The Ignorance of Killing a Coyote
One of the sure signs of spring are when the buzzards nest on the trees in town. They spread out their wings to catch the morning sun in an ominous embrace of the thawing bodies they intend to find. Death is one of those things that happens all winter long. And life on the farm here is not any different.
The first week of setting up new electric cattle fence is always an interesting one here. Spring is often considered the season of renewal but one of the things that I’ve learned over the years is that winter is the season of death. It was one singular death in the field as the snows melted away in the warm spring sun that caught my attention. It was the carcass of a coyote, white and grey fur still intact but the guts and eyes gone from the body. I knew that the coyote had been shot by my neighbor from the balcony of his mansion 75 yards to east. Despite the coyote being on property I rented; the neighbor had taken it on himself this past winter to kill the animal. The death of this coyote bothered me because it was done for no reason other than coyotes are meant to be killed by people that live in the western parts of the United States, particularly by bored retirees in mansions. This death was a disturbing one because it came from such a senseless place
There has been a strange tradition built around the idea of shooting coyotes in the American West. It was always assumed by ranchers in the area that coyotes would make off with the calves on a regular basis, but when I was talking to my grandparents that grew up on ranches in yampa Colorado they rarely reported coyotes actually killing any calves. Sheep were more vulnerable than calves. Of course, there might have been a time when coyotes did start to target the calves of ranchers and sheep ranchers that had moved into the area but it’s unlikely that they did it just because they want to do hunt and target the week calves and lambs. If there ever was really a time when coyotes started to target livestock it probably had something to do with the fact that ranchers in the area had been disrupting the ecosystem, by eradicating the preferred prey of coyotes such as mice and rabbits. It is a human habit to blame a creature without thinking through the steps we humans have made that brought a species into conflict with us.
Because I wasn’t raised in a traditional ranching family here in the Wet Mountain Valley of Colorado. I often don’t have a frame of reference to understand some of the habits and traditions that I see other ranchers in the area take part in. In many ways, our grassfed beef operation is so new, that we’re having to discover ranching one step at a time. The problem is that we are doing this discovery process without the benefit of all the wisdom that previous generations had learned. Over the past seven years I’ve gotten somewhat used to the fact that I don’t really know what’s going on either in traditional ranching or in the type of ranching that we practice here on the ranch. But this time the sight of that dead rotting coyote carcass in a field of lush green bothered me.
The person that shot the coyote, an otherwise friendly neighbor of ours, wasn’t even a rancher. He, like most of the people that live in the area, is a wealthy retired individual living in a mountain mansion after a successful life as a middle manager in corporate America, with a stint in the military. He has a nice tone of voice when he speaks with you and a friendly smile. You could picture him as an old farm boy in the Midwest when he was younger. Despite the friendly attitude of my neighbor, his act of killing the coyote triggered anger in me. Unlike previous generations of ranchers, I don’t view coyotes as a liability to our ranching operations. In fact, I view coyotes as an asset, one that helps keep in check the destructive rodents that till up and destroy our native grass fields. Coyotes, in other words, are vermin eradicators that don’t require a minimum wage.
I’m not the first person to consider coyotes as an asset to grassfed beef operation, the always engaging grassfed beef rancher Jim Gerrish in Idaho wrote in the Stockman grass grower about how he calculates the value of a coyote. In the short article, Gerrish highlights in a incredible amount of detail exactly the value of a coyote in regards to how many moles, voles, and pocket gophers a single coyote can eat in a day, week, and year. In the end, Gerrish estimates the value of coyotes that eat otherwise pasture destroying rodents to be in the 10s of thousands of dollars per decade. And unlike chemicals coyotes are a natural part of an ecosystem that do not carry any unintended side effects when they do what they evolved to do.
In my region of the United States we have what are known locally as pocket gophers. These little guys have the ability to churn up tons of soil in a short timeframe. This leaves whole sections of fields completely devoid of grass and can cause erosion if enough soil is tilled up. Coyotes are skilled at catching and killing pocket gophers. It is estimated that a single Coyote can kill and eat 10–30 mice and voles per day. And again, they do not even charge minimum wage.
I must be careful here not to demonize voles, mice, or pocket gophers. They are also a part of the ecosystem and have a role to play. I have noticed that many rodents tend to eat the plants we sometimes call weeds. Weeds are often annual plants that grow quickly in an effort to produce seeds. Left unchecked, annuals will take over an un-grazed or over-grazed field. From observation, rodents prefer these plants when they are young and tender. In addition, the pocket Gophers Dig long narrow tunnels that can cover an entire field. These long tunnels often reach some of the creeks that border my grass fields, and water flows through these channels, sub irrigating many of the areas that are far away from the creek. Let’s also not forget that pocket Gophers till while they dig their tunnels and this often brings organic material from the surface down to deeper areas increasing the hummus found in the soils.
So, what in the end did the dead coyote in my field represent? To me, it represented a lack of humility in the face of nature. To shoot a coyote for no other reason than a false narrative that coyotes are bad for cattle ranchers. Our ecological awareness has become so stunted in modernity that few can recognize the complex systems, with their many interdependencies, that surround all of us. To me, the coyote was an asset and it presented no danger to my heard of cattle. Even if it did represent a threat, can I honestly say that my farm is better off without the coyote in the ecosystem? In nature, it is not easy to make straight cost/benefit analyses.
Ecological ignorance is nothing new and it seems to be humanities birthright. One of the most extreme examples of ecological ignorance is that of Moa Zedong’s Four Pests Campaign that lasted from 1958 to 1962 in communist China. The concept was that a massive campaign to kill off mosquitos, flys, rats, and sparrows would increase grain harvests in China. This increased productivity would allow the dictator to sell the excess for foreign currency and use that currency to modernize and develop China’s industrial-military sector, plus help pay for a lavish lifestyle for the communist elite.
While it is understandable that the Chinese communist party wanted to get rid of rats, flys, and misquotes, why the focus on sparrows? Sparrows were seen as pests because they ate some of the grain right before harvest. The campaign to eliminate all the pests was successful beyond the hopes of Moa. Tens of millions of sparrows were killed. Worse, flys and mosquitos were also eliminated, for a short time, depriving the sparrows of their manly insect food source. The fact that sparrows ate huge amounts of insects, insects that liked to eat grain plants, had been completely ignored by the communist party in their mad dash for cash. With the sparrow population destroyed, insects had a huge advantage and their populations started to explode. Instead of a bumper crop of grain, famine gripped China during and after the four pests campaign as insects ravaged crops. As the mulitcapactivr risk expert Nassim Nicholas Taleb pointed out, “the sparrow had a small tax and ate some of the grain, but it earned its keep by eating insects that let the crops thrive in the first place.” China had to buy and import hundreds of thousands of sparrows to try and heal the damage.
The ecological ignorance cost the Chinese population dearly. An estimated 15 million to 55 million people died from the famine started by Mao. What happened to Mao? Judging by his portly photos, he remained well fed.
Yet this is not a judgment on people from an earlier era in a distant land. Americans in their push west could be better seen as a rolling tsunami of ecological devastation at a biblical scale. First, the bison herds were purged in an effort to starve the indian population. This led to a large buildup of prairie grass and an increase of locust swarms that spread east of the Mississippi, destroying crops and crippling agricultural production in the Ohio Valley region. Cattle from Texas were than used to graze the now abandoned Midwest. But these cattle were wild and not suited for the northern regions of the plains. Several freezes led to tens of millions of cattle dyeing in the winter. This led to butchers using anything they could call meat and selling it. This in turn poisoned hundreds of thousands of people and lead to the creation of the USDA.
I could go on about the cascading destruction that followed mankind’s expansion west, but to realize that we have not learned much from others about the complexity of nature, and how we harm ourselves when we meddle in nature, is the point of this essay, of this attempt.
The fact that an asset of my fields was killed by a boarded retired person is a fitting analogy for the disconnectedness of our society. To add salt to a wound, that neighbor, and his neighbor that leases us grazing ground, buys all their beef from Costco; which is a three and half hour round trip drive to Colorado Springs. Somehow, they have convinced themselves that our beef, that eats their grass, is not worthy of being eaten. It does not even cross their minds to buy beef from us. The ignorance and disconnectedness of these actions is often more than I can bare.
I often wonder if the buzzards are waiting to feed on us, as we collectively march-off one ecological and cultural cliff after another.
Post Script: The Antifragility of Coyotes
One of the ironic things about Coyotes is that the more that you try and kill them, the more they reproduce and spread. Once only found in southwest, the Coyote is now found in all of north America. Coyotes increase litter size as the population goes into decline. Also, the killing of wolves left conquest of the continent wide open to the Coyote.
I can only hope that more come and hunt my fields.
