Coyote America

by Dan Flores

  Two influential Americans in particular worried about this tradition in printed volumes, one a best seller, the other a congressional report. The author of the best seller was American diplomat George Perkins Marsh. A polymath New Englander who read twenty languages and filled diplomatic appointments all over the globe, Marsh in 1864 wrote Man and Nature, in effect the first modern history of the environment. Although it took on a huge range of topics relating to humanity’s relationship with the natural world, Man and Nature became most famous for its discussion of a pattern Marsh had observed in places as disparate as France, Turkey, and China. Rivers, he wrote, had always been crucial to human civilization, and almost everywhere they originated in mountains. But the privatization of mountains, the wellsprings of water that were so critical to human development, had been a disaster almost everywhere that countries had let it happen.

  The United States still had time to avoid such a mistake, Marsh believed, by excluding its mountain landscapes from settlement that would invite overlogging and overgrazing and by retaining them instead as public preserves to protect watersheds. Marsh’s book went through eight printings and appeared in a new edition in 1871, and its success brought his argument to the attention of the National Association for the Advancement of Science, which in 1873 endorsed this new policy recommendation.

  The other author was a one-armed Civil War veteran who became the most famous American explorer of the postwar era and eventually the most powerful bureaucrat in government late in the century. John Wesley Powell had lost an arm at Shiloh, but that could not prevent him from leading the first party to take on the dangerous descent of the unknown Grand Canyon, which he accomplished not once but twice, serializing the account of his adventure in the most popular magazines of the day. Then, in 1878, the year before he became the director of the new United States Geological Survey, Powell laid before Congress his masterpiece for rethinking public domain policies in America. The Lands of the Arid Region of the United States didn’t exactly endorse Marsh’s plan. Powell focused more on the diversity of public domain landscapes and why Congress should tailor settlement plans specifically for valleys, foothills, and mountains. Yet by emphasizing the special difficulties settlers were facing in a West that was far more desertlike than anyplace Americans had ever tried to homestead, Powell added yet another layer of reasoning as to why protecting western water was so crucial.

  Neither writer had said the first thing about wolves, coyotes, or any other wild creatures, but in 1891 Republican president Benjamin Harrison’s administration passed an appropriations bill for the General Land Office that included a rider placing 13 million acres of western mountains off-limits from settlement. It was the beginning, in the Sierra Nevada and Rocky mountain ranges, of what would evolve into America’s National Forest System, a linchpin of Teddy Roosevelt’s crucial conservation program a few years later that eventually included a National Park Service and more than fifty National Wildlife Refuges, all created out of federal public domain lands. By 1907, squat, bespectacled, squeaky-voiced Teddy Roosevelt, rivaled only by Thomas Jefferson as the most nature obsessed of all American presidents, had set aside 151 million acres of western mountain lands as national forests, and by 1910 the new policy began to work on acquiring cutover lands in the East, Midwest, and South as additional public forests. A new National Park Service followed in 1916. By 1932 it was administering twenty-two national parks and thirty-six national monuments, almost all of them fashioned from lands everyone once assumed would be parceled out to private individuals, as American lands had always been before.

  Farms, ranches, and towns would be located on the borders of, but not within, these vast expanses of public forests and parks. Despite roads, trails, campgrounds, and tourists, within them big nature prevailed. Instead of replicating the East, settlement in the western third of the country was angling off on a new historical course. For big predators like coyotes and wolves, a historical course that preserved vast expanses of wildlands in America couldn’t help but look really promising. Naturally the story turned out to be a lot more complicated.

  René Descartes famously thought of animals as so distinct from humans that they were almost automatons, incapable of joy, sorrow, or emotional lives of any kind. According to centuries of Western scientific thinking nearly down to our own time, higher animals’ behavioral responses are based purely in instinct, not—like human behavior—centered on morality or advanced emotions like fairness or empathy. Until very recent work by behavioral biologists, we firmly believed that no animal other than ourselves had anything remotely approaching a so-called theory of mind, the ability to recognize that other beings are also engaging in thought and to attempt to discern what other minds outside our own might be thinking.

  Most of those who pioneered the systematic, professionalized destruction of creatures like wolves and coyotes in America from the 1880s to the 1930s no doubt regarded wild predators in the Descartes mold. Wild canines were profoundly, fundamentally different from humans. Most, like professional wolfer Ben Corbin, who wrote The Wolf Hunter’s Guide in 1901, had internalized the Judeo-Christian teaching that humans possessed “souls,” which other animals lacked. Corbin was far from alone in imagining this war in terms of a Christian crusade against the depravity of predators. Wasn’t morality—at its core, a code for treating others as fairly as we wish to be treated ourselves—an invention of human culture, its precepts disseminated through religious teachings? For centuries the most enlightened position we could muster about our “brute neighbors” was that they deserved some semblance of decent treatment, but certainly not because they possessed emotional lives, experienced pain or loss, or understood anything at all about morality.

  Prior to this first phase of America’s war on wild things, Charles Darwin’s experiences with his own dogs had convinced the great naturalist that canines did indeed possess emotional lives and perhaps even had some fundamental form of morality. The nineteenth-century activists who formed the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals moved in Darwin’s direction, and post-Darwinian writers like Jack London, James Oliver Curwood, and Ernest Thompson Seton attempted early-twentieth-century fictional stories built around Darwin’s idea that animals experience joy and anguish and understand the essentials of fairness. But the scientific community quickly and famously squashed such notions. The activists were sentimentalists, scientists of Roosevelt’s day averred. As for the writers, not only were they anthropomorphizing animals, trying to turn them into little humans, but they were deliberately falsifying natural history for purposes of sentimental entertainment.

  The outcome of what has been known in the history of science ever since as the “Nature Faker Controversy” may have comforted those about to wage a war of extermination against American predators. In our time, though, it no longer works to seek solace in the notion that other higher animals are so different from us that they entirely lack emotional lives. The Stephen Pinkers of the modern world have made us understand that the human senses of fairness, equity, and empathy, the fundaments of the moral code, do not in fact spring from organized religion or advanced culture but have roots in our very evolution as a social species. We are beings with brains that are endlessly taking stock of favors and slights, reciprocity and advantage. Morality did not emerge from religious teachings. Rather, religious teachings encoded a morality that sprang from human social evolution.

  That breakthrough in understanding our own animal nature has led, in the present age, to the work of scientists such as Marc Bekoff and Brian Hare, who study primarily the social lives of dogs but also those of wolves and coyotes. Their work leaves little doubt that as social species themselves, canines also understand equality and inequity—morality, in other words—and experience both a rudimentary form of empathy and some basic theory of mind. In practice, theory of mind involves efforts by higher animals to read expressions and body language to discern the outlines of other creatures’ thoughts.

  In other wor
ds, just like us, canines are animals whose evolutionary history as social species has given them an essential sense of what in human terms we would call “right and wrong.” Numerous studies have demonstrated that both canines and chimps know when they are being treated equitably among their peers and when they are not, and their behavior registers this knowledge. According to Bekoff, much as humans use prisons and enforced socialization, wild coyotes have a sense of proper coyote behavior and ostracize individuals that fail to observe it. As for theory of mind, domesticated dogs famously demonstrate remarkable canine abilities in common acts that they and their owners perform on a daily basis. When we point at a dish or a toy, with their 15,000 years of coevolution alongside us, dogs read our intent and look in the direction we’re signaling. Wolves, coyotes, and chimps demonstrate theory of mind in other ways (often by reading intent in play gestures), but even chimps stare at our fingers when we point. Unlike dogs, they fail to infer the mental signal.

  Knowing what we currently understand about the evolutionary origins of human morality and the emotional lives of higher animals, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the fate that befell those millions of wild American canines from the 1880s to the 1930s must have caused them some staggering level of emotional trauma and perhaps even a profoundly experienced, rudimentary sense of unfairness, the kind of mental sense that in us becomes a powerfully felt idea: injustice.

  In 1897 New Mexico rancher Arthur Tisdale, resident of a territory where the new conservation policies were in the process of creating the Santa Fe and Carson National Forests in the Southern Rocky Mountains, became the first known individual to call on the federal government to assist ranchers facing what was becoming known as “the predator problem.” Ranchers like Tisdale reasoned out a syllogism whose logic went like this: Private efforts alone had sufficed to wipe out most of the wolves out on the plains. But because federal policies setting aside new public lands in the mountains were creating predator refuges there, having thereby created the problem, it was only right that some government agency help ranchers and farmers clear out the predators that were holing up in preserves precious few westerners had wanted in the first place.

  No one either in or outside government investigated this trail of reasoning very closely for evidence. The idea of public lands as animal refuges seemed intuitive. And looking back, there is some good evidence that several species of animals formerly found on the Great Plains—grizzlies, certainly, but also elk and very likely coyotes too—began in the 1880s and 1890s to retreat into the more protective mountains. Always more common on the plains and in the western deserts than anywhere else in the West, coyotes do appear to have begun colonizing westward in the direction of the Sierras and the Pacific in the 1890s. Likely they were pulled there by possibilities around mining activities and pushed there by persecution on the Great Plains.

  Since federal administrators of the new federal land preserves, like Forest Service chief Gifford Pinchot, knew they needed the support of locals in the West, and scarcely any of them felt sympathy for predators anyway, the federal agencies responded to Tisdale’s arguments. The Forest Service, in charge of the National Forests, thus became the first government agency to kill predators on behalf of ranching interests. Eventually even rangers working for the new Park Service would join the predator war with gusto. Later both the famous Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal era and the Grazing Service, the latter created to manage the remainder of the public domain once the Dust Bowl ended homesteading on federal lands in 1934, would make sure that some of the money for conservation and public-lands grazing fees actually went to predator extermination.

  But the Biological Survey, an apparently benign federal department designed to continue the natural history work in America that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had begun, became the federal agency whose very reason for being was predator control. Renowned American scientist C. Hart Merriam planted the seed for today’s US Fish and Wildlife Service—and its predator-control stepsister, now known as the Division of Wildlife Services—in 1886 in the form of a federal agency known as the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy. Merriam renamed it the Division of Biological Survey ten years later.

  In the first decade of the twentieth century, Merriam’s son-in-law, a scientist named Vernon Bailey who struck many on first meeting as a kindly soul, directed the Biological Survey’s ongoing, nationwide cataloguing of the fauna of America. That was the survey’s official mission statement up until 1905. Bailey was hardly a St. Francis though—indeed, he would have shot the wolf at St. Francis’s side as fast as he could draw on it—and he set the agency on a mission quite different from the one his father-in-law had imagined for it.

  Somewhat like today’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Biological Survey, due to its original pure science tack, endlessly found itself scraping for funds (and survival) when Congress passed appropriations bills. By the early century the Biological Survey realized it needed a mission statement that would make it seem a critical, if not downright indispensable, government player. The search for that economic mission kept leading the bureau back to the Forest Service, its National Forest System, and the public image problem it had with western stockmen who protested that the national forests were nothing more than a series of woodsy hangouts for the predators that decimated livestock. To Bailey this seemed an opening, so in 1907 he authored a pamphlet titled Wolves in Relation to Stock, Game, and the National Forest Reserves, wherein he argued, among other things, that the national forests were serving as predator refuges, and his agency could well be the solution. While he was at it, he expressed the sentiment that although wolves were certainly a menace to sheep and cattle, other, equally worthy targets were holing up in the national forests. He continued, “Wolves kill far less game in the western United States than either coyotes or mountain lions.”

  Embroiled then in a case that would go to the Supreme Court related to efforts to levy fees for grazing in the national forests, Forest Service chief Gifford Pinchot was in a conciliatory mood toward ranchers. He turned to Bailey to clear the national forests of predators. By their account, Bailey’s bureau men proceeded to enjoy an outstanding success in locating predator dens, killing pups, and trapping and poisoning the adults. According to the bureau’s next circular, Destruction of Wolves and Coyotes: Results Obtained During 1907, his men had dispatched 2,000 wolves and 23,000 coyotes in just a single year. With that outcome, Bailey initiated what would become a long-running campaign against the bounty system, which he argued was an unworkable private and state effort to deal with a problem that really required federal professionals. By the end of 1907, a government bureau that until then had seemed an innocent troop of deer counters was positioning itself as the solution to the “problem of predators.”

  The Biological Survey needed a clear, pragmatic justification for its existence, and the notion that public lands were harboring and breeding a menace to private enterprise provided its main chance. The Progressive Era—the years from 1901 through 1916, during the administrations of Republicans Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft and Democrat Woodrow Wilson—represented the real beginning of growth and reach in the US federal government. As with many other projects of this initial age of social engineering, many Americans believed that a large-scale effort like exterminating predators was simply too big a task for individual ranchers. Indeed, most westerners were coming to the conclusion that it was too big even for livestock association or state bounty programs. Coyotes, in particular, for some reason seemed impossible even to thin out. Getting rid of predators called for federal men, experts who understood animals—and who were preparing themselves by training in the techniques of mass killing.

  The first congressional “eradication appropriation” finally went to the bureau in 1914: it awarded $125,000 for use “on the National Forests and the public domain in destroying wolves, coyotes, and other animals injurious to agriculture and animal husbandry.” Final
ly armed with the budget and mission it had been seeking for nearly a decade, the bureau hired three hundred hunters around the West to engage in a brand-new, federally mandated war against wild things. Within two years it also asked Congress—and western senators and representatives made sure Congress agreed—to allow the bureau to accept additional private funding from stockmen’s associations, as well as money from state legislatures.

  At last the Biological Survey had found an argument for its existence that not only brought money rolling in from a variety of sources but seemed to make sense to everyone. That included middle-class Americans of the age, who had internalized Alfred Lord Tennyson’s flawed but potent redaction of evolution. “Nature, red in tooth and claw” convicted predators of all manner of crimes and cruelties. Even the Audubon Society endorsed the Biological Survey’s antipredator campaign.

  There was one other new ally. Public relations experts within the bureau began to mount a campaign to spread the idea to sport hunters that its project of destroying predators, which state after state was now classifying as unprotected “varmints” or “nongame,” would have the added benefit of creating bumper populations of “game” animals for hunters to shoot. The idea was that in this brave new world that American wildlife experts were engineering, sport hunters would replace predators in harvesting creatures like deer and elk. It was an absolute stroke of genius. Trappers who had long made money on the pelts of coyotes and wolves didn’t welcome the federal competition, but the bureau’s argument brought all manner of sportsmen’s groups, firearms manufacturers, and state game and fish agencies to the cause.