Coyote America

by Dan Flores

  Most remarkably of all, the administration drew up a new law, the Animal Damage Control Act of 1972, whose purpose was nothing less than a repeal of the 1931 law of that name that had first proposed the radical step of totally eradicating “the archpredator of our time” from the continent where it had evolved. The Nixon administration was proposing to get the federal government entirely out of predator control and turn that mission over to the states.

  The president’s attempt to repeal 1931’s Animal Damage Control Act became a bridge too far for his natural allies in the agricultural and ranching communities. In conservative and rural Republican communities, the shit hit the fan. An outraged Farm Bureau led the charge, insisting that Congress acknowledge Fish and Wildlife statistics indicating that in 1970 in the sixteen western states, predator losses to livestock averaged 6 percent of stock numbers at a cost of $21 million to the industry. It encouraged stockmen’s associations, like those for western wool growers, to bring coyote-killed lambs to public hearings on the bill. Western congressmen, as they long had, became their shock troops in the debate, one testifying that he was sick of hearing about “cruelty to the coyote” because the coyote was “a bad animal, a destructive animal” and the public ought properly to be more concerned about the coyote’s cruelty to its victims. Nixon’s new Animal Damage Control Act passed in the House in 1972 but never came up for a vote in the Senate. It never became law.

  But special-interest fury against the new antipoison, antieradication Animal Damage Control law unexpectedly smoothed the way for the real crown jewel legislation of the Age of Ecology in America. What the US Supreme Court would soon call “the most comprehensive legislation for the preservation of endangered species ever enacted by any nation” was waiting in the wings. The Endangered Species Act of 1973, biocentrism’s ideal translated into legal language, is arguably the farthest-reaching environmental law passed during the entire two decades, spanning 1960 to 1980, of a remarkable body of clean air, water, wilderness, energy, and toxic waste legislation sometimes known as America’s “Environmental New Deal.”

  Despite the uproar surrounding Nixon’s presidential proclamations halting half a century of callous coyote eradication on the country’s public lands, the new act seemed to glide to passage almost unnoticed. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 built on its two predecessors but went much, much farther. It was in truth a watershed in global history, legislating other species’ right to exist for the first time anywhere in the world. Yet, for all its potential, it somehow escaped the notice of its natural opponents, passing in the House by a vote of 390–12 and in the Senate by 92–0!

  Less than a century earlier, the United States had stood unmoved as one charismatic wild species after another had disappeared or almost become extinct under our hand. Except for a few scientists and activists, no one had swallowed hard and looked away uncomfortably when the Animal Damage Control Act of 1931 had targeted the continent’s coyote population for extinction. Now, between July and September 1973, Congress had passed a law that, via an almost backdoor approach, made the erasure of America’s coyotes through deliberate or even inadvertent means illegal and impossible. Of course the Endangered Species Act did not end coyote “control.” Individual coyotes by the millions were still fated to lose their lives in any number of shocking ways, a continuing source of outrage and activism by grassroots environmental groups today. But as a species, coyotes and hundreds of other threatened and endangered animals had earned the basic right to exist in America.

  No one anticipated in 1973 just how much a great many people would hate this law. The Endangered Species Act derived its power from three of its sections, which in turn became the source of the many controversies that would envelop it. Section 4 gave the secretaries of Interior and Commerce the mandate to list species or subspecies as either threatened or endangered based solely on the best science available. In language that shocked conservatives when they got around to reading it, Section 4 outright prohibited the use of economic factors to determine listings. Section 7 compelled federal agencies to halt any development project that might imperil a listed species. And Section 9 prohibited the “taking” of any endangered species, which courts subsequently interpreted to mean not just shooting or harming an animal but degrading an endangered species’ habitat, even on private land. One historian of the act describes Section 9 as “perhaps the most powerful regulatory provision in all of environmental law.”

  At the time of the act’s passage, coyotes, by virtue of their evolutionary biology and intelligence, had never come close to becoming a threatened or endangered species. Despite all the technology, chemistry, and Dr. Evil pathological inventiveness we had thrown at them—and more was to come, for sure—coyotes were the extremely rare American mammal species still beyond our ability to push to the edge of extinction. And even if someone, somewhere, finally came up with a fatal canine disease or another surefire way to erase coyotes from nature, after 1973 the Endangered Species Act made execution of any such plan impossible. But if only theoretically so for coyotes, the Endangered Species Act became America at its best and most noble for wolves, bald eagles, grizzly bears, and black-footed ferrets—and, infamously to some, for snail darters, endangered arachnids, various warblers and flycatchers, prairie chickens, spotted owls, and scores of other species. For the animals themselves, though, for hundreds of species, it really was “morning in America.”

  Long before accounts of coyotes swarming into cities or hybridizing with wolves and dogs in the South and Northeast became the dominant narrative of the coyote story, all the fireworks had exploded, primarily in the West. Despite twenty-first-century coyote high jinks in downtown Chicago or Midtown Manhattan, and despite the passage of the Endangered Species Act and the presidential ban preventing government agencies from inventing ever-more lethal poisons to exterminate them, the war on coyotes in the West actually never slackened. Those waging the campaign had to seek out new killing methods, and because environmentalism itself produced a wide array of new activist organizations that came to the defense of predators like wolves and coyotes, mass killings of coyotes no longer went uncontested by the public. But the war went on and still does.

  In 1972 it was a toss-up as to whether environmentalists, the livestock industry, or employees of the Division of Wildlife Services (PARC had gotten a new name in 1965) were most shocked when Nixon banned the use of poisons for government coyote control. Livestock interests, for their part, reacted to the ban on poisons as if it were a new tax levied on hardworking sheep to fund a food stamp program for homeless coyotes. Maybe the clap-to-the-forehead winners were actually Nixon’s fellow Republicans, who began crawfishing as soon as the American Wool Growers’ Association called for congressional hearings on the poison ban. New president Gerald Ford was willing to pardon Nixon in the aftermath of Watergate, but apparently pardoning coyotes in the aftermath of fifty years of the most outrageous persecution was more than Ford could stomach. In 1975 and 1976 he issued two executive orders that effectively restored the use of cyanide “Humane Coyote-Getter” tubes (by then called M-44s) on American public lands. For the wool growers and the Farm Bureau, that was a nice sanity-is-restored gift, but for reducing the density of the country’s coyote population, the agriculture community really wanted its 1080 superpoison back. Thinking in more nuanced terms, the agriculture community also thought that the business of coyote killing properly belonged in the Department of Agriculture rather than in Interior. It turned out none of those was a wish too far.

  Ford’s “sanity” about coyotes helped win the interior West for him in 1976, but Democrat Jimmy Carter took the rest of the country and the presidency. For the coyotes that meant a reprieve and, in 1977, even a ban on federal field agents killing pups in their dens, an old practice that usually employed fishhook wire and forced smoke or gas—sometimes even dynamite—and seemed especially disturbing to an age of ecology public. But when the GOP regained control of the government with Ronald Reagan’s elect
ion in 1980, the New Right launched a full-on backlash against what it called “the specter of environmentalism.” Indulging a view that environmentalism threatened to replace communism as a primary threat to free-enterprise capitalism, the Reaganites were happy to let the puppies get their just desserts, the disturbed enviro public be damned.

  So in January 1982, Reagan signed an executive order that not only overturned Carter’s ban on killing coyote pups in their dens but reversed Nixon’s landmark poison ban from ten years earlier. Three years later, in 1985, he further rewarded the livestock industry for its support by retaining the Fish and Wildlife Service in Interior but transferring its predator-killing operation to the Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), a bureau for “protecting animal health and animal welfare.” Reagan had granted the full wish list. Since 1976 APHIS’s new predator agency had been called Animal Damage Control, which like Predatory Animal and Rodent Control had the virtue of unmistakable directness. But in 1997, in a move that has provided wince fodder for journalists and environmentalists ever since, Agriculture would return to the name Division of Wildlife Services for its predator-killing agency. Wildlife Services was a harmless-sounding label apparently designed to fool the public. Ah, this is who you called if you needed accent swans or a whitetail doe and fawn for an outdoor garden party. But nothing fundamental was different, and the name change to an innocuous I’m-from-the-government-and-I’m-here-to-help title did not hide from the cognoscenti that Wildlife Services was a frontier subsidy carryover whose primary mission was still killing.

  Environmentalists got outvoted in the Ronald Reagan–George H. W. Bush years, but they were not so easily outmaneuvered. They could now call on the Endangered Species Act of 1973, since coyote poisons blanketing the countryside in the manner of the 1920s to the 1970s would inevitably threaten any number of species on the endangered list. By 1988 the courts had upheld that argument. Reagan’s executive order may have raised shouts of exultation in the ranching community that 1080 was back, but Nixon-era environmental programs ensured that Reagan’s own version of “morning in America” would not include a return to scorched-earth coyote poisoning. Ultimately, M-44 cyanide tubes remained a legal weapon for federal coyote hunters, but in 1985 the EPA approved 1080 only for use in plastic sheep collars that, when punctured, presumably poisoned just the coyote attacking the sheep wearing it.

  Since the courts had now ruled that carpet-bomb poisoning the world with 1080 violated the Endangered Species Act, by the 1990s newly labeled Wildlife Services was at something of a loss for how to carry out its coyote-killing mission. But in truth, it had already invested decades in perfecting a new anticoyote technology anyway. With a little tinkering, an old southwestern story works to explain Wildlife Services’ resolution of its dilemma: how to continue mass-killing coyotes for the ag community without mass poisoning. If the Indians had a coyote problem, according to the story, they’d send out one guy in a pickup. The Hispanos would shrug fatalistically: What can one do about a coyote? But the folks at the federal agency had a different reaction. When God (so the story always goes) looked down and said, “Look at those poor, ignorant Wildlife Services people. I gave them the rifle, the snowfields, and the airplane, and they didn’t have sense enough to put them together,” they looked at one another in wonder, imagined coyotes trying to escape pursuit from above, and bought some airplanes.

  You do not just happen upon Wildlife Services’ Predator Research Facility while out for a Sunday drive. No doubt by design, it is tucked away in the already semiremote Cache Valley in northern Utah, the final destination on a dead-end road a few miles south of the university town of Logan. No officious government signs point tourists toward it. Following the route in from the nearest highway required half a page of detailed instructions. Back in the 1990s, though, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals still found it.

  Julie Young, Predator Research’s current director, and research biologist Eric Gese had agreed to a visit and sent the map, so on a fine, sunny afternoon in November, Sara and I drove over from the other side of the Wasatch Mountains, where Sara is a professor at one of Utah’s universities. Since our Yellowstone trip she had become more and more intrigued by the coyote story, and there was no way she was going to miss this.

  I grasped enough about the facility going in to know it was built in 1973 by coyote specialist Fred Knowlton (still famous for an adage in everyday use at Wildlife Services: “Coyotes will make a liar out of you every time”). That dates the Predator Research Facility to the moment when Nixon banned poisons for use in the coyote war. As the research arm of Wildlife Services, its mission harkens back to some pretty sinister roots—those original Eradication Methods and Control Methods labs of the 1920s are its spiritual antecedents—although it is currently a hub of the National Wildlife Research Center in Fort Collins, Colorado.

  I knew, too, that the facility housed one hundred coyotes that were the subjects of research by biologists and grad students from around the world. Then there were these facts: Wildlife Services quietly spends $140 million of our taxpayer dollars a year not to serve wildlife but primarily to subsidize agribusiness. And its annual kill of all animals has ranged from a shocking 4 million in 1999, down to about 1.5 million a year in the early 2000s, then back up to a staggering 5 million in 2008 and well past 4 million in 2013. For their part, coyotes have never fallen out of Wildlife Service’s crosshairs. From 2006 to 2011 the agency “retired” 512,710 of them.

  Wildlife Services’ Predator Research Facility, successor to earlier federal extermination labs, secreted away in a mountain valley in Utah. Courtesy Dan Flores.

  I also knew that sheep raising, an industry federal predator control has forever existed to serve, has almost dwindled away in America. There were 56 million sheep on US pastures in the 1940s. There are fewer than 6 million now.

  Coyotes are a political topic, and Julie and Eric are not quite sure what to think of our visit, but as good government servants, they are engaging and forthcoming. Fit and outdoorsy, with short dark hair and younger than I would have thought, Julie was born in California but graduated high school in Texas, went to Texas A&M, then on to a PhD as a carnivore specialist at Utah State. Slender, older, grayer—he looks to have spent much time in the field—Eric is an Arizonan who did his graduate work at the University of Wisconsin and worked with wolf guru Dave Mech. Both Julie and Eric have done extensive work on coyotes. They give us an entire afternoon, and I find I like them both. It also doesn’t pass notice that in this facility the animal we are all interested in is a KI-oht. No doubt everyone Julie and Eric work with disdains a three-syllable animal.

  This is an agency with a history that, to put it mildly, hasn’t impressed the American environmental community. The New York Times, the Sacramento Bee, the Washington Post, and the journal of the Conservation Biology Society had all done recent, unflattering stories on it. There were petitions attempting to defund it, and half a dozen environmental groups had, a few months before our visit, joined a lawsuit against it. So naturally I have some questions as we gather around a table to talk, and I start out with what I think will be a softball lob to give them a chance to show their awareness of the criticism out there, that they’re sympathetic.

  “So, Julie, your tools for controlling coyotes now are obviously a lot more limited than they were forty years ago. Has that got your research going more in the direction of nonlethal control?”

  Julie is inclined to a bit of a nervous laugh. “Well, not 100 percent. We’re still working on lethal tools too. We’ve still got M-44s and of course leg-hold traps. And aerial gunning.”

  Aerial gunning, which really took off after Nixon’s poison ban in 1972, dates to the 1940s as a federal antipredator tool. Wildlife Services is in love with it. Since 2001 its hunters have killed roughly 35,000 coyotes a year from planes and helicopters, images of which are never appealing when they make it to the media. I’m trying to find out whether the s
cientists at this Predator Research Facility are coming up with new, workable, nonlethal strategies for a new century. But, surprisingly, Julie deflects the question. She does want me to realize that regardless of the tools, the focus, at least, is narrowing.

  “If we’re looking at something lethal,” she offers, “it’s to decrease nontarget take, to get the problem animal rather than going after the whole population. Actually, a lot of what we do here is basic ecology in order to understand coyotes better, because you can’t create tools if you don’t understand the animal.”

  “Right, but back in the day the newest techniques for going after coyotes were always new poisons or, in the 1970s, aerial gunning, all developed by your predecessors at these research labs.” I exchange a glance with Sara, aware that she knows where I’m going with this. On the drive over we’d talked about another agency, the Forest Service, once cut off from its more progressive constituencies by entrenched good old boys interested only in getting out the timber cut but then changed with the hiring of women and a younger, more environmentally savvy generation. I’m trying to lead us to the nonlethal topic again, hoping to hear that Wildlife Services is finally coming up with strategies that will get it off the hook some with the environmentalist public. “What cutting-edge techniques are you guys coming up with these days?”

  Now Julie and Eric exchange a glance and some laughter. There’s a bigger story here, and it’s clearly Eric’s domain.

  “Well,” he says, “what we’re trying now goes back to the 1980s, when research showed that if you removed the pups from a coyote den, lamb losses went way down. It seemed to us as if provisioning the pups was a motivation for higher kill rates on lambs. When I got here I wanted to take that to the next level. We started with an experiment in the field where we had a vet sterilize half the coyote packs in our study. At the end of three years we found that our sterilized packs were only killing 12 percent of the lambs that packs raising pups were killing. We had some packs that stopped killing lambs altogether. So that’s been our big idea.” He lets that trail off, then laughs to himself about what he’s about to tell us.