by Dan Flores
Everyone, from PARC hunters to outside observers, believed the trio of new poisons would finally accomplish what the old bureau had promised back in 1931. World War II had killed millions. Now, at least, the offspring of the science it had engendered promised to erase coyotes from the continent of their origin. No American animal had ever been the target of this kind of viciousness. In 1952 Olaus Murie, writing a review of the old bureau stalwart Stanley Young’s The Clever Coyote for the Wilderness Society’s magazine, adopted the position that the bureau’s hatred had finally won, that species cleansing was already a fait accompli for the coyote. “Many who had formerly taken for granted the presence of Señor Coyote and his song, without much thought,” he wrote, “now miss him, now that he is gone.”
Despite the bureau’s obsessively tabulated official kill of 1,884,897 coyotes from 1915 to 1947, rumors of the coyote’s final song were exaggerated. But how and why? The poison trifecta of the postwar years does seem to have extirpated coyotes, at least locally, in many regions of the country beginning in the late 1940s. By 1957 PARC’s budget from Congress had almost doubled, to $1.76 million. Added revenue from states and livestock associations brought the figure up to an astonishing $4.5 million. From 1945 to 1971 the federal coyote killing program would collect the carcasses of a staggering 3.6 million dead coyotes, although because of the way the new poisons killed, many in PARC believed they destroyed another 3 million coyotes in those years that were never found. And still coyotes persisted, although backed by this kind of money, the new poisons roughhoused them.
One place that experienced a regional near-collapse of coyotes may provide us with an answer about what factors were critical in keeping coyotes from going under when faced with chemical warfare on this scale. The Texas Hill Country, low juniper-covered hills west of Austin and San Antonio devoted to sheep and goats since Spain owned the territory, experienced the most intensive poison and trapping carpet-bombing campaign against wolves and coyotes of any locale in America. One researcher called the relentless forty-year program there “a massive human effort using all the tools and techniques which could be brought to bear.” First wolves, then coyotes practically ceased to exist in the Hill Country. Why? The answer may lie in the land ownership history of Texas, which had entered the Union in the 1800s with so many debts that the government allowed the new state to retain title to its lands to pay them off. This it did by selling off its landscape wholesale. The result was a giant state with no public lands and only one national park (Big Bend), located hundreds of miles from the Hill Country, that could serve as a refuge. Yet the struggle for survival of Texas Hill Country’s wolves and coyotes would become one of the amazing wildlife stories of the 1960s.
So Joseph Grinnell and the scientists had managed a win that helped coyotes after all. That one concession, protection of predators inside the national parks, was certainly key in helping to save coyotes at mid-century. In Yellowstone, Glacier, Rocky Mountain, Zion, Bryce, Canyonlands, and the Grand Canyon, coyotes survived unmolested.
But national parks and scientist saviors alone do not explain the coyote’s persistence. In the next two decades a pair of new studies would demonstrate a fuller truth: all along, coyotes had been saving themselves. Biologist Fred Knowlton would finally untangle the behavior of coyotes under assault, and a computer simulation by biologist Guy Connolly using Knowlton’s insights—Connolly titled the resulting article “The Effects of Control on Coyote Populations”—would produce an almost mind-bending revelation.
With the species under siege from efforts to wipe it out, Knowlton and Connolly had discovered, the coyote’s evolutionary colonizing mechanisms kicked in. With beta females breeding, fission-fusion in high gear, larger litters, and more surviving pups, even reducing the total population of coyotes in a given area by 70 percent—not just once but year after year after year—produced no appreciable effect on coyote population density! Even at a 75 percent annual reduction, it would take half a century to eliminate a population. And once killing stopped, within three to five years in-migration and coyote cues about carrying capacity would return population numbers to where they’d been when 75 percent control began!
Sisyphus kept pushing his rock up the hill, and Coyote kept rolling it right back down again. Short of carpeting the continent with our new nuclear weapons, nothing was going to get rid of coyotes. Were we really willing to continue this level of cruelty in the face of unending failure?
As with coyotes, as with most mammals, as with us. Epigenetics determine who we are; that mysterious interplay between our hardwired genetic selves and the experiences we have, which turn off some genes and dial up the gain on others, shapes the beings we become. The age of ecology looming in front of us in the 1960s was one of those mass epigenetic experiences that would change America. Like so many millions of others, I became someone different then, transformed by my experiences, and I suppose open to transformation. And through what seemed yet another inexplicable turn in the coyote story, the period provided many of us with a new, very twentieth-century experience with the animal—that ambiguous yet endlessly intriguing canine—that stood as such an emblem of wild America.
Those ever-trotting, golden-eyed creatures of vertical red canyons and sere deserts were about to become far more visible in the culture and in our living rooms. I, for one, would be enthralled.
CHAPTER 5
Morning in America
In the spring of 1961, the year the weekly television show Walt Disney Presents (it would evolve into Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color later that year) decided to position itself dead solid in the middle of the growing cultural controversy in America over coyote control, the show’s producers had me squarely in their sights as audience demographic. In 1961, I was twelve years old and an undying disciple of Disney. I never missed an episode. I’d seen his 1942 antihunting film, Bambi, a year or two earlier, and I’d soon enough take in Lady and the Tramp at a local theater and nurse a grudge against dog pounds and dogcatchers from then on. So at an impressionable age, in a decade on the precipice of the age of ecology and the beginnings of the environmental movement, I was all in when revered Uncle Walt stepped into the nation’s coyote debate with his hour-long animated film The Coyote’s Lament.
Disney himself, amiable as always, introduced his initial film on coyotes (there would be five more), beginning by quoting from Mark Twain’s description of the animal in Roughing It to provide a reference point for what humans thought of the species. But The Coyote’s Lament, he averred, would finally tell “the coyote’s side of the story.” Over the next hour the film introduced millions of young viewers like me to three generations of a family of rustic, country-bumpkin coyotes (replete with rural Southern accents), including a pup who serves as the rapt audience for the accounts the older coyotes share. Those accounts mourn the changes wrought by humans and their dogs “when man came West” and chased off coyotes’ “vittles,” fenced in the prairie, and crowded coyotes out. Their natural food sources diminished, they’d had to turn to domesticated fare like chickens and sheep, incurring man’s wrath. Scenes in The Coyote’s Lament portray the war against coyotes remarkably realistically, with set-piece scenes on guns, bounties, and traps. In this coyotes’ version of American history, man “took our domain.… [W]e were here before you.” Then, their perspective of the conquest of the West told, the pack gathers atop a mesa to howl the film’s recurring theme song, “You Made Our Lives a Misery,” one line of which goes (I no doubt gritted my teeth in sympathy), “We don’t want to be your durn pet!”
“We coyotes do lots of good,” one of Disney’s coyotes tells his television audience, before channeling the essence of the new scientific consensus about coyotes: “We’re what’s known as the balance of nature.” At the end of The Coyote’s Lament, the coyotes’ final message to the audience, delivered during a period when federal poisoners, bounty hunters, and state trappers were killing between 250,000 and 300,000 coyotes a year in the United States,
is simply this: “When the time comes when you can’t hear the song of the coyote, the West is going to seem a mighty dull place.”
By the time the credits rolled, I and millions like me were avowed coyote aficionados, the first generation in American history to have its sensibilities shaped by nature programming on television.
It’s a bumper sticker cliché to think of the 1950s as a simpler time, the “morning in America” that Ronald Reagan would invoke three decades later, but no decade in America’s past has ever been simple. Compared to the ear-splitting thunderclap of the revolutionary 1960s that loomed ahead, the 1950s almost seemed like a collective inhalation. For more than a decade 200 million people seemed to be holding their breath in anticipation. Perhaps the largest generation gap in American life occurred between those who came of age in the 1950s and those whose worldviews were shaped by the 1960s. I have two older siblings who both were teenagers in the 1950s. The cultural rift between them and our parents, themselves children of the 1920s, was far narrower than the grand gulf of viewpoints that separated my siblings and me. The 1960s did that to many millions of Americans.
Scientists of the 1950s and 1960s, especially specialists in ecological relationships like predation and, most particularly, those interested in the effects their evolving fields had on public policy, already possessed a nuanced idea about America’s native wild canids. They had a new appreciation of the role of predators in the natural world that had been growing in sophistication over the previous three decades. But for ordinary citizens, who read no scientific papers or journals and only barely knew that coyotes were the special target of a poisoning campaign paid for with their tax dollars, the fate of coyotes wasn’t even a blip on the radar or the TV screen. Westerners certainly knew about coyotes, although often only as a category of creatures classified by state game laws as “nongame varmints”—legally killed by various methods at any time of the year, with none of the restrictions that hunting seasons or bag limits imposed on animals considered “game,” which, of course, is where most wildlife money went. If coyotes registered any recognition at all among southerners and easterners, they did so merely as characters in western literature or films. Hardly anyone, even the scientists, realized at the time that coyotes were slipping quietly through places like Louisiana and upstate New York, year by year trotting toward the Atlantic coast and already experimenting with urban life in cities like Los Angeles, with Denver and Chicago on their radar.
In 1949 the star biologist of the first half of the twentieth century published his most important book, which would spread his fame far beyond the scientific community. Aldo Leopold had been writing both science journal and popular articles for decades. Since he penned his 1917 essay “The Varmint Question” praising “the excellent work” of the Biological Survey, his views about predators had evolved more than any other scientists’. From at least 1940 Leopold had understood that to have an impact beyond their profession, at least a few wildlife scientists would need “to contribute to art and literature.” He may have been thinking about his own 1939 Journal of Forestry essay, “A Biotic View of Land,” as it played a critical role in the thinking that went into his eventual masterpiece. However he came to its ideas, Leopold’s 1949 book, A Sand County Almanac, became both a best seller and a crucial philosophical foundation for the ecology movement that was about to sweep America as part of the countercultural revolution of the 1960s.
Books and film are equally capable of rearranging the furniture in our heads, books perhaps the more so because the experience of reading is so private and provides such opportunity for pause, for deliberate consideration, for mental testing. For those who read and deliberated on it in the 1950s and 1960s, A Sand County Almanac was an absolute game changer. In gorgeous, poetic passages and vividly rendered scenes, Leopold introduced postwar America to the insights of a full career in the ecological sciences. For many his insights constituted near-epiphanies. Leopold was the first scientist willing to promote an ecological philosophy of living. He called it “the Land Ethic,” and it included his “Golden Rule of Ecology”: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Leopold did not say that an act was right when it tended to preserve humanity or economies, the easy position of a self-absorbed species. Instead he called on readers to think of the innate rights—among them the simple right to exist—of other creatures, an idea his followers subsequently called “biocentrism.”
The essay in A Sand County Almanac that ultimately provided the most memorable scene in the book, however, detailed Leopold’s own story of personal conversion and redemption. “Thinking Like a Mountain” was not merely an accessible statement, written for a popular audience, of Leopold’s maturing view of predators. Over the next quarter century it became far more than that. For a generation of readers soon to be immersed in painful soul-searching about so many unexamined assumptions in American life, Leopold’s story of shooting a wolf, watching the “green fire die in its eyes,” and realizing eventually what a miscalculation he had made about predators, their role in the health of the “biotic community,” and even himself, offered a culture-wide catharsis. We were wrong—I was wrong—his story said. But it’s not too late for salvation.
A Sand County Almanac became a national touchstone, carried around in back pockets and backpacks much like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, literary preparation for a shift in the zeitgeist of the age.
On one level, the changes in America that produced the global age of ecology in the 1960s had to do with the maturation of advanced industrial societies after World War II and their ability to produce a modern standard of living that went beyond essential necessities and allowed ordinary citizens to begin to consider quality-of-life values. At the very moment that a different kind of life became possible, Americans also began to confront for the first time in history the self-evident consequences of industrial development without the scantiest regard for the environment. Policies pushing extermination for predators like coyotes and wolves seemed, to many, to spring from the same inattention toward capitalist excess that produced deadly smog in the Northeast and Los Angeles, oil spills off the Pacific and Gulf Coasts, and rivers so polluted with chemical waste that they caught fire. A “subversive science” in a capitalist economy, ecology lent the 1960s its symbolic word power, which morphed into the environmental movement.
Leopold’s book meant that biocentrism and the much persecuted canine predator got snagged by the dragline of the 1960s, caught up in the roiling upheaval of antiwar politics, feminism, civil rights, Earth Day consciousness, and sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Every one of these would produce profound changes in modern life. Leopold’s biocentrism arguably produced the most controversial legislation of the entire environmental revolution. It, too, changed the world.
If, in the 1960s, you thought at all about other species’ innate right to exist, you eventually came to believe that the new synthetic poisons—many of them products of the chemical revolution that natural resource shortages had jump-started during World War II—very likely posed a threat to life of all kinds. The widespread radioactive fallout from US and Soviet nuclear bomb tests during the 1950s had spooked many people around the world anyway. The era gave us science fiction films like Godzilla and Them, where mutated animals were the monstrous result of the products of the new sciences of the age.
Chemical companies advertised poisons like Compound 1080 and DDT, cooked up by chemists prior to and during the war, as game changers in quality of life, better living through chemistry. Not everybody bought it, though. The furor surrounding another blockbuster book, science writer Rachel Carson’s legendary Silent Spring, published in 1962, vividly demonstrated how mid-twentieth-century American attitudes about the natural world, including the fate of the coyote, were beginning to morph into values many 1950s conservatives found almost unrecognizable.
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p; Silent Spring famously employed songbirds as its primary victims and metaphor for a world dramatically changed by the use of the insecticide DDT. But the book’s warning about the profligate and unexamined use of insecticides to curb “undesirables” raised public consciousness about poisons generally. A biologist and successful writer (her earlier book The Sea Around Us won the National Book Award), Carson had actually spent much of her career as an employee of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which had evolved out of the Bureau of Biological Survey. So Carson was close enough to agency divisions like Predatory Animal and Rodent Control (PARC) and Animal Damage Control to have an insider’s sense of what was happening in the world around her.
Carson didn’t invent her subject. She was preceded in her outrage by other American writers. In 1959 outdoor writer Arthur Carhart published a scathing indictment of the federal government’s use of poisons, especially the 1080 it had developed to wipe coyotes off the continent. Carhart’s “Poisons—the Creeping Killer,” appeared in Sports Afield magazine three years before Carson’s Silent Spring saw print. The piece even included passages about DDT, but Carhart focused most prominently on the poisons the government had developed to eradicate coyotes and their tendency to kill all along the food chain. “An area equal to one sixth of all the crop land in this nation is now being treated with deadly new poisons whose total effects are dangerously and shockingly unexplored,” he wrote.
