howls enlivening almost every night in the High Desert of New Mexico, I wonder now at the mind-set of it all, the mode of thinking that makes us such stoic killers, able to extinguish with such ease the very qualities that lend the world beauty, grace, romance. And, to my personal regret, I wonder not just how it played out a century ago or in other minds. I wonder about it in all of us, certainly in myself, who as a teenager, when coyotes were colonizing Louisiana, tried so hard to possess wild nature and bring it to hand.
This is an uncomfortable memory for me, but here it is. It is an early daybreak, with the sun a flattened red ball through the mists of the Red River Valley. I am seventeen years old. A coyote pauses in yellow prairie grass, her muzzle wondrously sharp and refined, her ears working. Dew droplets cascade into silvery pearls in the air above her as her tail switches the grass. Her intense eyes bore straight into mine: she is posing an ancient question, one I will not be capable of answering correctly until another decade of living has passed. So a rifle blast shatters the humid morning air, and she yelps, spins, disappears.
The next moment is one of the most vivid mind’s-eye pictures of my life, as perfect in my memory as a circle. The sun suddenly breaks through the mist, and all that only an instant before had seemed wild, romantic, beautiful, dissolves in stop-frame motion as I look on. The “prairie” becomes a scraggly pasture littered with cow dung and discarded plastic soft drink bottles and broken farm machinery. The “wilderness” is now encircled with a half-collapsed barbed wire fence decorated with rusted, bullet-riddled no-trespassing signs. And somewhere beyond the cottonwoods along the river, the gears of a propane delivery truck are grinding like chalk on slate.
In an instant I had personally recapitulated the last two hundred years of coyote history. I had destroyed what I loved, drained beauty and perfection from the world with a syringe as I looked on. Detached, stoic. A killer.