Status Updates From Coyote America

Sisyphus kept pushing his rock up the hill, and Coyote kept rolling it right back down. Short of carpeting the country with our new nuclear weapons, nothing was going to get rid of coyotes. Were we really willing to continue this level of cruelty [killing millions with excruciating poisons despite solid scientific evidence that they were not predators of game animals or cattle] in the face of unending failure?

"Southwestern Hispanos have a rich folk tradition about coyotes and have long said that the only thing smarter than a coyote is God."

The ecological niche breakthrough [by Joseph Grinnell, 1924] was critical for understanding wild coyotes & appreciating predators generally. In nature a "niche" is analogous to an occupation in human culture..Niches for predators had existed across time as part of the balance of nature that ancient societies had marveled at. In scientese, the coyote trotting across America..occupied the niche of a mid-sized predator.

Humans are ancient veterans of..pushing fellow animals into the black hole of oblivion..Even so, few if any organized states have ever been so coldly calculating about species cleansing as to set into law..a strategy to exterminate a single mammal native to its continent. If the residents of [New York City] want to know why coyotes are sleeping in their flowerbeds..the interrogation can begin here...

[Mark] Twain..hit stride in what became a classic description with a long reach.."The cayote is a long, slim, sick&sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerable bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness &misery, a furtive&evil eye,&a long, sharp face..He has a general slinking expression all over. The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want."

Coyote (capitalized to distinguish the deity from the ordinary coyote trotting by while you read) is the most ancient god figure of which we have record [in N. America]. No one knows when..or exactly how Coyote became a principal figure in so many different peoples' creation stories and ruminations on the human condition.No other native deity in America came anywhere close to inspiring such a vast body of literature.

[For 15,000 years] Something about our lifestyle has always drawn coyotes to human camps, villages & cities. That something is ecology at its simplest, even if it makes us squirm a bit. A coyote's primary prey happens to be our close fellow travelers, the mice and rats that flourish around us in profusion.As for fearing us too much to tolerate our presence, coyotes have taken our measure far too perceptively for that

But the range expansion of a wild animal for thousands of miles in every direction, often through dense settlements of humans who in recent history have been committed to that animal's eradication, is truly remarkable. ...
Southwestern Hispanos have a rich folk tradition about coyotes and have long said that the only thing smarter than a coyote is God.