Coyotes

The golf course officials who ordered the shooting of two innocent coyotes in Pasadena (May 22) admitted that those coyotes did not pose any threat to anyone nor did they kill any pets, which is the usual excuse to justify the destruction of coyotes. Their lives have been snuffed out just because they were coyotes.

If a coyote is merely visible on a canyon road, where it is supposed to be, it is sufficient reason to trigger a hysteria and the coyote control agencies are eager to oblige by destroying the creatures. The agricultural commissioner’s deputy said that the agency’s function is to protect livestock. I wonder how many cows or sheep needed protection on that golf course? It was a family of coyotes--mama, papa and their offspring.

Those fun-loving and uncaring golfers ought to play less golf and spend some time taking a course in environmental science and wildlife biology. They would find out that coyotes have an important biological function in the food chain and that they are beneficial to man. They feed on rats and harmful rodents such as the pocket gopher and the Beechey ground squirrel, a vector of the plague. They may also learn that after the wolf, jaguar and grizzly bear have been eliminated in California, the only important predator left in our local ecosystem is Canis latrans , indigenous to Southern California since the Pleistocene epoch. Therefore, they had more right to be on that golf course than those golfers.

Asphalt is being poured daily over the little remaining wildlife habitat and the reason that coyotes are more visible is because their habitat is shrinking. Wildlife, whose days are numbered on this ravaged planet, fight for survival but are losing the battle in many such places as the Brookside Golf Course in Pasadena.

LILA BROOKS, Director

California Wildlife Defenders

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