In the spring of 1961, the year the weekly television show Walt Disney Presents (it would evolve into Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color later that year) decided to position itself dead solid in the middle of the growing cultural controversy in America over coyote control, the show’s producers had me squarely in their sights as audience demographic. In 1961, I was twelve years old and an undying disciple of Disney. I never missed an episode. I’d seen his 1942 anti-hunting film, Bambi, a year or two earlier, and I’d soon enough take in Lady and the Tramp at a local theater and nurse a grudge against dog pounds and dogcatchers from then on. So at an impressionable age, in a decade on the precipice of the age of ecology and the beginnings of the environmental movement, I was all in when revered Uncle Walt stepped into the nation’s coyote debate with his hour-long animated film The Coyote’s Lament.
Disney himself, amiable as always, introduced his initial film on coyotes (there would be five more), beginning by quoting from Mark Twain’s description of the animal in Roughing It to provide a reference point for what humans thought of the species. But The Coyote’s Lament, he averred, would finally tell “the coyote’s side of the story.” Over the next hour the film introduced millions of young viewers like me to three generations of a family of rustic, country-bumpkin coyotes (replete with rural Southern accents), including a pup who serves as the rapt audience for the accounts the older coyotes share. Those accounts mourn the changes wrought by humans and their dogs “when man came West” and chased off coyotes’ “vittles,” fenced in the prairie, and crowded coyotes out. Their natural food sources diminished, they’d had to turn to domesticated fare like chickens and sheep, incurring man’s wrath. Scenes in The Coyote’s Lament portray the war against coyotes remarkably realistically, with set-piece scenes on guns, bounties, and traps. In this coyotes’ version of American history, man “took our domain. . . . [W]e were here before you.” Then, their perspective of the conquest of the West told, the pack gathers atop a mesa to howl the film’s recurring theme song, “You Made Our Lives a Misery,” one line of which goes (I no doubt gritted my teeth in sympathy), “We don’t want to be your durn pet!”
“We coyotes do lots of good,” one of Disney’s coyotes tells his television audience, before channeling the essence of the new scientific consensus about coyotes: “We’re what’s known as the balance of nature.” At the end of The Coyote’s Lament, the coyotes’ final message to the audience, delivered during a period when federal poisoners, bounty hunters, and state trappers were killing between 250,000 and 300,000 coyotes a year in the United States, is simply this: “When the time comes when you can’t hear the song of the coyote, the West is going to seem a mighty dull place.”
By the time the credits rolled, I and millions like me were avowed coyote aficionados, the first generation in American history to have its sensibilities shaped by nature programming on television.
It’s a bumper sticker cliché to think of the 1950s as a simpler time, the “morning in America” that Ronald Reagan would invoke three decades later, but no decade in America’s past has ever been simple. Compared to the ear-splitting thunderclap of the revolutionary 1960s that loomed ahead, the 1950s almost seemed like a collective inhalation. For more than a decade 200 million people seemed to be holding their breath in anticipation. Perhaps the largest generation gap in American life occurred between those who came of age in the 1950s and those whose worldviews were shaped by the 1960s. I have two older siblings who both were teenagers in the 1950s. The cultural rift between them and our parents, themselves children of the 1920s, was far narrower than the grand gulf of viewpoints that separated my siblings and me. The 1960s did that to many millions of Americans.
Scientists of the 1950s and 1960s, especially specialists in ecological relationships like predation and, most particularly, those interested in the effects their evolving fields had on public policy, already possessed a nuanced idea about America’s native wild canids. They had a new appreciation of the role of predators in the natural world that had been growing in sophistication over the previous three decades. But for ordinary citizens, who read no scientific papers or journals and only barely knew that coyotes were the special target of a poisoning campaign paid for with their tax dollars, the fate of coyotes wasn’t even a blip on the radar or the TV screen. Westerners certainly knew about coyotes, although often only as a category of creatures classified by state game laws as “nongame varmints”—legally killed by various methods at any time of the year, with none of the restrictions that hunting seasons or bag limits imposed on animals considered “game,” which, of course, is where most wildlife money went. If coyotes registered any recognition at all among southerners and easterners, they did so merely as characters in western literature or films. Hardly anyone, even the scientists, realized at the time that coyotes were slipping quietly through places like Louisiana and upstate New York, year by year trotting toward the Atlantic coast and already experimenting with urban life in cities like Los Angeles, with Denver and Chicago on their radar.
In 1949 the star biologist of the first half of the twentieth century published his most important book, which would spread his fame far beyond the scientific community. Aldo Leopold had been writing both science journal and popular articles for decades. Since he penned his 1917 essay “The Varmint Question” praising “the excellent work” of the Biological Survey, his views about predators had evolved more than any other scientists’. From at least 1940 Leopold had understood that to have an impact beyond their profession, at least a few wildlife scientists would need “to contribute to art and literature.” He may have been thinking about his own 1939 Journal of Forestry essay, “A Biotic View of Land,” as it played a critical role in the thinking that went into his eventual masterpiece. However he came to its ideas, Leopold’s 1949 book, A Sand County Almanac, became both a best seller and a crucial philosophical foundation for the ecology movement that was about to sweep America as part of the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s.
Books and film are equally capable of rearranging the furniture in our heads, books perhaps the more so because the experience of reading is so private and provides such opportunity for pause, for deliberate consideration, for mental testing. For those who read and deliberated on it in the 1950s and 1960s, A Sand County Almanac was an absolute game changer. In gorgeous, poetic passages and vividly rendered scenes, Leopold introduced postwar America to the insights of a full career in the ecological sciences. For many his insights constituted near-epiphanies. Leopold was the first scientist willing to promote an ecological philosophy of living. He called it “the Land Ethic,” and it included his “Golden Rule of Ecology”: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Leopold did not say that an act was right when it tended to preserve humanity or economies, the easy position of a self-absorbed species. Instead he called on readers to think of the innate rights—among them the simple right to exist—of other creatures, an idea his followers subsequently called “biocentrism.”
The essay in A Sand County Almanac that ultimately provided the most memorable scene in the book, however, detailed Leopold’s own story of personal conversion and redemption. “Thinking Like a Mountain” was not merely an accessible statement, written for a popular audience, of Leopold’s maturing view of predators. Over the next quarter century it became far more than that. For a generation of readers soon to be immersed in painful soul-searching about so many unexamined assumptions in American life, Leopold’s story of shooting a wolf, watching the “green fire die in its eyes,” and realizing eventually what a miscalculation he had made about predators, their role in the health of the “biotic community,” and even himself, offered a culture-wide catharsis. We were wrong—I was wrong—his story said. But it’s not too late for salvation.
A Sand County Almanac became a national touchstone, carried around in back pockets and backpacks much like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, literary preparation for a shift in the zeitgeist of the age.
On one level, the changes in America that produced the global age of ecology in the 1960s had to do with the maturation of advanced industrial societies after World War II and their ability to produce a modern standard of living that went beyond essential necessities and allowed ordinary citizens to begin to consider quality-of-life values. At the very moment that a different kind of life became possible, Americans also began to confront for the first time in history the self-evident consequences of industrial development without the scantiest regard for the environment. Policies pushing extermination for predators like coyotes and wolves seemed, to many, to spring from the same inattention toward capitalist excess that produced deadly smog in the Northeast and Los Angeles, oil spills off the Pacific and Gulf Coasts, and rivers so polluted with chemical waste that they caught fire. A “subversive science” in a capitalist economy, ecology lent the 1960s its symbolic word power, which morphed into the environmental movement.
Leopold’s book meant that biocentrism and the much persecuted canine predator got snagged by the dragline of the 1960s, caught up in the roiling upheaval of antiwar politics, feminism, civil rights, Earth Day consciousness, and sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Every one of these would produce profound changes in modern life. Leopold’s biocentrism arguably produced the most controversial legislation of the entire environmental revolution. It, too, changed the world.
If, in the 1960s, you thought at all about other species’ innate right to exist, you eventually came to believe that the new synthetic poisons—many of them products of the chemical revolution that natural resource shortages had jump-started during World War II—very likely posed a threat to life of all kinds. The widespread radioactive fallout from US and Soviet nuclear bomb tests during the 1950s had spooked many people around the world anyway. The era gave us science fiction films like Godzilla and Them, where mutated animals were the monstrous result of the products of the new sciences of the age.
Chemical companies advertised poisons like Compound 1080 and DDT, cooked up by chemists prior to and during the war, as game changers in quality of life, better living through chemistry. Not everybody bought it, though. The furor surrounding another blockbuster book, science writer Rachel Carson’s legendary Silent Spring, published in 1962, vividly demonstrated how mid-twentieth-century American attitudes about the natural world, including the fate of the coyote, were beginning to morph into values many 1950s conservatives found almost unrecognizable.
Silent Spring famously employed songbirds as its primary victims and metaphor for a world dramatically changed by the use of the insecticide DDT. But the book’s warning about the profligate and unexamined use of insecticides to curb “undesirables” raised public consciousness about poisons generally. A biologist and successful writer (her earlier book The Sea Around Us won the National Book Award), Carson had actually spent much of her career as an employee of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which had evolved out of the Bureau of Biological Survey. So Carson was close enough to agency divisions like Predatory Animal and Rodent Control (PARC) and Animal Damage Control to have an insider’s sense of what was happening in the world around her.
Carson didn’t invent her subject. She was preceded in her outrage by other American writers. In 1959 outdoor writer Arthur Carhart published a scathing indictment of the federal government’s use of poisons, especially the 1080 it had developed to wipe coyotes off the continent. Carhart’s “Poisons—the Creeping Killer,” appeared in Sports Afield magazine three years before Carson’s Silent Spring saw print. The piece even included passages about DDT, but Carhart focused most prominently on the poisons the government had developed to eradicate coyotes and their tendency to kill all along the food chain. “An area equal to one sixth of all the crop land in this nation is now being treated with deadly new poisons whose total effects are dangerously and shockingly unexplored,” he wrote.
In a story in a magazine read by hunters and fishermen, a caption for a photo of a coyote killed by 1080 minced no words: “Agonizing death throes of coyote killed by 1080, one of the deadliest poisons yet devised, show in snow furrowed away by thrashing of head, legs.” In 1958, Carhart told his readers that for two decades a federal program had spent $500 million to spread the new poisons across 100 million acres in the United States, producing “a parade of death.” Carhart was a tough westerner, but he ended his exposé with a powerful declaration: “I am scared.”
Taxpayer-funded Wildlife Services still kills 80,000 coyotes a year.
Courtesy Dan Flores.
Carson was scared too. She had become aware of and increasingly alarmed about DDT for the same reason that the mammalogists in the 1930s had called out the predacides in use then. Like the strychnine used against coyotes, DDT, commonly applied though aerial spraying, produced enormous collateral damage among nontarget species. DDT had first attracted attention for its success against typhus-carrying lice among World War II troops. After the war the chemical companies widely advertised it as a modern miracle, the solution for everything from agricultural pests to backyard mosquitos. They told a trusting public the spray was utterly harmless, and evidently we believed them. To a kid like me, growing up in sweltering Louisiana summers, only Jesus appearing in the clouds would have been more miraculous than the visits of the “spray truck.” Suddenly it was possible to play outside in the summertime without becoming a mass of red welts from bayou mosquitos, and since everyone said it was safe, my friends and I rode our bicycles blissfully in the wet, white spray behind the trucks that rumbled regularly through town.
About the time my mother was making me change my DDT-drenched shirts before coming to dinner, Rachel Carson discovered that the chemical sprayed over a wildlife sanctuary near her home in Maryland was not just killing insects. Birds, in particular, were dying horribly in the days following spraying episodes. As she began to work on what became Silent Spring, Carson became convinced that by poisoning nature, we were not just fouling the environment around us; we were poisoning ourselves. As sensitive as the author was to the impact of poisons on nontarget creatures like birds, this was not Aldo Leopold’s truly revolutionary biocentrism. Carson’s major point was that human bodies are permeable and that DDT sprayed on insects bioaccumulated up the food chain to humans. Ultimately this anthropocentric argument made Silent Spring the revolutionary book it became. As she said, “If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers could conceive of no such problem.”
Despite the chemical and agricultural industries’ best efforts to portray Silent Spring and its author as “hysterical,” within a year the book had gone through three printings, and some forty state legislatures were entertaining pesticide bills. Eventually it produced a ban on DDT use in the United States. But in a larger way, Carson’s book aroused in the American public a growing revulsion at the ill-considered poisoning of the natural world taking place around us every day of the week. As she put it, misguided government policies were placing “poisonous and biologically potent chemicals . . . indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm.” And much of that poisoning was in the service of the outright eradication of species after species, as if somehow North American evolution had floundered along for eons just waiting for us to show up to weed the place properly.
That kind of thing had been happening in coyote country for half a century already. But Leopold and Carson, and Walt Disney too, were making the world a different place in the 1960s. In 1963 John Kennedy’s secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall, appointed a board to report on wildlife management in the national parks and asked it to look also at federal predator-control policies, particularly as they involved the use of poisons and especially on the public lands managed by federal agencies. One of the committee members, A. Starker Leopold, son of the now late famous author and biologist, had spent the last few years studying grizzlies in Mexico, where he and his graduate students had discovered that poisons put out by PARC Fish and Wildlife Service personnel threatened the bears’ very existence.
The board’s report to Udall, famous back in the age of ecology as the “Leopold Report,” fell under Secretary Udall’s eyes in the spring of 1964. Various constituencies over the years have either hailed or decried it. Among certain cognoscenti it is probably best known now for its historically naive assumption that Europeans had inherited a “wilderness” continent when they began colonizing America. Despite at least 15,000 years of Indian life in America and the obvious manipulation of continental ecology that implied, the Leopold Report recommended that the national parks be considered wilderness vignettes and preserved in the timeless condition they enjoyed when white eyes first fell on them. Postmodernist academics refer to this, in classes full of earnest graduate students, as “privileging a point of view.”
Thirty years after the Leopold Report, I had several private breakfasts with Stewart Udall in Missoula, Montana, where I taught at the university, and asked him about the Leopold Report’s seeming blindness to North American history. I recall that the former interior secretary paused for only a moment, then reminded me of how innocent the country had been in so many ways in the early 1960s, to the point that we barely considered that America even had a history before Europeans had arrived. “We seemed to think back then that somehow, some way, things like nature and evolution had gotten repealed by the twentieth century.” He shook his head. “We thought we didn’t have to pay any attention to nature anymore. The sixties pretty much disabused us of that!”
We haven’t remembered the Leopold Report’s predator recommendations in quite the same way as its account of the state of the national parks, but they were part of a string of events that were leading in a surprising and in fact revolutionary direction. The report’s comments about the federal predator-control program were entirely damning, although in 1964 they fell short of calling on the government to end poisoning. Still, the board was willing to tell Udall that “the program of animal control . . . has become an end in itself and no longer is a balanced component of an overall scheme of wildlife husbandry and management.” The report continued, “In the opinion of this Board, far more animals are being killed than would be required for effective protection of livestock . . . [and] wildlands resources.”
While the Leopold Report’s criticism of federal predator policy was important, it was not enough. As the age of ecology began to take off, it was becoming clear to scientists and the ever-growing legions of environmentalists that nothing would change unless change was forced. The agency’s victims continued to pile up alarmingly. Within months of the Leopold Report, PARC’s field agents had poisoned off, in Arkansas, one of the last remaining red wolf populations in the country. They treated the occasional Mexican wolves straggling across the border in the Southwest like scouts for terrorist revolutionaries and promptly poisoned them too. In 1965 one of the last populations of black-footed ferrets on the Great Plains disappeared when PARC operatives poisoned into utter oblivion the huge South Dakota prairie dog town they inhabited. Meanwhile, in California, agency use of Compound 1080 against coyotes produced a classic poison overreach, almost wiping the giant California condors off the planet. One condor carcass was so toxic with 1080, it killed all the beetles a museum used to try to strip away the flesh!
Starker Leopold’s father, Aldo, had argued fifteen years earlier for a revolutionary principle in human affairs: a recognition that other species in this world possess an innate right to existence. “Biocentrism” in one sense was actually evolutionary. It implied yet another extension of the circle of ethical treatment that had begun long ago in human affairs, when we first moved beyond kinship and our own genetics and granted rights to others outside our families. In Western civilization, steps in that direction had included the Magna Carta of 1215, the constitutions produced by the American and French revolutions, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the vote, and civil rights legislation in the 1960s. The step Leopold’s followers pressed for in the late 1960s, however, struck many as the biggest step in extending ethics in human history. It advanced the radical idea that we offer ethical treatment—at least by guaranteeing their right to coexist on the planet with us—to other species.
The sea change underway in so many aspects of American culture was in full roar by the mid-1960s. Environmentalism would embrace a host of primarily human-centered issues: air and water pollution, toxic wastes, nuclear power, a search for renewable energy. But the ten years after 1964, following Congress’s passage of the Wilderness Act, were truly the age of ecology, the most biocentric decade in American history. Leopold’s and Carson’s books and Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf initiated it, pop culture coyotes contributed in a kind of TV-land Rorschach suggestion, and an emerging sense of local uncoupling from the designs of the nation and a suspicion of authority carried it forward.
Accidental eradication of creatures it had taken North America millions of years to produce because we were too self-absorbed to notice was not a new thing under the sun. Maybe condors and black-footed ferrets and eagles were collateral damage in the same way that ivory-billed woodpeckers once were. Adapted to life in old-growth forests, ivory-bills ended up occupying too narrow a niche in the modern world. They disappeared not because of direct attack but because their habitat got logged. Of the eighteen mammal, thirty-four bird, and nine fish extinctions in America since 1600, some were “accidental”; species with small populations or very specialized niches, like ivory-bills, had simply died out. Most were victims of crass greed: market hunting destroyed the Labrador duck, the great auk, and, against all odds, the passenger pigeon, and the capitalist market wiped nearly 30 million bison and 15 million pronghorn antelope off the face of continent. But many other species fell into the same category as wolves and coyotes: they were coldly marked for outright extermination. We successfully eradicated the bright green and yellow Carolina parakeet, our only native parrot and one of America’s most beautiful birds (look at Audubon’s painting of them sometime) because, as with coyotes, agriculturalists thought they were pests whose lives weren’t worth the space the creatures were taking up.
During this unique and special period, a wave of ecological mindedness was building to a crest. In 1964 Secretary Udall’s office had compiled a list of sixty-three American bird and animal species that scientists believed were “rare” or “endangered,” a number that grew to eighty-three by 1966. Udall called the bill drawn up by the Lyndon B. Johnson administration to redress fears of extinction for these creatures the Endangered Species Preservation Act. Introduced into Congress by Representative John Dingell of Michigan, the act represented a couple of small first steps. It established the legal category of “endangered species,” a list of which a group of international scientists was already compiling in a so-called Red Data Book. But the 1966 law made killing such species a crime only in a very circumscribed area: the US National Wildlife Refuges. Congress passed the act with little fanfare in 1966. The same blasé approach characterized 1969’s Endangered Species Conservation Act, which also came out of the Johnson administration and made fish, crustaceans, and invertebrates—not just birds and mammals—eligible for “endangered” classification.
By 1969 Richard Nixon was president of the United States, but remarkably that did not mean environmentalism’s moment in the sun had passed. Difficult as it might be to imagine from the perspective of the twenty-first century, environmentalism in the late 1960s was a bipartisan issue that at least some Republicans endorsed. When Nixon took office, the first Earth Day was only a year away. Anyway, saving the planet hardly seemed controversial in an age of inner-city riots and massive student protests against the war in Vietnam. Nixon himself, of course, had not the slightest interest in nature. On a spectrum of nature-loving American presidents, with Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson occupying one end, Nixon pretty much bookends the other. But he recognized a political bellwether, and even if he privately thought environmentalist interest in animals was pathetic sentimentalism, Nixon believed that if he and his administration publicly endorsed environmental causes, he might be able to swing the student and youth vote toward the Republicans. If, that is—as one of the president’s advisors put it—he could “identify the Republican Party with concern for environmental quality.” How controversial could environmentalism be anyway?
So, counterintuitively, the Nixon Republicans actually created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970, although this did not fool many Americans. When the first Earth Day in history was celebrated in April of that year, CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite reported that the crowds were “predominantly anti-Nixon.” In his pursuit of youthful environmentalists, the president clearly needed another issue. And for someone with so little animal magnetism himself, he came up with a most unlikely one. With magazines from Field & Stream to Sports Illustrated to the New Yorker then running exposé articles on the government’s poisoning campaigns against coyotes and eagles, in a Coyote trick as delicious as Elvis joining Nixon’s antidrug war as a snitch, the president suddenly determined that embracing the well-being of coyotes could improve his political fortunes!
In the wake of the early 1970s media firestorm, the Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Humane Society joined to sue Nixon’s Interior Department. Their antipoisoning lawsuit argued, among other things, that since the federal poisoning program was taking place without meeting the new legal requirement to conduct an environmental impact study, it clearly violated the administration’s own National Environmental Policy Act. Seeking an immediate injunction to stop the predator-control program in its tracks, environmental groups eventually agreed to drop the lawsuit if the Nixon administration ended poisoning on public lands by 1972.
So Nixon appointed a committee to look once again at a federal agency that critics claimed was going way overboard in poisoning scores of thousands of coyotes, eagles, and even bears. While this committee included A. Starker Leopold, this time it was headed by Stanley Cain, a former undersecretary of Interior, and this time the outcome was different. Across less than a decade, there had been a seismic shift in the country’s worldview. The Cain Committee’s report, submitted to the White House in October 1971, did not equivocate: the administration should at once ban Animal Damage Control from using poisons to control coyotes and other predators. A practice that had been routine since the early century and viewed askance by only a handful of scientists suddenly began to seem, in the bright light of the new worldview, not just inappropriate but downright repulsive.
In the case of coyotes, the “silent majority” Nixon always invoked in his political speeches actually did include the president himself, or at least it appeared to if you take at face value the text of a policy speech he delivered to Congress. Nixon’s February 1972 address probably reflected more the nuanced sentiments of its author, Republican environmentalist Russell Train, than any values deeply held by Nixon. Nixon almost certainly had never read Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, but this early 1972 environmental address nonetheless invoked Leopold’s biocentric thinking in explaining the sharp new detour in the administration’s policies.
America had reached a new stage of civilization, our president told us. “This is the environmental awakening. It marks a new sensitivity of the American spirit and a new maturity of American public life. It is working a revolution in values.” He went on to explain what this meant. “Wild places and wild things constitute a treasure to be protected and cherished for all time. . . . [T]he wonder, beauty, and elemental force in which the least of them share suggest a higher right to exist—not granted to them by man, and not his to take away.”
Nixon had not flinched from a line about other species’ “right to exist,” and he didn’t flinch from the predator question either. “The old notion that ‘the only good predator is a dead one’ is no longer acceptable as we understand that even the animals and birds which sometimes prey on domesticated animals have their own value in maintaining the balance of nature.” The president did acknowledge that the administration was, in effect, joining this concern—“The widespread use of highly toxic poisons to kill coyotes and other predatory animals and birds is a practice which has been a source of increasing concern to the American public”—but he was now prepared to make it his own: “I am today issuing an Executive Order barring the use of poisons for predator control on all public lands.”
Banning poisons in the coyote war and acknowledging wild animals’ “higher right to exist” were not platform planks that Nixon would campaign on for reelection in 1972. Indeed, when he discovered, despite his professed embrace of the Age of Ecology, that young people and environmentalists still supported Democrat George McGovern, Nixon’s environmentalism faded as magically as it had appeared. To his credit, however, he did follow through on the policy promises he made in early 1972. Two presidential executive orders followed on the heels of the address, one banning federal agents from using poisons against mammalian and aviary predators and scavengers, the other outlawing the use of poisons on US public lands.
It was enough of a break from history to stun anyone. Strychnine baits that had produced lightning-struck coyote corpses in America for 120 years—banned. Thallium sulfate that had resulted in blind, hairless coyotes shivering to freezing deaths—banned. Cyanide coyote-getters—banned. Compound 1080, amazingly, banned. There would be no more 1080-poisoned coyotes running frantically, uncontrollably, until they dropped. In 1972, those kinds of things at least seemed to be at an end.
Most remarkably of all, the administration drew up a new law, the Animal Damage Control Act of 1972, whose purpose was nothing less than a repeal of the 1931 law of that name that had first proposed the radical step of totally eradicating “the archpredator of our time” from the continent where it had evolved. The Nixon administration was proposing to get the federal government entirely out of predator control and turn that mission over to the states.
The president’s attempt to repeal 1931’s Animal Damage Control Act became a bridge too far for his natural allies in the agricultural and ranching communities. In conservative and rural Republican communities, the shit hit the fan. An outraged Farm Bureau led the charge, insisting that Congress acknowledge Fish and Wildlife statistics indicating that in 1970 in the sixteen western states, predator losses to livestock averaged 6 percent of stock numbers at a cost of $21 million to the industry. It encouraged stockmen’s associations, like those for western wool growers, to bring coyote-killed lambs to public hearings on the bill. Western congressmen, as they long had, became their shock troops in the debate, one testifying that he was sick of hearing about “cruelty to the coyote” because the coyote was “a bad animal, a destructive animal” and the public ought properly to be more concerned about the coyote’s cruelty to its victims. Nixon’s new Animal Damage Control Act passed in the House in 1972 but never came up for a vote in the Senate. It never became law.
But special-interest fury against the new antipoison, antieradication Animal Damage Control law unexpectedly smoothed the way for the real crown jewel legislation of the Age of Ecology in America. What the US Supreme Court would soon call “the most comprehensive legislation for the preservation of endangered species ever enacted by any nation” was waiting in the wings. The Endangered Species Act of 1973, biocentrism’s ideal translated into legal language, is arguably the farthest-reaching environmental law passed during the entire two decades, spanning 1960 to 1980, of a remarkable body of clean air, water, wilderness, energy, and toxic waste legislation sometimes known as America’s “Environmental New Deal.”
Despite the uproar surrounding Nixon’s presidential proclamations halting half a century of callous coyote eradication on the country’s public lands, the new act seemed to glide to passage almost unnoticed. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 built on its two predecessors but went much, much farther. It was in truth a watershed in global history, legislating other species’ right to exist for the first time anywhere in the world. Yet, for all its potential, it somehow escaped the notice of its natural opponents, passing in the House by a vote of 390–12 and in the Senate by 92–0!
Less than a century earlier, the United States had stood unmoved as one charismatic wild species after another had disappeared or almost become extinct under our hand. Except for a few scientists and activists, no one had swallowed hard and looked away uncomfortably when the Animal Damage Control Act of 1931 had targeted the continent’s coyote population for extinction. Now, between July and September 1973, Congress had passed a law that, via an almost backdoor approach, made the erasure of America’s coyotes through deliberate or even inadvertent means illegal and impossible. Of course the Endangered Species Act did not end coyote “control.” Individual coyotes by the millions were still fated to lose their lives in any number of shocking ways, a continuing source of outrage and activism by grassroots environmental groups today. But as a species, coyotes and hundreds of other threatened and endangered animals had earned the basic right to exist in America.
No one anticipated in 1973 just how much a great many people would hate this law. The Endangered Species Act derived its power from three of its sections, which in turn became the source of the many controversies that would envelop it. Section 4 gave the secretaries of Interior and Commerce the mandate to list species or subspecies as either threatened or endangered based solely on the best science available. In language that shocked conservatives when they got around to reading it, Section 4 outright prohibited the use of economic factors to determine listings. Section 7 compelled federal agencies to halt any development project that might imperil a listed species. And Section 9 prohibited the “taking” of any endangered species, which courts subsequently interpreted to mean not just shooting or harming an animal but degrading an endangered species’ habitat, even on private land. One historian of the act describes Section 9 as “perhaps the most powerful regulatory provision in all of environmental law.”
At the time of the act’s passage, coyotes, by virtue of their evolutionary biology and intelligence, had never come close to becoming a threatened or endangered species. Despite all the technology, chemistry, and Dr. Evil pathological inventiveness we had thrown at them—and more was to come, for sure—coyotes were the extremely rare American mammal species still beyond our ability to push to the edge of extinction. And even if someone, somewhere, finally came up with a fatal canine disease or another surefire way to erase coyotes from nature, after 1973 the Endangered Species Act made execution of any such plan impossible. But if only theoretically so for coyotes, the Endangered Species Act became America at its best and most noble for wolves, bald eagles, grizzly bears, and black-footed ferrets—and, infamously to some, for snail darters, endangered arachnids, various warblers and flycatchers, prairie chickens, spotted owls, and scores of other species. For the animals themselves, though, for hundreds of species, it really was “morning in America.”
Long before accounts of coyotes swarming into cities or hybridizing with wolves and dogs in the South and Northeast became the dominant narrative of the coyote story, all the fireworks had exploded, primarily in the West. Despite twenty-first-century coyote high jinks in downtown Chicago or Midtown Manhattan, and despite the passage of the Endangered Species Act and the presidential ban preventing government agencies from inventing ever-more lethal poisons to exterminate them, the war on coyotes in the West actually never slackened. Those waging the campaign had to seek out new killing methods, and because environmentalism itself produced a wide array of new activist organizations that came to the defense of predators like wolves and coyotes, mass killings of coyotes no longer went uncontested by the public. But the war went on and still does.
In 1972 it was a toss-up as to whether environmentalists, the livestock industry, or employees of the Division of Wildlife Services (PARC had gotten a new name in 1965) were most shocked when Nixon banned the use of poisons for government coyote control. Livestock interests, for their part, reacted to the ban on poisons as if it were a new tax levied on hardworking sheep to fund a food stamp program for homeless coyotes. Maybe the clap-to-the-forehead winners were actually Nixon’s fellow Republicans, who began crawfishing as soon as the American Wool Growers’ Association called for congressional hearings on the poison ban. New president Gerald Ford was willing to pardon Nixon in the aftermath of Watergate, but apparently pardoning coyotes in the aftermath of fifty years of the most outrageous persecution was more than Ford could stomach. In 1975 and 1976 he issued two executive orders that effectively restored the use of cyanide “Humane Coyote-Getter” tubes (by then called M-44s) on American public lands. For the wool growers and the Farm Bureau, that was a nice sanity-is-restored gift, but for reducing the density of the country’s coyote population, the agriculture community really wanted its 1080 superpoison back. Thinking in more nuanced terms, the agriculture community also thought that the business of coyote killing properly belonged in the Department of Agriculture rather than in Interior. It turned out none of those was a wish too far.
Ford’s “sanity” about coyotes helped win the interior West for him in 1976, but Democrat Jimmy Carter took the rest of the country and the presidency. For the coyotes that meant a reprieve and, in 1977, even a ban on federal field agents killing pups in their dens, an old practice that usually employed fishhook wire and forced smoke or gas—sometimes even dynamite—and seemed especially disturbing to an age of ecology public. But when the GOP regained control of the government with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, the New Right launched a full-on backlash against what it called “the specter of environmentalism.” Indulging a view that environmentalism threatened to replace communism as a primary threat to free-enterprise capitalism, the Reaganites were happy to let the puppies get their just desserts, the disturbed enviro public be damned.
So in January 1982, Reagan signed an executive order that not only overturned Carter’s ban on killing coyote pups in their dens but reversed Nixon’s landmark poison ban from ten years earlier. Three years later, in 1985, he further rewarded the livestock industry for its support by retaining the Fish and Wildlife Service in Interior but transferring its predator-killing operation to the Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), a bureau for “protecting animal health and animal welfare.” Reagan had granted the full wish list. Since 1976 APHIS’s new predator agency had been called Animal Damage Control, which like Predatory Animal and Rodent Control had the virtue of unmistakable directness. But in 1997, in a move that has provided wince fodder for journalists and environmentalists ever since, Agriculture would return to the name Division of Wildlife Services for its predator-killing agency. Wildlife Services was a harmless-sounding label apparently designed to fool the public. Ah, this is who you called if you needed accent swans or a whitetail doe and fawn for an outdoor garden party. But nothing fundamental was different, and the name change to an innocuous I’m-from-the-government-and-I’m-here-to-help title did not hide from the cognoscenti that Wildlife Services was a frontier subsidy carryover whose primary mission was still killing.
Environmentalists got outvoted in the Ronald Reagan–George H. W. Bush years, but they were not so easily outmaneuvered. They could now call on the Endangered Species Act of 1973, since coyote poisons blanketing the countryside in the manner of the 1920s to the 1970s would inevitably threaten any number of species on the endangered list. By 1988 the courts had upheld that argument. Reagan’s executive order may have raised shouts of exultation in the ranching community that 1080 was back, but Nixon-era environmental programs ensured that Reagan’s own version of “morning in America” would not include a return to scorched-earth coyote poisoning. Ultimately, M-44 cyanide tubes remained a legal weapon for federal coyote hunters, but in 1985 the EPA approved 1080 only for use in plastic sheep collars that, when punctured, presumably poisoned just the coyote attacking the sheep wearing it.
Since the courts had now ruled that carpet-bomb poisoning the world with 1080 violated the Endangered Species Act, by the 1990s newly labeled Wildlife Services was at something of a loss for how to carry out its coyote-killing mission. But in truth, it had already invested decades in perfecting a new anticoyote technology anyway. With a little tinkering, an old southwestern story works to explain Wildlife Services’ resolution of its dilemma: how to continue mass-killing coyotes for the ag community without mass poisoning. If the Indians had a coyote problem, according to the story, they’d send out one guy in a pickup. The Hispanos would shrug fatalistically: What can one do about a coyote? But the folks at the federal agency had a different reaction. When God (so the story always goes) looked down and said, “Look at those poor, ignorant Wildlife Services people. I gave them the rifle, the snowfields, and the airplane, and they didn’t have sense enough to put them together,” they looked at one another in wonder, imagined coyotes trying to escape pursuit from above, and bought some airplanes.
You do not just happen upon Wildlife Services’ Predator Research Facility while out for a Sunday drive. No doubt by design, it is tucked away in the already semiremote Cache Valley in northern Utah, the final destination on a dead-end road a few miles south of the university town of Logan. No officious government signs point tourists toward it. Following the route in from the nearest highway required half a page of detailed instructions. Back in the 1990s, though, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals still found it.
Julie Young, Predator Research’s current director, and research biologist Eric Gese had agreed to a visit and sent the map, so on a fine, sunny afternoon in November, Sara and I drove over from the other side of the Wasatch Mountains, where Sara is a professor at one of Utah’s universities. Since our Yellowstone trip she had become more and more intrigued by the coyote story, and there was no way she was going to miss this.
I grasped enough about the facility going in to know it was built in 1973 by coyote specialist Fred Knowlton (still famous for an adage in everyday use at Wildlife Services: “Coyotes will make a liar out of you every time”). That dates the Predator Research Facility to the moment when Nixon banned poisons for use in the coyote war. As the research arm of Wildlife Services, its mission harkens back to some pretty sinister roots—those original Eradication Methods and Control Methods labs of the 1920s are its spiritual antecedents—although it is currently a hub of the National Wildlife Research Center in Fort Collins, Colorado.
I knew, too, that the facility housed one hundred coyotes that were the subjects of research by biologists and grad students from around the world. Then there were these facts: Wildlife Services quietly spends $140 million of our taxpayer dollars a year not to serve wildlife but primarily to subsidize agribusiness. And its annual kill of all animals has ranged from a shocking 4 million in 1999, down to about 1.5 million a year in the early 2000s, then back up to a staggering 5 million in 2008 and well past 4 million in 2013. For their part, coyotes have never fallen out of Wildlife Service’s crosshairs. From 2006 to 2011 the agency “retired” 512,710 of them.
Wildlife Services’ Predator Research Facility, successor to earlier federal extermination labs, secreted away in a mountain valley in Utah.
Courtesy Dan Flores.
I also knew that sheep raising, an industry federal predator control has forever existed to serve, has almost dwindled away in America. There were 56 million sheep on US pastures in the 1940s. There are fewer than 6 million now.
Coyotes are a political topic, and Julie and Eric are not quite sure what to think of our visit, but as good government servants, they are engaging and forthcoming. Fit and outdoorsy, with short dark hair and younger than I would have thought, Julie was born in California but graduated high school in Texas, went to Texas A&M, then on to a PhD as a carnivore specialist at Utah State. Slender, older, grayer—he looks to have spent much time in the field—Eric is an Arizonan who did his graduate work at the University of Wisconsin and worked with wolf guru Dave Mech. Both Julie and Eric have done extensive work on coyotes. They give us an entire afternoon, and I find I like them both. It also doesn’t pass notice that in this facility the animal we are all interested in is a KI-oht. No doubt everyone Julie and Eric work with disdains a three-syllable animal.
This is an agency with a history that, to put it mildly, hasn’t impressed the American environmental community. The New York Times, the Sacramento Bee, the Washington Post, and the journal of the Conservation Biology Society had all done recent, unflattering stories on it. There were petitions attempting to defund it, and half a dozen environmental groups had, a few months before our visit, joined a lawsuit against it. So naturally I have some questions as we gather around a table to talk, and I start out with what I think will be a softball lob to give them a chance to show their awareness of the criticism out there, that they’re sympathetic.
“So, Julie, your tools for controlling coyotes now are obviously a lot more limited than they were forty years ago. Has that got your research going more in the direction of nonlethal control?”
Julie is inclined to a bit of a nervous laugh. “Well, not 100 percent. We’re still working on lethal tools too. We’ve still got M-44s and of course leg-hold traps. And aerial gunning.”
Aerial gunning, which really took off after Nixon’s poison ban in 1972, dates to the 1940s as a federal antipredator tool. Wildlife Services is in love with it. Since 2001 its hunters have killed roughly 35,000 coyotes a year from planes and helicopters, images of which are never appealing when they make it to the media. I’m trying to find out whether the scientists at this Predator Research Facility are coming up with new, workable, nonlethal strategies for a new century. But, surprisingly, Julie deflects the question. She does want me to realize that regardless of the tools, the focus, at least, is narrowing.
“If we’re looking at something lethal,” she offers, “it’s to decrease nontarget take, to get the problem animal rather than going after the whole population. Actually, a lot of what we do here is basic ecology in order to understand coyotes better, because you can’t create tools if you don’t understand the animal.”
“Right, but back in the day the newest techniques for going after coyotes were always new poisons or, in the 1970s, aerial gunning, all developed by your predecessors at these research labs.” I exchange a glance with Sara, aware that she knows where I’m going with this. On the drive over we’d talked about another agency, the Forest Service, once cut off from its more progressive constituencies by entrenched good old boys interested only in getting out the timber cut but then changed with the hiring of women and a younger, more environmentally savvy generation. I’m trying to lead us to the nonlethal topic again, hoping to hear that Wildlife Services is finally coming up with strategies that will get it off the hook some with the environmentalist public. “What cutting-edge techniques are you guys coming up with these days?”
Now Julie and Eric exchange a glance and some laughter. There’s a bigger story here, and it’s clearly Eric’s domain.
“Well,” he says, “what we’re trying now goes back to the 1980s, when research showed that if you removed the pups from a coyote den, lamb losses went way down. It seemed to us as if provisioning the pups was a motivation for higher kill rates on lambs. When I got here I wanted to take that to the next level. We started with an experiment in the field where we had a vet sterilize half the coyote packs in our study. At the end of three years we found that our sterilized packs were only killing 12 percent of the lambs that packs raising pups were killing. We had some packs that stopped killing lambs altogether. So that’s been our big idea.” He lets that trail off, then laughs to himself about what he’s about to tell us.
“The next step was, Can we implement this? Can we find ranchers who will work with us? But we just couldn’t get anybody to bite. They felt like they already have the solution—we can aerial-gun, we can trap, we can use M-44s, so this is cute, but there’s no need for it.”
I’m mulling this information. I’m pretty certain the relentless pressure agency hunters put on them is one goad to coyotes taking lambs. They have larger litters to compensate and need more calories to rear them. But I ask, “So how expensive is it to sterilize? And how do you maintain a population of the coyotes themselves if you’re sterilizing them?”
“We thought of that,” Eric says. “But our idea is to make it surgical, just aim it at problem coyote packs. It’s pretty expensive, $400 to $500 per coyote to catch them, do vasectomies on the males, and tie the tubes of the females. But over three years you’d come out even or ahead because of the lambs you’d save. We never even saw pair-bond changes among the coyotes; sometimes they still excavated dens together. Just getting the ranchers to try it has been the main problem. They’re used to getting our help nearly free, so there’s no way you could ask them to pay for it.”
I was remembering a story I’d heard about a Wildlife Services public hearing in Idaho to explain sterilization. A rancher at the back of the room had raised his hand: “Son, I don’t think you understand our problem. Them coyotes ain’t fucking our sheep, they’re eatin’ ’em.”
Julie brings me back to the present. “So we looked at cheaper, chemical methods. Last year we tested eighteen pairs using a drug that works extremely well on dogs. The male coyotes got ten times the dog dose, which, as long as they were alone, pretty much killed their sperm production. But as soon as they were reunited with their mates, fifteen of the eighteen pairs still got pregnant!” Julie still found this incredible. Sara and I do too. “That’s just not supposed to happen, but somehow they’re overcoming the drugs as a result of their social bonds. They even had normal-sized litters. Coyotes will make a liar out of you every time!”
‘Anyway, right now, even if we had a viable chemical, the delivery system could be problematic,” Eric says. “If it went out as bait, it would be hard to target the problem pack; plus there are endangered animals out there like swift foxes that could ingest a bait. We’ll be testing this for a long time before we’ll ever get EPA approval.”
I nod that I understand that nonlethal controls apparently aren’t on the docket for Wildlife Services anytime soon. “So in the meantime it’s aerial gunning, M-44s, and trapping.” They’d not said anything about 1080 sheep collars, the only way the infamous predacide can be used anymore, although—in another classic of coyote deduction—the more poison collars have gotten used, the more coyotes have figured them out. The hip new way for a coyote to attack a sheep is to hamstring it from behind rather than, as instinct would dictate, to grab the neck and crush the windpipe—and perchance puncture a 1080 collar.
“Yep, that’s pretty much it.” Then Eric adds, “With the toxins gone, the field guys are just trying to solve problems for our cooperating ranchers and counties. They’re trying to be surgical.”
“Problem solvers,” Julie echoes. “We can’t require our cooperators do nonlethal techniques anyway.”
“Well, OK then, what’s the annual surgical coyote kill for the agency these days?”
There’s a bit of a pause.
Eric answered, “Well, I think the last couple of years, about 70,000 a year.”
I actually already knew the ballpark figure, but 70,000 to 80,000 coyotes a year that are problematic enough to fly a goddamn plane off after them? “Given their replacement biology, what’s the logic of that? This seems like it’s never going to end.”
“The way the ranchers see it, as long as you’re taking some of them, you’re reducing the risk,” Julie insists. “And there’s just the social thing of believing something is being done, a psychological thing.”
“It has to be something they can see,” Eric says. “Sterilization seems like hocus-pocus—you can’t see anything—but shooting . . . and even nonlethal stuff like guard dogs, guard llamas, burros also work, and those are things ranchers can see, a visible effect.”
I decide to direct one more question at Julie before we go out and drive the grounds of the facility. I’ve talked to enough coyote biologists by this point to know that studying coyote personalities is cutting-edge and that some of the boldness/shyness studies have been done here. “So, Wildlife Services seems to base much of its reason for existence on the proposition that there are always going to be problem coyotes because of the individual variation among them.” The question comes out as more of a statement, but Julie confirms it.
“That is what I believe. They’re individuals. Like people, some get into trouble.”
We spend the next half hour navigating a pickup around and through the Predator Research grounds, sometimes stopping and watching the coyotes pace the perimeters of their pens. The facility has wire-mesh pens housing a population of one hundred adult coyotes divvied up into mated pairs, fed to keep them around twenty-five pounds, vaccinated, and treated for heartworms. They look healthy, if somewhat small, to me. On the couple of stops we make—the mountain valley setting of this facility is absolutely stunning on this late fall day—coyotes glide by, their golden eyes fixed on us; they move like water flowing in every direction and seemingly at every possible distance. And all of them are watching.
Sara asks what turns out to be our final question. “Do you guys have a relationship with any of the environmental groups, like Project Coyote for instance, or just grazing associations?”
I am in the front seat and can’t see Eric, but I see Julie roll her eyes.
One of a hundred resident coyote inmates at Wildlife Services Predator Research Facility.
Courtesy Dan Flores.
“Our greatest advocate is the American sheep industry. That’s who we work with. As for Camilla Fox and Project Coyote, they and a bunch of others have filed a lawsuit against us, about forty pages long. I just deleted it. I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not going to waste my time.”
Among the vocal defenders of coyotes across American history, the naturalists and the scientists are easy to pick out, people like Elliott Coues, Joseph Grinnell, and Olaus and Adolph Murie. There was the filmmaker Walt Disney. Then there were the writers: Ernest Thompson Seton, Enos Mills, J. Frank Dobie, and Edward Abbey, although the latter’s shout-out to coyotes in Desert Solitaire about whether coyotes are eating enough sheep—“I mean, enough lambs to keep the coyotes sleek, healthy, and well fed”—was more a trademark Abbey thumb in the eye of western ranching than anything else. With the poison controversy of the 1960s and 1970s, though, modern nonprofit environmental organizations and their presidents or directors became the ones pushing hard to relieve the unrelenting pressure on predators like coyotes. The Fund for Animals was such group. Rodger Schlickeisen, longtime president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife and a man the western environmental newspaper High Country News once called “the most influential conservationist you’ve never heard of,” was prominently another. Founded in 1947, Defenders of Wildlife has been among the most ardent advocates for coyotes since the 1960s.
So at times have more mainstream groups, like the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Audubon Society. But more recently, niche environmental groups like the Animal Legal Defense Fund, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Natural Resources Defense Council have been advocating for the rights of coyotes. In particular, a San Francisco–based organization called Project Coyote, founded in 2008 by Camilla Fox, has adopted a novel approach to taking on Wildlife Services, as well as demonstrating opposition to a highly controversial kind of coyote “event” that has become increasingly common across the country.
The latter would be the sponsored public coyote-hunting contest, with prizes (and often gambling pots) based on body counts for the most coyotes the contestants can, basically, murder over a week or a weekend. Coyote contests are often held by gun stores or local sportsmen’s groups whose patrons are all in on the premise that failing to kill an elk or deer last fall has everything to do with coyotes (and in the West, now wolves) on the landscape. In 2000 the Fund for Animals financed a documentary on the practice, Killing Coyote, made by two filmmaker friends of mine from Missoula. It’s not for the faint of heart. Coyote prize contests are advertised as family and youth events across the West, and despite national and international outrage, they are showing up in places like Pennsylvania. In Camilla Fox, though, coyote contests have a formidable opponent.
In 2013 I was in Northern California to do a talk on coyotes at the elegantly preserved nineteenth-century Nevada Theater in Nevada City. After a drive across the Central Valley, the visit gave me a chance to sit down with Camilla Fox at an outdoor restaurant in Larkspur, her home on the north end of San Francisco Bay, and find out why she had become such a passionate advocate in the modern incarnation of the coyote war.
Camilla Fox is striking. She is attractive, also charismatic, also tiny. She delivers information calmly and with the care of someone raised in an academic family, or so I think as I listen, and I turn out to be right. Her father, Dr. Michael W. Fox, long a leading researcher in the field of canid ecology, had a canid research station connected to his position at Washington University in St. Louis. “As a little girl I grew up with a wolf in the house and lived with her for fifteen years,” she told me. “My father was never closer to any being than to that wolf. I was just inculcated into all things canid at an early age.”
When her parents split, she’d lived with her mother in Maine and ended up attending Boston University, majoring in women’s studies rather than biology. Then in 2006, after several years of work with environmental nonprofits, she went to graduate school at Prescott College in Arizona to write a very specific thesis about what she’d managed to make happen in Marin County, California, around Wildlife Services and coyotes.
“This was the project where you persuaded Marin to drop its relationship with Wildlife Services, right?”
“Exactly. I had learned back in 1996 about this agency and its use of 1080 in sheep collars. The way it works all over the West is that county ag commissioners actually contract for Wildlife Services to come in. The county puts up 30 to 70 percent of the cost of bringing in agency hunters, and the federal government pays the rest. In Marin the whole county was completely clueless about this arrangement. It functions with this aura of secrecy because once taxpayers realize what they’re funding, they won’t stand for it; they’re outraged. This was at a time when a California ballot measure banned the use of M-44s and 1080 collars. Our board of supervisors in Marin was shocked to find out what they were signing off on every year.
“So we met with our ranching community. Marin is a place where wildlife is important, and we sought common ground with them. It led to developing an all-nonlethal coyote program for the county using shepherds and guard animals and fencing, and often bringing the sheep inside enclosures at night, and to Marin breaking off its old arrangement with Wildlife Services. In five years we were able to show that lamb losses went from 5.5 percent under lethal control to 2.2 percent under our system.”
At this point, I’m recalling Wildlife Services scientists’ assertion to me that paid snipers still had to go after problem coyotes in the Marin system. Camilla had also mentioned that she’d not yet had time to publish her thesis on the Marin plan versus Wildlife Services in a peer-reviewed journal, a piece of information the people at the Predator Research Facility had wanted to make sure I knew.
But I ask, “So have other counties around the country followed Marin’s lead?”
“There’s been a lot of interest, and some have asked for our data, but so far only Sonoma County has implemented something similar.”
“Have you interacted much with the people at Wildlife Services? It struck me visiting with their scientists that, unlike the Forest Service with its multiple constituencies, this is an agency with only one interest group, the agricultural community, which blinkers them to bigger realities. Their scientists may be myopic. They don’t seem irrational though.”
“Wildlife Services does all this great research at their centers,” Camilla agreed, “but there’s this disconnect in translating it into the field, to the guys who are most used to traps and airplanes. There’s some grudging acknowledgment of that. I think there are a few people there who are younger, smart, well intentioned, but they get burned out from the inertia of the old killing system. There’s concern, too, that if Wildlife Services shifts to something different, somehow their funding’s going to dry up. I think they have a great opportunity to shift their whole paradigm. But it would be a big cultural shift.”
It was a gorgeous autumn afternoon on the bay. Bright sun, drifting cotton-ball clouds, light traffic tending toward BMWs and sports cars idling a few feet away. I had just one more question for her.
“Why coyotes, Camilla? Why spend your life fighting to protect them? The gods know they don’t need much help from us, do you think?”
I’d spent twenty years among nonprofit environmentalists in the university town of Missoula, Montana, and I knew this was going to be a fat fastball down the middle for her, right at her group’s mission.
“In a way, I’m doing this for us, for the sake of our moral compass. We’ve made coyotes the most persecuted native carnivore in North America. My board—lots of illustrious scientists and ethicists—estimates that considering all the ways we do it, we’re killing half a million coyotes a year, which averages one every minute! But here is our iconic song-dog, so prominent in our history, so unique compared to wolves or foxes that occur on other continents. If we can change the way we view and treat coyotes, we can change the way we treat nature itself.”
Within a few months of my meeting with her, Project Coyote had managed, among other things, to get public coyote-hunting contests for prizes and gambling pots banned in California. This was going to be harder to do elsewhere, I knew, where “sport hunting for coyote control” strikes many as sanctioned by God. The real goal is to have convenient live targets, of course, but the argument often advanced is that gunshot coyotes make for more “game.”
Poster for prize-based public coyote hunt, 2013.
Courtesy Dan Flores.
Of course, sport hunters don’t read peer-reviewed ecological articles. Since the time of the Murie brothers’ research, biologists have done some very fine-grained studies of coyote predation on the animals hunters like to shoot. The strongest case for coyote predation has long been the pronghorn antelope, as in some instances coyotes account for half the mortality of pronghorn fawns. Coyote predation on pronghorns, though, is complicated by livestock grazing, which impacts forage enough that antelope fawns end up weak and easy prey. Even so, antelope populations remain stable with that level of predation, in good part because female pronghorns long ago adapted to coyote pressure by birthing twins. This is a more ancient equation, for the coyote and the pronghorn alike, than we ever think to acknowledge.
True enough, in the East and South coyotes are now the primary predators of whitetail fawns, although their effect is actually to create healthier deer herds more in balance with the setting than before. In the West, where mule deer are an important game animal, an intensive, long-term study of coyotes and mule deer in 2011 concluded flatly that “benefits of predator removal . . . will not appreciably change long-term dynamics of mule deer populations in the intermountain west.” In obstinate defiance of that science, in 2012 Utah passed a controversial Mule Deer Protection Act creating a predator bounty program that pays state hunters a $50 head-price for coyotes. In 2014, 7,041 coyotes paid with their lives for being in a state where neither hunters nor legislators bother to read science.
Meanwhile, in states like Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and New Mexico, hunter-sponsored public coyote contests continue to go on, ostensibly “to protect game,” often for prizes. Sometimes the body counts reach as many as two hundred animals over a weekend.
Along with other groups, Project Coyote continues to battle hunts like these, now with a documentary film narrated by Peter Coyote that may finally blow open the disgrace of these coyote contests, which will struggle to survive in the glare of national and international attention. There’s no vantage from which they’re not despicable. Project Coyote also brings lawsuits. In November 2014, a coalition it assembled, which included the Animal Legal Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Animal Welfare Institute, sued Mendocino County and Wildlife Services on the grounds that Mendocino had failed to submit its $142,356-a-year contract with Wildlife Services to environmental review as required by the California Environmental Quality Act. In February 2015 Project Coyote filed a second suit against the US Department of Agriculture, this time seconded by four additional environmental groups, over the department’s failure to conduct an environmental-impact assessment, as required by federal law, of Wildlife Services’ extensive predator-killing program in Idaho, financed entirely by taxpayer dollars.
Coyotes discarded in the desert, the aftermath of a coyote-hunting contest in New Mexico, in 2015.
Courtesy Kevin Bixby.
In 2015 Camilla Fox was named the John Muir Conservation Awards’ Conservationist of the Year.
My first-grade class picture shows me decked out in Davy Crockett gear straight out of the 1955 Disney series starring Fess Parker as the great American frontiersman. By the time of the Endangered Species Act of 1973, I looked more like one of the Indians the Crocketts of the world had displaced. Big History had unreeled in the years since I had matriculated from first grade, and pop culture was right there in the mix.
When it came to changing opinions about coyotes, Walt Disney was sure in the mix. A Chicago native, Disney had spent his early professional career in Kansas City, but in 1924 he and his brother Roy had transferred their operations and fortunes to Hollywood, where they quickly became commercial successes with cartoons and shorts in the motion picture industry. Disney may have fought to keep the Cartoonists Guild out of Disney Studios, and he may have been a red-baiting Republican in 1950s Hollywood and a Goldwater Republican in the 1960s, but he had always been interested in animals. His studio effectively invented the nature documentary, and he inserted conservationist values into many of his films. The house he built at Smoke Tree Ranch in Palm Springs in 1957 gave him more chances to be in the country and to interact with desert coyotes, and he soon began to hear from friends about the coyotes hanging out in the Hollywood Hills area of Los Angeles. These coyote experiences brought Disney around to defending the little song-dogs of the western deserts and cities.
The Coyote’s Lament of 1961 was just the beginning of Disney’s attempt to shape American attitudes about coyotes. He followed it later that fall with a theatrical release, Chico, the Misunderstood Coyote. For some moviegoers the star coyote’s name probably sounded vaguely familiar, and for a reason. “Chico” was none other than “Tito,” the heroine coyote in Ernest Thompson Seton’s story from sixty years before. Perhaps the Bambi-like storyline appealed to Disney. Chico is the story of an orphan pup whose family has been killed by ranchers. Captured, he is put in a rundown roadside zoo, a classic highway snake pit in the West, where his captors display him to gawking tourists as a “wild desert dog.” Disney’s film even invokes the poisoning debate by having Chico nearly killed by poison. But as in the Seton story, Chico escapes with a newfound craftiness about what the human world holds for his kind.
Now Disney was rolling, and Chico was about to have new adventures. In 1965’s A Country Coyote Goes Hollywood, a theatrical featurette narrated by and starring country music star Rex Allen, Chico gets chased inside a moving van by dune buggy toughs and their dogs and finds himself in Hollywood, learning how to be an urban coyote. The surprise plot twist is actually an indication of how hip Disney was to coyotes in modern America, for Chico finds that Los Angeles is already inhabited by a population of slick, big-city coyotes. The film includes outstanding footage of coyotes in the Hollywood Hills. Disney even released a 45-rpm record from the film, “When Coyotes Howl in Hollywood You Hear a Mournful Tune.”
Throughout all those pivotal Age of Ecology events in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Disney’s Wonderful World of Color kept at it. Concho, the Coyote Who Wasn’t, about a young Navajo shepherd who trains an orphan coyote to work as a sheepdog, appeared in 1966. The Nashville Coyote, about a coyote with a voice for the stage, came out in 1972; and Carlo, the Sierra Coyote, based on the novel Sierra Outpost and with John Muir as a character, debuted in 1974.
Unlikely as it might have seemed, then, Uncle Walt deserves some share of the credit for helping the country begin to cast aside the disrespect for coyotes that started with Roughing It, then morphed into outright hatred via the public relations arms of the Bureau of Biological Survey and its descendants. The gray wolf’s emergence as environmental star helped give coyotes a fresh chance too, but that never could have happened without the American public’s own maturation beginning in the 1960s.
And it seemed, somehow, as if the coyotes mysteriously understood that maturation, for at this same moment they discovered a new refuge for themselves in America, one chock-full of food and cover where, blessedly, no one ever shot at you.
Hello bright lights, big cities.