The Defiance of Coyotes
How To Survive When Everyone Hates You
When I tell people that I’m from Colorado, the answer is often some form of “oh, it’s so beautiful there! I’ve been to Boulder and I loved it.” I then have to explain that the Southern part of the state is not like Boulder at all. Colorado Springs is the evangelical capital of America. Pueblo is a factory and ranching town. And, while the Rocky Mountains and foothills occupy the middle of the state, the non-mountain parts are quite flat. It’s too dry to be a breadbasket, but the land is great for cattle.
The land is great for bison too. If you’ve ever eaten a buffalo burger there’s a good chance it came from my home state, and a better chance that it was pricey. After decades of conservation and careful breeding there are still fewer than 500,000 buffalo, alive or in captivity — about half a percent as many cattle as there are in this country.
Things didn’t used to be this way. In 1800, 30 million buffalo roamed across America’s great plains, from east of the Mississippi to Utah and Idaho. By 1886, only a few hundred remained anywhere. The settlers, with their guns and their hunger for land, massacred these beasts by the thousands, both to harvest their valuable hides and to destroy the indigenous people who depended on them for food. They slaughtered the bison en masse, skinned them, and left them to rot.
It wasn’t just the buffalo. Americans hunted the passenger pigeon to extinction and killed every wolf within our borders. Mountain lions culled, elk depleted, grizzly bears slaughtered: not necessarily for food or self-preservation, but because this country decided they should not exist. These animals are only here today thanks to the tireless efforts of the conservationists, who are themselves being driven to extinction by the Trump regime.
The settlers singled out another animal for extermination in the 1800s — and in the 1900s — and now, today, still: the coyote, a creature scorned and reviled for centuries, for whom few tears have fallen.
Here’s Mark Twain on the subject:
A long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolfskin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck, and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is so spirtless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it. And he is so homely! -so scrawny, and ribby, and coarse-haired, and pitiful.”
Mark Twain was far from alone in this sentiment. Though there are many examples, the Best Quote About Coyotes Award, with no close second, goes to John L Von Blon, who, in 1920, described coyotes in Scientific American as “that despised howling pariah of the animal kingdom” and declared that “he is the original bolshevik — and good only “after treatment.””
From a policy perspective, little has changed. Last year, the Department of Wildlife killed 67,000 coyotes, which is a tiny fraction of the number killed by hunters who sometimes stage contests to see who can slaughter the most. In 2014, National Geographic estimated that Americans kill half a million coyotes per year — the total number of bison left on earth.
We did not despise the buffalo as we drove them to the brink of extinction. We feared wolves and bears, but few people feel disgust when we look at these magnificent creatures. The coyote, on the other hand, is one of the most hated animals on the continent, and our centuries-long war against them has taken a toll. In 1880, you could find coyotes all across the great plains and deserts of North America. After tireless efforts to slaughter them by any means necessary — poison, traps, arial machine gunning — coyotes can only be found everywhere in the contiguous United States, most of Canada, and Alaska. There are coyotes in Central Park now.
All that killing, and the coyote population hasn’t shrunk at all. It’s grown.
Those quotes from Twain and Von Blon come courtesy of “American Boshevik,” a wonderful documentary that you can rent for $3.99. The film explains that coyotes keep the rodent population down and might actually be a net good for farmers and ranchers, but that’s a discussion for a different type of article. The point of this one is: you cannot kill these motherfuckers. Even if you pour time and energy and massive government funding into the murder attempts for centuries. Even if you were to kill three quarters of their entire population every single year. Those yips and howls you might hear at night anywhere in America aren’t idle conversation: that’s coyotes gauging population density. When a female coyote hears fewer yips, she produces more pups. You can kill them, but they’ll only come back stronger.
I’ve always preferred coyotes to wolves. Wolves are beautiful and noble, sure — and look how far that got them. I think coyotes are also quite handsome, but Mark Twain was right about some things: they’re skulkers who survive on wits and cunning. They eat rats and garbage and small household pets and anything, really: whatever’s around, whatever’s on offer. Most animals either hunt in packs or live in solitude. The coyote, like the human, is capable of both. Whatever the circumstance, coyotes will find a way to make it work for them.
It’s easy and safe to admire wolves, or polar bears, or any other species we’ve nearly wiped out. These animals might be a threat to us one-on-one, but the fact remains: they’re only here because we decided to allow it. Their existence serves as a pleasurable reminder of both our power and our mercy. Coyotes, on the other hand do not require our permission to exist. They stand as a permanent reminder that our power is not infinite, that there are things beyond our control. For this, they will never be forgiven.
The coyotes who migrated to the East Coast over the past century or so aren’t like Western coyotes: they’re bigger, bushier, and greyer. As settlers drove wolves to extinction, those wolves were forced to slum it with their skulkier, sneakier cousins. Coyotes, true to their nature, will hook up with anything, so in addition to those wolf genes, these East Coast canids also have that dog in them. Evolved, turbocharged coyotes are running around in major cities, howling in suburbia, and evading traps in rancher country.
Coyotes were never a dominant species, did not evolve to be an apex predator. But Amricans killed off most of the apex predators, and sometimes being the last man standing is enough. Coyotes have migrated to fill this entire country because they can fit into the niche left open when we killed the wolves and bears. We have coyotes with wolf blood in their veins in New York City because we tried to exterminate wolves. Tell me that doesn’t make your heart sing, just a little bit.
I’ve written before about how dangerous it is to call your enemies vermin. Vermin are the animals we can’t get rid of; the living limit of our power. New York City can appoint all the Rat Czars it wants to, but this city’s rodents will be eating pizza in our subways until the pizza shops shut down. We will never be rid of cockroaches or spiders or flies. And we will certainly never be rid of the Coyotl, the noblest vermin of all: beautiful and clever and revered by cultures who do not feel the need to subjugate everything they see.
Do not be the wolf: noble and prideful and dead. Do not be the buffalo, grazing and oblivious, or the passenger pigeon who thinks it’s above it all.
Be the coyote. Skulk, sneak, linger at the margins. Band together when it makes sense, go it alone when you need to. Be open to recruiting and merging with unlikely others, even people who seem like natural enemies — coyotes and wolves competed for resources for millennia before realizing they shared interests and an enemy. Communicate. Regroup. Survive.
You do not need anyone’s permission to exist.
You are the living limit of their power.
I love coyotes. A coyote led me to wildlife tracking as a vocation, when one literally ran across the road in front of me in my Seattle neighborhood. The same neighborhood where a bunch of people got together and paid to have coyotes removed--i.e. killed--a few years back. Subsequent to an explosion in the local rabbit population, they're back.
The animals we call pests or vermin are the ones that manage to thrive in spite of us, or even often because we've created niches that suit them. Coyotes, raccoons, rats: social, resilient, clever, persistent, will eat anything. Kind of like us.
Don't forget the Native American legends about Coyote as the trickster god! Sneaky, cunning, always surviving.