I hear the coyotes' howl sometimes near my home, especially late in the evening. They of course are fabled and storied creatures that are native to North America that Native Americans have always respectfully characterized and mythologized"as the trickster" because of its unrivaled wit and cunning in its quest to survive.
In a recent book, Coyote America, Dan Flores, he examines coyotes' extraordinary evolutionary adaptability not only to changing environmental contexts, but literally to campaigns that have sought to exterminate them.
I just looked up Coyotes in Central Texas from the Austin Animal Center.
Among other things, they provide advice on how to get rid of them without hurting them. We have much to learn about our ancient friends whose howl, according to Dan Flores, is indeed "our original national anthem."
Angela Valenzuela
c/s
How the Most Hated Animal in America Outwitted Us All
By
The howl of the coyote is America’s “original national anthem,” says Dan Flores, author of Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History.
A totemic animal in Native American mythology, the coyote has lived in
North America for more than a million years. But since the early
19th-century, when Lewis and Clark first encountered them, coyotes have been subject to a pitiless war of extermination by ranchers and government agencies alike.
Even today, some 500,000 coyotes are killed each year, many shot to
death from small planes and helicopters. Yet the coyote has survived all
attempts to eradicate it, spreading from its original territory west of
the Rockies to the East Coast, where it has now found a safe, new
refuge in cities like Chicago and New York. (Why coyotes thrive in cities.)
When National Geographic caught up with Flores by phone from his home in New Mexico, he explained how misunderstanding and prejudice have dogged the coyote’s history; how the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote helped change public attitudes; and why the coyote’s howl plays a unique role in maintaining populations.
Tell us a bit about the history of the coyote. Is it a distinctively American species?
It is. It comes out of the canid family, which evolved in North
America 5.3 million years ago. Many of the other species of canids, like
jackals, wolves, and wild dogs, spread around the globe via the land
bridges connecting America to Europe and Asia. But coyotes never left
and evolved as a distinctive species about a million years ago.
Physically, they resemble jackals, especially the golden jackal.
They’re about the same size as golden jackals, from which coyotes only
separated about 800,000 years ago, so they’re fairly close relatives.
There’s only about a 4 percent genetic difference.
The coyote featured prominently in Native American mythology. How was it represented?
We’ve traditionally thought of the coyote as a classic trickster
figure, which is found among Paleolithic peoples around the world. I
argue that the coyote serves in Native American folk tales more as a
deity, who instructs humans about human nature. He certainly can
sometimes play tricks, but what the bulk of the stories are about is
exposing various elements of human nature and instructing people in the
proper way to behave toward one another in a social setting.
Lewis and Clark were the first white Americans to encounter the coyote. What did they make of it?
In the early 19th century, the coyote was not found east of the Great Plains. It was a western animal exclusively. As a result, Lewis and Clark had never seen one until they got to the middle Missouri River in present-day South Dakota in the fall of 1804. They wrote in their journals that they were seeing some new kind of fox. But once they shot one and looked at it up close, they realized this was no fox but some kind of wolf. They named it a prairie wolf and for a lot of the 19th century that’s what the animal was known as in American natural history.
Coyote is an old Aztec name that goes back at least a thousand
years. It had been taken into the American Southwest with Spanish
settlers, who brought Native Americans with them. When Anglo Americans
began arriving in the Southwest in the 1820s-1840s, they began
encountering people who called the animal coyote. Over time, most people
began to replace the name prairie wolf with coyote or as some people
pronounced it, in vernacular speech, kie-ote. That’s how we ended up with two different pronunciations.
One of the chief culprits for the coyote’s negative image was Mark Twain. What was his beef?
Twain’s classic 1870s book, Roughing It, gave Americans a way to think about the coyote. Up until that time, Americans arriving from Europe did not know what to think of it. Mark Twain comes along and, in a three-to-four-page comic rant about the animal, gives us a way to think of it as a cowardly, despicable little wretch that lives off carrion. He writes, “The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede.” By the 1920s, even Scientific American calls the coyote “the original Bolshevik.” [Laughs.]
You write that coyotes were “the victims of a crusade … that
surpassed any other in terms of the range of killing techniques and
cruelty.” Give us some of the gruesome details.
A government agency called the Bureau of Biological Survey, which
became the federal solution to the so-called predator question, began by
focusing mostly on wolves, because that was the animal that the
livestock industry wanted to eliminate. By the 1920s, they had managed
pretty much to extirpate wolves in North America, so they turned to the coyote as “the archpredator of our time.”
A lab was created called the Eradication Methods Laboratory. It began
working on various kinds of poisons, like strychnine, to wipe coyotes
off the face of the continent. And, in 1931, they got Congress to pass a
bill that gave them $10 million to do exactly that. What ensued was the
most epic campaign of persecution against any animal in North American
history. In a nine-year period between 1947 and 1956, this agency killed
approximately 6.5 million coyotes in the American West, using blanket
poisoning, sometimes with as many as three to four million poison baits
at one time.
There was actually no scientific basis for calling the coyote the “archpredator.”
One of the remarkable things about this campaign is that, at the time
it was launched in 1931, there had been no scientific studies of
coyotes. No one had any idea what they ate. The hate campaign
directed at the animal just assumed it fed on all the classic game
species: mule deer, pronghorns, bighorn sheep, and livestock sheep and
calves.
Finally, the agency began to fund scientific studies of coyotes. What
they discovered is that coyotes actually ate rodents, rabbits, fruit,
all sorts of vegetables, some carrion, and mice, but had almost no
impact whatsoever on the large game animals the Bureau had been arguing
was their chief prey. By the late 1920s, the American Society of
Mammologists was coming out in position papers against the campaign. But
they weren’t able to make much of a dent. The agency just kept at it.
One of the most fascinating mechanisms for the coyote’s survival
is that it can quickly change its breeding habits according to realities
on the ground. Explain how that works.
The coyote evolved with an adaptive, evolutionarily derived strategy
for surviving under persecution. Coyotes evolved alongside larger
canids, like wolves, which often persecuted and harassed them and killed
their pups. As a result, both jackals and coyotes developed this fission-fusion adaptation,
which human beings also have. This enables them to either function as
pack predators or as singles and pairs. When they’re persecuted, they
tend to abandon the pack strategy and scatter across the landscape in
singles and pairs. And the poison campaign was one of the things that
kept scattering them across North America.
One of the other adaptations they have is that, whenever their
populations are pressured, their litter sizes go up. The normal size is
five to six pups. When their populations are suppressed, their litters
get up as high as 12 to 16 pups. You can reduce the numbers of coyotes
in a given area by 70 percent but the next summer their population will
be back to the original number. They use their howls and yipping to
create a kind of census of coyote populations. If their howls are not
answered by other packs, it triggers an autogenic response that produces
large litters.
Television became a surprising champion for the coyote—tell us about Wile E. Coyote and what you call “coyote consciousness.”
I was trying to figure out how American attitudes changed enough toward these animals in the 1960s and early 1970s to persuade Richard Nixon to issue a presidential proclamation that banned the further use of poisons
on the public lands of the West. And I realized that pop culture had
done a lot toward swaying the way Americans thought about coyotes.
Starting in the 1960s, Walt Disney produced six pro-coyote films. For
a lot of us, the most famous coyote in the world from the 1960s through
the 1990s was Wile E. Coyote, the cartoon coyote produced by Warner
Brothers Studios. He not only serves as this coyote avatar. He finally
gives us a sympathetic coyote character to have in our lives. [Laughs.] That’s why I call it coyote consciousness.
Are coyotes still being killed? And what sort of numbers are we talking about?
After poisoning was largely brought to an end in the early 1970s, the Wildlife Services Agency began to employ a new technology: primarily aerial gunning.
The sheep industry in America used to have 55 to 60 million sheep in
the World War II period. Today, they only have about five to six million
sheep. But biologists who study this estimate say that, at taxpayer
expense, Wildlife Services aerial guns about 80,000 coyotes per year on
behalf of the livestock industry.
In recent years coyotes have discovered what you call “a new
refuge … chock full of food and cover where no one ever shot at you.”
Tell us about the rise of "urban coyotes" and what you call “coywolves.”
Coyotes have been living in cities in America for at least a thousand
years. But in the early 20th century, as they spread across the
Mississippi River into the Midwest, East, and South, they’ve taken up
residence in the biggest cities in the U.S.,
like Chicago and, increasingly, their new frontier, New York City! It’s
a place where people do not trap, poison, or shoot them. Coyotes in
rural America usually live on average only about two and a half years.
But in cities they’re living to 12 to 13 years old and raising pups so
that many more survive. They’re doing very well living among us, dining
on the rats and mice that our villages and houses produce in such
abundance.
As they have moved east, they have also encountered two remnant species of American wolf: the red wolves of the South and the Eastern wolves
of upper New England and eastern Canada. There are no behavioral
barriers to them interbreeding. So, as they’ve interbred with these
remnant wolf populations, they’ve created a new predator for modern
America, the “coywolf,” which is about 70 percent coyote but also has
wolf genes and even the genes of domestic dogs. It’s a very exciting
development.
Project Coyote
is one of a number of conservation organizations devoted to bringing
back the coyote—tell us about these efforts and why it is important to
save what you call an "American avatar."
Project Coyote, which is based in San Francisco, is trying to get us
to understand how we can coexist with these animals and not react to
them out of fear or stereotypes: that they have rabies or eat at the
back of fast-food restaurants. Coyotes don’t carry rabies and they
hardly eat any human food. They are predators of small rodents. And by
learning to co-exist with them, we can tap into something that’s ancient
to this continent.
The coyote is our classic totem animal in America. It’s the animal
that produced the oldest body of literature in North America in the form
of Indian coyote deity stories from 10,000 years ago. To me, the howl
of the coyote is our original national anthem.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
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