A 'TOURIST EVENT' IN BAKER, MONTANA
Controversial Contest Brings Coyotes Again Under The Gun
By Todd Wilkinson, 1-11-07
Coyotes. What good are they?"I don't know why God put them on this Earth. If He put them on this world to give us sport for hunting, maybe. But I'll tell you what, they do a lot of damage to livestock."
Thus says Jerrid Geving, a hunter and organizer of an annual coyote-calling and shooting contest in the hardscrabble town of Baker, located in far eastern Montana. The event is sheduled to commence again this weekend but will be accompanied by the kind of outcry one mght expect. Originally started five years ago to attract tourist dollars to the community, it offers $6,000 in prize money, according to a story written by Associated Press reporter Matthew Brown.
By clicking on the link, above, you can also weigh in by taking part in an informal poll of whether you think the competition is a sound or bad idea.
For myriad reasons, the contest is controversial, not the least of which is the contention made by its organizers that they're doing it on behalf of ranchers to help protect livestock. As a journalist who has written extensively about predator control, including authoring a book about the human quest to wipe out coyotes in the West, I can say such declarations are minimally accurate and generally misleading.
Scientific research shows that non-strategic targeting of coyotes as the Baker event does, yields no long term dividends for ranchers in terms of quelling losses, and can actually exacerbate problems. Coyotes have incredible reproductive potential and predator control that breaks up pack structure can yield a higher concentration of animals.
Even experts with Wildlife Services, the federal agency affiliated with APHIS under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of Agriculture which kills 80,000 coyotes a year, corroborates this reality.
"You kill some coyotes and six months later it's as if you didn't kill any at all. What are they accomplishing other than just being barbaric?" Brooks Fahy, executive director of the conservation advocacy group Predator Defense, told AP.
Moreover, Jim Posewitz, a three decade veteran of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks and who today leads Orion Institutein Helena, bristles at the notion of the contest masquerading as an event custom made for serious ethical hunters. "I don't think hunting is a contest between human beings," Posewitz told AP. "We like to think it's a more meaningful relationship that we have with wildlife than simply viewing them as a competition between people."
Coyotes can cause significant losses to ranchers. Upwards of $50 million in losses a year nationwide, according to some estimates which are often disputed. But far more effective in safeguarding calves and sheep than indiscriminate killing are using guard dogs, llamas, and other non-lethal deterents such as electric fencing; hiring good vigilant shepherds; and, if control (i.e. killing) is necessary, then being strategic about it, realizing that conflict is not going away. Many environmentalists, in fact, say that government-subsidized predator control should not extend to public land livestock grazing where those lands exist to provide habitat for publicly-owned wildlife.
While the show will still go on in Baker, there is a larger looming issue here that foreshadows potential controversy involving wolves. At present, Wyoming is proposing that any wolf which wanders beyond the greater Yellowstone ecosystem (which means the vast majority of the state) be treated with the same regard as coyotes around Baker. Tagged with the label of vermin under Wyoming's plan to manage wolves after removing them from the list of federally protected species, lobos, like coyotes, could be shot, trapped, and poisoned any hour of the day, any day of the year, without just cause and in unlimited number whether they are near livestock or not. This approach is one reason why the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is reluctant to return wolf management to Wyoming.
For more information on predator control, here are the links to USDA's Wildlife Services and to several conservation groups that specialize in examining the issue in the West.
Predator Defense
Sinapu
Predator Conservation Alliance
[End of article]
Todd
Some good points.
I suspect God put coyotes on this earth, as the old stories tell us, to throw human beings' hideous arrogance back into their faces. As long as human beings think of themselves as having taken over God's work, or even the slightly lesser "doing God's work," Coyote is there to make fools of them.
On a lesser plane, let's consider not the damage that coyotes and other predators do to livestock, but the damage the livestock do to land and wildlife. We can count the latter damage in the billions of dollars. Who will compensate us for that?
Robert
The economics of mountain meadow farming in Austria have caused many of those seasonal farms to close after hundreds of years. The result was a loss of plant diversity, as the whole of the meadow plant complex had evolved to be nourished by grazing animals, and without the grazing plants were dying out.
Now the Austrian government pays people to run cows, sheep and goats on the meadows to maintain species diversity. Therefore, I doubt the billions of dollars in grazing damage in the West is a viable statistic.
Having a coyote shoot, knowing the population will regain its loss in a year, is most likely about harvesting as many as possible at calving time. People get to hunt, shoot, and pelts are worth $25 or so right now. It does not hurt the coyote population, keeps some calves from being eaten as they emerge from the cow, and is not out of place as to who graziers are and what they do. It maintains the diversity of the human experience, and validates a lifestyle and livelihood.
Cattle, having descended from the wild aurochs, are native to European ecosystems that developed after the end of the Pleistocene. That is not the case in North America. The example from Switzerland or Austria is irrelevant, with cattle, sheep, or goats.
As an alien species introduced to North America not even 500 years ago, cattle have done undeniable and easily demonstrable damage to ecosystems throughout the continent, particularly southwestern ecosystems, that is nowhere being repaired except through removal of cattle and return of native grazers, despite the claims from Allen Savory or Courtney White or other apologists to the contrary. The grazing of domestic livestock in North America has reduced, not improved, biodiversity. There is no scientific evidence, or even evidence from our common sense, to the contrary. That's a claim of ideology.
All these folks are doing is killing coyotes because it makes them feel good; they're just making their so-called coyote problem worse. However, this is the irrational and inherent logic of all pastoral systems, all of which act in ways that destroy them in the end. Predator control is one of those irrational actions.
This sort of carnival nonsense just plays into the hands of the gun control advocates; so, although I will hate to see my guns go because of the antics of these trashy people, I suppose that in the end their disgusting behavior will turn out to be a self-correcting problem.
Comment By Pronghorn, 1-12-07Another important question to ask: Why is this "contest" being endorsed by and promoted on Montana Government's "Official State Travel Information Site"?
http://visitmt.com/categories/moreinfo.asp?IDRRecordID=14350&SiteID=1
There are a number of good reasons to boycott Montana--the slaughter of Yellowstone bison to appease the MT livestock industry, for one, and this sick "contest" designed to benefit the MT livestock industry (as well as give trigger-happy dimwits something to do), for another. If you live outside of MT, use the link below to register your feelings about this activity, and perhaps mention that your tourism dollars won't find their way here until the killing stops.
If you are a Montanan who considers this one hell of an ugly way to promote the state, SPEAK OUT. Otherwise, you are complicit.
http://visitmt.com/feedback/
It is too bad killing coyotes generates vitriol far more than killing humans. I read that last year Oakland, CA., had 165 gunshot murders and 675 shot but lived. No outcry to end that insanity. And Oakland is just one urban shoot 'em up environment. My small mind thinks shooting coyotes, even if no long term relief for pastoral predation is accomplished, does not warrant outrage in a country where people are killed so often, by myriad means. New Orleans, still without a lot of its former population, started the year out with a murder a day. There were protests in the street when it got to 9 murders. Asking people from outside Montana to tell Montana people how to live, and doing that by boycott, makes little sense. The changes should come from the people of Montana, on their own. When urban America drastically reduces the carnage on their turf, they might have standing to address rural pastoral predation issues on the range.
Comment By Brodie Farquhar, 1-12-07I know a rancher who leaves coyotes strictly alone on his property and grazing allotments. Consequently, the number of coyote pups is very low, and he can't remember a calf getting killed by a coyote in 30 years. With an abundance of rabbits, coyotes aren't going hungry.
His neighbors hunt and trap coyotes intensively, their coyote pup crops are huge and Daddy Coyote has lots of hungry mouths to feed, so he goes for the big payoff -- calves. Realistically, the past 100 years of predator control has resulted in only temporary decreases in coyote populations while breeding ever smarter and more prolific coyotes.
Coyotes show an ability to learn and adapt. Other than my rancher friend, can other humans learn and adapt as well?