Coyotes’ Resilience Has Foes Howling

The early American Indians called it God’s dog: The watchful eyes, just outside the range of the firelight. The reproachful look cast back over the shoulder as it crept away. The aching cry shot up at the stars.

In humankind’s contest with predators for dominion over the Earth, there have been stronger competitors, and larger, and more dangerous ones. But none has been more persistent than the coyote.

The federal government is launching yet another campaign to control the coyote, this time using a new poison-laced sheep collar that provokes dread among environmentalists and doubts among some scientists that it will be any more successful than previous tactics.

Indeed, each cycle of control only seems to beget more coyotes. They have been shot at, trapped, snared, poisoned, clubbed, strangled and electrocuted by the millions. The federal government alone dispatched 82,261 coyotes last year, more than 638,000 since 1990. And yet in the 100 years since livestock owners began the coyote war in the West, the resourceful predator has far surpassed the wolf, the grizzly and the cougar, tripling its numbers and its range.

The unfolding debate over the use of more deadly measures pits sheep industry losses now approaching $35 million a year against significant scientific evidence that the vendetta against the coyote--so far a clear loss from any conceivable measuring point--may be responsible for increasing its range and speeding up the species’ ability to reproduce.

Underlying it all is the fundamental ambivalence with which humankind regards the coyote. The animal has superb intelligence and resourcefulness, dog-like playfulness and a monogamous social structure. Yet it evokes primal fear with its efficient ability to kill and its nighttime howl, a bone-chilling combination of yearning and savagery that emanates just beyond the range of the visible.

That the coyote’s range has exploded in the last 30 years is evident in reports all over North America, where a species once confined to the high grasses of the Great Plains can be found as far south as Costa Rica and up into the Arctic Circle, in every state except Hawaii.

New England, which had no coyotes a century ago, now has the brawniest in existence. Newly appearing Florida coyotes are snatching turtle eggs along the beaches and plundering watermelon farms. Coyotes have crept into the urban fringes to feast on house cats and raid garbage cans. Sheep ranches in the coastal counties of Oregon and northern California, which regarded the coyote as a curiosity in the 1960s, now find themselves locked in nightly combat. The California Department of Fish and Game estimates there are one to five coyotes for every square mile of the state.

To understand the frustration and desperation of ranchers, one need look no further than southwestern Oregon and a small cluster of sheep ranches on the flanks of the coastal range, and the three-year reign of a small coyote that confounded the best predator control officers in the state.

3 Years, 700 Dead Sheep, 1 Coyote

Some mornings, rancher John Guynup would find 18 dead lambs strewn across the hillside, some with their throats crushed, others with their stomachs split open and their mothers’ milk lapped out. Some weren’t eaten at all, they just were dead, as if whatever had gotten in during the night had started savaging and couldn’t stop.

Guynup and his neighbors tried the traditional methods: leghold traps, snares, fencing. One man laid out all night with his gun; even so, the next morning two lambs lay dead less than 50 feet away. They swept the countryside with airplanes, posted guard dogs, set poison baits, blasted sirens, turned on floodlights, played tapes of wounded rabbits as lures.

Nearly three years into it, 700 sheep were dead, all with the peculiar teeth marks of the Elk River coyote. Then, in 1995, down in some swampland along the river, a federal wildlife agent found a small, cowering coyote in one of his traps. He fired his gun, and it was over.

The next year, another story, not unlike this one, started making the rounds east of Salem. More dead sheep. More empty traps.

Not to be outdone, the federal government is quietly unleashing a deadly campaign against the audacious predators, licensing a new class of poison sheep collars containing Compound 1080, a toxin so potent it was outlawed during the Nixon administration as one of the deadliest compounds known.

Because the collars contain such a small amount of the compound, the Environmental Protection Agency approved their limited use in Texas and New Mexico in the late 1980s. The collars are licensed in seven other states and approval is pending in several more. California in the spring began using the collars at sheep ranches in Marin, Sonoma and Mendocino counties.

Even Oregon, one of the blockhouses of the environmental movement, licensed the collars in February for trial use in Curry County, home of the Elk River coyote. This is where the battle over the collars is likely to be joined. A growing coalition of organizations say the device sentences the coyote to a miserable demise and threatens to unlock a poison so potent that a teaspoonful can kill more than 30 people.

The groups, led by the Eugene, Ore.-based Predator Defense Institute, a wildlife advocacy group, are also digging in against another toxin, the tiny cyanide canisters of M-44 known as “coyote getters.” The federal government has peppered ranches throughout the West with the canisters, baited with meat or cheese.

Control Agency Comes Under Fire

Leading the assault with the poison collars is the federal Wildlife Services agency, a little-known arm of the Department of Agriculture. Its job for 66 years has been to ferret out--and usually destroy--the cougars, bears, beavers, birds and coyotes that have plagued the livestock industry and to some extent the public at large.

Known for years as Animal Damage Control, the agency has earned a foul reputation in animal-rights quarters for its extensive use of leghold traps, snares, poisons, and practices like denning, in which coyote pups are cornered in their dens and gassed, shot or, in earlier years, burned and clubbed.

“The general public would be outraged if they knew their tax dollars were going to a program to kill wildlife when they think our government is working to save wildlife,” said Nancy Zierenberg of the Tucson-based Wildlife Damage Review, whose mission is to get Wildlife Services abolished.

The group is focusing its latest battle against the return of Compound 1080 to the coyote arsenal, a move they say courts environmental contamination and sentences offending coyotes to cruel deaths, usually spanning three to 12 hours.

“In 1958, Iowa State University videotaped a dog getting a lethal dose of this stuff,” Zierenberg said. “Fortunately, they chopped it down to only 15 minutes. It took the dog almost two hours to die. It was so disgusting that it made me physically ill, and then I had nightmares about it. It’s a horrible death, believe me.”

Before it was banned in 1972, use of 1080 in poison-baited carcasses led to the death of many eagles and other unintended animal targets, and at least 13 humans.

Opponents, including many residents here in Oregon’s Curry County, say they fear that traces of the poison could again be unleashed through the newly licensed livestock collars, either through leaks or through the coyote’s body. Use of the collar in Texas, federal officials admit, has resulted in the loss of some collars when coyotes carted off their prey and the inability to locate, recover and dispose of the bodies of affected coyotes.

“My concern is there’s a bunch of creeks up there, and it can take hours for the animal that bites into this little sack [on the collar] to die. When they start dying in the rivers, the whole town water system is going to be the first thing contaminated,” said Howard Lichtig, a Curry County resident who has opposed the collars.

But federal officials say the new collars represent a completely different means of delivering 1080, far safer than the bait stations of past years. The tiny amount of poison delivered is enough to kill a coyote, which is uniquely susceptible to the material, but the chemical is metabolized so quickly that animals feeding off the coyote’s body are unaffected. Leaks are quickly detectable through a dye in the poison. The collars themselves are numbered, subject to severe restrictions on where they are placed and heavily monitored.

The truly ingenious part, they say, is that by placing the poison collar around the throat of a sheep--the very location where a coyote nearly always strikes--it avoids indiscriminate killing of coyotes that eat the normal diet of rodents and rabbits and focuses on those that have crossed the forbidden line and become sheep killers.

“You’re killing the animal that is killing,” said Brian Thomas, the Wildlife Services field agent in Oregon’s Marion County. “I guess I’m not educated enough to tell you why that doesn’t make sense.”

Poison Claims a Family Pet

Amanda Wood Kingsley has been on the receiving end of the less discriminating tools in the anti-coyote arsenal. She was walking her dog on her ranch near Eugene one day when he began rolling around on the ground.

She thought he was playing until she saw he was convulsing and struggling for air. She noticed a metallic smell as she administered CPR through a tube, and later, after the dog’s long, painful death throes were over, felt numbness, tunnel vision and heart flutterings herself--possible symptoms, she was told, of mild cyanide exposure.

A search revealed an M-44 “coyote getter” placed by Wildlife Services, apparently with her tenant’s permission but without notifying Kingsley.

“At this point, I think the whole [Wildlife Services] is nuts,” said Kingsley. “I’m not anti-rancher or anti-sheep. We have chickens here, and we’re losing a lot of them to coyotes. If I can get a shot at a coyote, I’ll take it. But spreading poison throughout our pastoral environment is not the way. I think I could easily have been killed that night.”

Yet ranchers say devices like the M-44, and now the poison collar, are their best line of defense. Where, they say, are those who feel sorry to wake in the morning to find a milk-engorged ewe standing bleating next to the bloodied body of her lamb?

“When you get into the purebred business, you probably raised their mothers and their grandmothers. My wife just babies ‘em,” said Charlie Daugherty, who raises purebred lambs in Molalla, Ore. “I’ll never forget there was one ewe, a little bit older’n some, and the coyote didn’t kill her, but he got his teeth in her windpipe, and she was just gurgling with the blood bubbling out both sides. Sure, she’s just a sheep, but you can’t help but feel sorry for a poor old girl like that.”

Thomas, the Marion County agent, hears such stories almost every day. So every day, he’s plying the back roads outside Salem in his pickup truck, with his traps and his rifle and his bucket of M-44s. He reaches onto his dashboard and picks up a small rubber membrane, puts it in his mouth, and out comes a whimpering that sounds like a puppy in pain.

“You just make a somebody-stepped-on-a-dog’s-tail sound, and every member of the pack will respond,” he says, grinning. “We can only hope to be the parents that they are. We wouldn’t have kids living in the streets if we were parents like the coyotes are.”

He’s got a siren on the front of the truck. He’ll play it long after dark, and invariably he’ll get an answering howl from somewhere out in the night. That way, he knows where to look.

“When I approach a killing situation, I try to approach it much like the police would a murder scene. I look at the kill and I try to figure out what did this, and how did he do it? How did he get in over the fence? It’s a whole lot like being a police officer for animals. Except unlike the police, most of the criminals we’re dealing with are smart.

“I’ve had coyotes in this county that you could just pray lightning was going to strike this animal. Because that’s your next best resource. You’ve beat your head against the wall to try to get him to step where you want him to, and you’re still losing thousands of dollars worth of sheep. You get a lot of respect for him. But you also lose an awful lot of sleep. There’s nothing worse than that feeling when you get another phone call in the morning, and you have to say, ‘How many did you lose?’ ”

Eradication Efforts Blamed for Spread

A number of mainstream coyote biologists say the government’s abandonment of predator toxins in the 1970s led to the escalation of coyote problems. But Bob Crabtree, one of the foremost U.S. experts on undisturbed coyote populations, blames a policy of indiscriminate eradication.

Undisturbed, he said, coyotes live in small packs in which only a dominant, monogamous pair will breed, keeping the size of the pack stable and its territory fiercely guarded against outsiders. Indiscriminate killing triggers a response in which other pack members begin breeding and in larger numbers. Hunting outside the normal food range becomes necessary to feed the large number of puppies. Solitary pack members often strike out on their own.

In another irony, say Crabtree and others, it was the wolf--in centuries of competition with the coyote--that fine-tuned the smaller animal’s wiliness. And it was man’s assault on the wolf that left open territory into which the coyote could expand.

“Finally, just think about the selective pressures, when you think about 100 years of control,” says Crabtree. “In a lot of areas, you’re killing off half the population. That leaves the smart ones, who reproduce. The next year you kill half of those. Do that for 100 years, and ask yourself, what kind of species do we have now?”