Coyote America

by Dan Flores

  Nor could Murie tell his bureau superiors that coyotes were major predators of mule deer, mountain sheep, or antelope. From the coyote’s point of view, everything it ate was beneficial, of course. But Murie’s analysis indicated that, all things considered, 70.3 percent of a coyote’s food sources produced a net benefit for humans as well. Another 18 percent of the junior wolf’s wide-ranging diet had a neutral effect on human endeavors. So much for Goldman’s “archpredator of our time.”

  Adolph’s Yellowstone work was far more sophisticated, but it yielded similar conclusions unwelcome by government bureaus that had dedicated themselves to wiping out a coyote “scourge.” The two years of fieldwork that went into Ecology of the Coyote in the Yellowstone took place in a distinctive context. Twenty years after Joseph Grinnell had proposed the idea in Science, predators now had refuges—even from PARC hunters—in America’s national parks. As the Journal of Mammalogy had announced, “Predatory animals are to be considered an integral part of the wild life protected within national parks, and no widespread campaigns of destruction are to be countenanced.” But many were the dire predictions of doom that produced. Retired Park Service director Horace Albright had done all he could to squash any sympathy for coyotes. In fact, sentiment in favor of restoring coyote control in the parks had gotten Murie’s work in Yellowstone approved in the first place. His superiors had thought his study would result in a return to poisoning and trapping.

  Biologist Adolph Murie’s breakthrough study exonerating coyotes as stock-and-game predators appeared soon after Congress authorized a program to exterminate them. Courtesy Dan Flores.

  So Adolph Murie knew he had a keenly interested and suspicious audience no matter what he found. Like a twenty-first-century climate scientist, he knew he was conducting critical research in a highly politicized atmosphere. He responded in much the same way as today’s climatologists. He was exceedingly careful.

  Murie began not in the field but in the Yellowstone archives, trying to develop an understanding of the history of coyotes on the Yellowstone Plateau. Aldo Leopold said in 1936 that he had found no coyotes in the mountains in Mexico, and there was a general sense all along the Rockies that coyotes had arrived recently in the high country. So, were coyotes in the mountains originally? The historical record seemed clear that coyotes had always been more numerous on the Great Plains, but Murie found ample indications of them high in the Yellowstone country too, at least as far back as the writings of trapper Osborne Russell in the 1830s. Indeed, contrary to Major Goldman’s insistence that the arrival of white Americans had destroyed the balance of nature, Murie concluded from his research that the coyote’s relationship “to the rest of the fauna is today similar to what it was formerly.”

  Murie also discovered that as early as the 1890s, tourists in the park had become interested in and favorably disposed toward the coyotes they saw. But as he wrote in his foreword, park superintendents had always insisted that Yellowstone was supposed to showcase game animals and that controlling coyotes was essential to preserve deer, antelope, and bighorn sheep for those same tourists. That opinion had continued even after control efforts ended in 1935, accompanied by dire warnings that in the absence of human control, the coyote population would certainly skyrocket with disastrous results. Yet, Murie found that four years after the park had ended coyote control, the coyote population in Yellowstone remained at about the 1935 level. Contrary to predictions, there simply had been no explosion of coyotes.

  Since the park’s resident coyotes had not swelled in numbers, it followed that they had also not spilled across park boundaries to wreak havoc outside the park, as so many had warned. In the adjacent Absaroka National Forest, rangers had estimated the coyote population in 1935 at nine hundred animals. After coyote control ended in Yellowstone, the national forest population actually fell, to 781 animals. So much for yet another hand-wringing prediction. Why, in any case, would an animal as smart as a coyote want to leave protection and plentiful food in a national park for the dangers of trappers and poison bait outside its boundaries? As Murie argued, the vast majority of coyotes born in Yellowstone would very likely die right there.

  In the wake of the Animal Damage Control Act, Murie knew the crux of his investigation was to discover whether coyotes were truly archpredators of valuable game animals. Like his older brother, Olaus, he did this primarily by examining stomach contents and scat, in which his analysis ultimately identified nearly 9,000 food items. And like his brother, Adolph carefully enumerated the mammals, birds, invertebrates, and vegetables these represented. Some of the items that had passed through his coyote subjects definitely fell outside those categories. A piece of window curtain, a strip of rubber, a paint-covered rag, a gunny sack, a piece of towel, part of a shirt, and eight inches of rope made Mark Twain’s Roughing It description from seventy years before sound like a masterpiece prophecy of coyote natural history.

  But—and this, after all, was the whole point of the study—did coyotes prey harmfully on prized game animals? In case after case, Murie had to conclude that the answer was no. Primarily coyotes ate mice and gophers (55 percent of their diet) and carrion from large mammals (in Yellowstone about 17 percent of their diet). Grasshoppers and crickets accounted for nearly 10 percent of what they ate. Otherwise their menu was a wild smorgasbord, including the odd length of rope. Did they prey on elk? No, not even—except in anomalous circumstances—on elk calves. “All available data indicate that the coyote is a minor factor in the status of elk.” What about mule deer, whose very survival, some had argued, depended on vigorous coyote control? In bad winters of crusted snow, coyotes sometimes took the weakest fawns, running them down slopes and catching them at the bottom. Otherwise, “there was no evidence that the coyotes molested any deer except fawns.” Antelope, those beautiful, striped survivors from ancient America? Coyotes had been thought a threat to their very existence by people who blamed every antelope death on coyotes. Murie found some fawn predation but not at any problematic level and concluded, “The coyote is not at the present time adversely affecting the antelope.” Bighorn sheep? “Coyote predation is at most an unimportant mortality factor.”

  Adolph Murie no doubt went to press in 1940 with the kind of expectations that wary climate scientists anticipate in our own time. For nearly a decade a powerful government agency, seconded by the Park Service he worked for, had moved heaven and earth for the extinction of coyotes in part because they were supposedly “archpredators” of valuable game animals. Now, in the first comprehensive study of the matter, a government-employed scientist said flatly, without any equivocation, “The facts show that in the case of elk [coyote predation] is negligible, and that no appreciable inroads on the populations of deer, antelope, and bighorn are taking place.”

  The Murie brothers did many other things across their illustrious careers, but neither ever lost a fascination with coyotes. Through the 1930s and 1940s Olaus continued to assemble data on coyote diets in places like Montana and British Columbia. He illustrated articles for J. Frank Dobie while Dobie was working on his folkloric book The Voice of the Coyote, and he collected newspaper articles on anticoyote sentiment among stockmen and hunters. He and brother Adolph even raised a female coyote pup as a pet.

  While still working for the bureau, Olaus Murie went so far as to evaluate “the factions interested in [the] coyote question” for his superiors. He concluded that there was an emerging group he called the “Nature Lovers,” and to the evident disgust of his superiors he argued that this group might actually represent the future and a state of enlightenment with respect to predators. “I firmly believe that it is working against the best interests of humanity to… ridicule those who see beauty in a coyote’s howl.”

  Eventually Murie came to think that he and other scientists of the period had misunderstood their own motivations during the 1930s. Before a public they knew the bureau had brainwashed into hating predators, the scientists had opposed poisoning because of collateral dama
ge, because of all the innocent animals that ended up dying along with coyotes in the bureau’s war of extermination. But in a famous letter he would write in 1952, Murie asserted that, in truth, “concern for the coyote itself” had turned so many scientists against the bureau and its coyote policy.

  Concern for the coyote itself. Murie knew that once, in his Yellowstone research, his brother had stood rapt, watching a coyote trot along a trail with a sprig of sagebrush in its mouth. At repeated intervals it had tossed the sprig joyously into the air, caught it, then trotted on. Why had so many in the bureau, without any science to back them up, so hated an animal that took that kind of pleasure in being alive in the world? Why had they encouraged hatred for coyotes among the public? It was not an attitude or a culture Olaus cared to be associated with. He ended up leaving the bureau for the Wilderness Society.

  The several score American mammalogists who were by now heavily invested in the coyote question felt vindicated by the fieldwork of the Murie brothers, but they knew that exonerating coyotes as major predators of game animals was only part of the task. With wolves all but gone in the Lower 48 and mountain lions rapidly dwindling, hunters would never have to be arm-wrestled into believing coyotes were rivals to filling their elk and deer tags. They would ignore the Murie brothers’ research. It was the livestock industry, especially sheepmen but even some cattlemen, that kept the pressure on Congress and the bureau’s PARC hunters to continue the coyote campaign. And as they had long done, stockmen’s associations and state legislatures contributed external money when New Deal contingencies left the bureau a little short of those promised million-dollar-a-year appropriations.

  Some incredulous coyote from hundreds of years before had been the first of its kind to marvel at what a lob across the plate the domestic sheep was. By the 1930s generations of western coyotes had never gotten over marveling, so sheepmen, in particular, were shrill with some justification. The country’s coyote population was likely growing in the 1930s for two reasons: carpet-bombing lethal control, which kept coyotes constantly colonizing and rebuilding their populations, and what ecologists today call “mesopredator release,” which resulted when wolves faded away. The mouflon variety the sheep industry had imported to America descended from a wild sheep hunted in the Old World by the coyote’s distant cousin, the golden jackal. Rendered incapable of resisting shepherds—and therefore predators—through 8,000 years of domestication, sheep in that helpless condition had then been plopped into the heart of coyote habitat in the West. With millions of normal prey—rodents and prairie dogs—vanishing before the bureau’s poisoning onslaught, coyotes in sheep country did exactly what a coyote had evolved to do: they laid into such easy sitting ducks. And with the number of domestic sheep in the United States reaching 56 million during World War II, coyotes must have been drunk with their good fortune.

  But the bureau’s all-out war against coyotes repeatedly disrupted their normal social behavior, and for sheepmen the results were not good. The poisoning of older alpha males and females, gassing and strangling of pups, and harassing and winnowing of coyote social groups resulted in inexperienced beta animals assuming alpha status and breeding. That had the potential to send coyote social life into a loop of fractured, abnormal behavior not unlike what history has recorded for the Indian populations of the Americas in the wake of contact with Europeans. Waves of virgin-soil epidemics caused by Old World pathogens killed millions, among them elders and priests responsible for conveying cultural lore to younger generations. Hard-won knowledge of how to exist in the world vanished overnight.

  Something like that seems to have happened with some coyotes. Young coyotes were surviving without proper cultural training, and with the pressure of raising litters, they attacked livestock, especially marks as easy as sheep. Coyotes may not have been archpredators of the natural world, but domestic sheep were low-hanging fruit. Killing them required little training in the hunt.

  Whether because they are retiring introverts or for some other reason, scientists have never been particularly good at public relations. Judging from the climate debate, they still aren’t. In the 1930s and 1940s, they were getting their hats handed to them by the bureau, which was clearly winning the war for the hearts and minds of the public. In the mid-1930s, newspapers around the country, among them even the Washington Post, ran an illustrated, canned bureau article that, in the age of John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd, offered up coyotes and other predators as the “gangsters of the animal kingdom” and characterized bureau hunters as the heroic G-men who would protect society, “man and beast, against the animal underworld.” It was a clever set piece, and it worked. Despite the Murie brothers’ findings, in the public mind coyotes deserved the same fate as Bonnie and Clyde.

  In 1935 Ira Gabrielson replaced Ding Darling as director of the bureau. Gabrielson (who conservationist Rosalie Edge said could make poisoning a coyote sound like a beautiful experience for poisoner and coyote alike) was still in charge in 1940 when the bureau, transferred from Agriculture to the Department of Interior, became the Fish and Wildlife Service, the name it still carries. PARC made the transition with its name unchanged. Gabrielson would hold his position for eleven years, during a time when rumors of war, then real war on a scale never before seen in human history, absorbed the country’s attention. All the same, the coyote war at home continued, and one of Gabrielson’s field men saw all of this as part of a whole: “I hope I have three celebrations coming—when we whip Hitler and Hirohito and when we kill that damn coyote.”

  So throughout World War II, and partially in response to the huge shot in the arm the war effort gave to widespread technological innovation, the smaller, less heralded campaign against coyotes went on. And on and on. In 1946, the year Gabrielson retired, two events of significance in the effort to exterminate coyotes from North America occurred almost back-to-back. In September, E. A. Goldman, architect of the phrase “archpredator of our time,” passed away from a stroke, dying only a few months after retiring and while serving as president of the American Society of Mammalogists. Then, in a kind of tangible epitaph to Goldman, in December the Fish and Wildlife Service approved the use of sodium fluoroacetate and thallium sulfate against coyotes.

  That final decade for wild coyotes in America, promised by the bureau back in 1931 if only Congress would pass the Animal Damage Control Act, had stretched to fifteen years. And coyotes were still on the scene. More than that, coyotes had reached the Yukon and Alaska and were showing up in one state after another in the Midwest, the South, and the East. Despite a focused and single-minded campaign against them unlike anything in American history, coyotes were still out there, now loping casually along boulevards, glancing back defiantly, for some inexplicable reason impossible to eradicate.

  Hence the two new poisons. Strychnine had killed hundreds of thousands of coyotes in its century of use, but obviously it had fallen short of the task. Coyotes were especially bright and observant, and strychnine acted so quickly that other coyotes in the vicinity of a poisoning victim learned to be wary of the baits and their associated smell. Thallium sulfate had been around since the 1920s, mostly used against rats, but tests on coyotes at Denver’s Wildlife Research Laboratory—another new name for the old Eradication Methods Lab—showed it had real advantages. It not only was odorless but, happily enough, killed coyotes slowly. Rather than producing the thrashing, struck-by-lightning reaction caused by strychnine, the new poison took days to kill. Coyotes that fed on a carcass baited with thallium sulfate went blind. They lost the pads on their feet. Their pelage dropped off in tufts. Naked coyotes poisoned by thallium sulfate were sometimes found huddled together, freezing and blind but not yet dead. But with the relationship between cause and result obscured, coyotes did not become bait-shy.

  The second poison was even more effective. Sodium fluoroacetate occurs naturally in the Australian “poison pea” plant family but was synthesized into a commercial poison during World War II. The poison acquired the
name Compound 1080 because it took the Wildlife Research Lab that many tries to perfect it. It was cheap, easy to handle, and simple to use. Injected into a bait animal like horse—a lethal coyote dose was 1.6 grams per one hundred pounds of horse—it would poison every molecule of flesh. Coyotes feeding on such a bait animal showed no symptoms for up to an hour, again long enough to confuse other coyotes about the cause of death. But there was no surviving 1080. Within an hour or two, a poisoned coyote would be seized by grotesque convulsions. It would utter piteous howls and bizarre vocalizations. Then it would run uncontrollably until it dropped.

  The World War II era had produced an explosion of knowledge about chemicals and poisons, and along with these two, the Denver lab promoted yet a third, administered by a device the Fish and Wildlife Service, to its eternal discredit, called the “humane coyote-getter.” Originally the device was a brass .38-caliber casing inserted into the earth and capped by the kind of scented cloths that Adolph Murie had found in the stomachs of coyotes in Yellowstone. If unable to resist these cloth offerings, which were suddenly springing up like mushrooms, the coyote ingested a tablet that exploded into a sodium cyanide mist in its mouth. What was “humane” about this? Cyanide didn’t cause blindness or hair or pad loss. It left pretty corpses.