Coyote America: The Evolution of Human-Animal Relationships

"Persecuting an animal in a war you can’t win is an ideological act, not a decision based on science or understanding"

Dan Flores' new book Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History is a wonderful read. It's chock full of detailed information and stories about this most adaptable mammal, but it's really much more. For example, there is a lot of food for thought for conservation psychologists and anthrozoologists who study human-animal relationships, because coyotes are often involved in conflicts with humans because these amazing nonhuman animals (animals) can live just about anywhere, including in and around various human communities. I've studied coyotes for decades and work closely with Project Coyote, and I'm often astonished at how much I learn when new studies appear in the literature. Simply put, coyotes are fascinating beings who have figured out how to thrive in an increasingly human dominated world. As such, they are persecuted and killed by the tens of thousands each year, but they continue to bounce back in epic fashion.

The book's description about this most amazing survivor—in many ways misunderstood victims of their own success—reads:

With its uncanny night howls, unrivaled ingenuity, and amazing resilience, the coyote is the stuff of legends. In Indian folktales it often appears as a deceptive trickster or a sly genius. But legends don’t come close to capturing the incredible survival story of the coyote. As soon as Americans—especially white Americans—began ranching and herding in the West, they began working to destroy the coyote. Despite campaigns of annihilation employing poisons, gases, helicopters, and engineered epidemics, coyotes didn’t just survive, they thrived, expanding across the continent from Anchorage, Alaska, to New York’s Central Park. In the war between humans and coyotes, coyotes have won hands-down.

Coyote America is both an environmental and a deep natural history of the coyote. It traces both the five-million-year-long biological story of an animal that has become the “wolf” in our backyards, as well as its cultural evolution from a preeminent spot in Native American religions to the hapless foil of the Road Runner. A deeply American tale, the story of the coyote in the American West and beyond is a sort of Manifest Destiny in reverse, with a pioneering hero whose career holds up an uncanny mirror to the successes and failures of American expansionism.

An illuminating biography of this extraordinary animal, Coyote America isn’t just the story of an animal’s survival—it is one of the great epics of our time.

I was able to interview Dr. Flores about his new book and am pleased to share this discussion with you.

Why did you write Coyote America?

A fresh take on coyotes in a readable book aimed at a general audience seemed, to me, something we (and coyotes) have needed ever since wolves acquired environmental star power. While we were struggling to re-introduce gray and red wolves to their former ranges, coyotes were almost nonchalantly spreading across the continent and trotting down the streets of our biggest cities. I’ve been attracted to them for a host of reasons—their North American origins, their unusual intelligence, their resistance to domestication, the way they have served as our avatar stand-ins so frequently, and the way they hold a Darwinian mirror up to us—but I think it’s their success as a species that most made me want to write about them. That’s an unusual mammal story in the Anthropocene.

How did you become so fascinated by coyotes?

I’ve probably been preparing to write this book since I was 12 years old, which was when I saw a Walt Disney film—the first of several pro-coyote films Disney did in the 1960s and 1970s—called “The Coyote’s Lament.” As I write in Coyote America, I was probably a charter member of the first generation of Americans to have their environmental aesthetic shaped by nature programming on television. My problem seemed to be that growing up in Louisiana I was in a coyote-less landscape. I was utterly shocked a couple of years later when I took a dying rabbit call I’d bought into my local woods and, rather than the gray fox I was hoping to see, I got treated to the sight of a large, orange-eyed canid trotting very purposefully towards the tree I was sitting in. What I discovered at 14 years old was that coyotes were colonizing Louisiana and even hybridizing with red wolves in the Midsouth. It was like rounding a corner in the French Quarter, encountering a moose, and discovering that exotic creatures from faraway places were moving into your world. It seemed to me even at a young age that Coyote Manifest Destiny was a very cool thing to have happening around me.

What are your major messages?

Well, to be honest, I’m trying to re-arrange the furniture in people’s heads about coyotes. I want them to understand that we have another wolf in America, a small version that’s native to this continent and that has a biography that outdoes that of just about any animal they’ve ever heard about, a biography that in fact is about as compelling as our own. For people living in cities and in the South and Northeast, where coyotes are fairly recent arrivals, I want to ease their fears about an animal they’re probably unfamiliar with. Coyotes have been living in close proximity to people for at least a thousand years and they know how to do it well. We’re the ones who need a bit of experience with co-existence with coyotes, but once we understand them and learn how to co-exist, there are many benefits and pleasures from having creatures as wild as interesting as coyotes in your world. Finally, I’m hoping readers take away with them the futility and wrong-headedness of persecuting these animals the way we have for the past 125 years. Persecuting an animal in a war you can’t win is an ideological act, not a decision based on science or understanding.

What are your views on "predator control" by Wildlife Services?

"I drew no conclusion that Wildlife Services is looking hard for any new solution, and until taxpayers and politicians and activists force their hand, they’re going to be quite content to kill 80,000 coyotes a year from now on out."

Unlike the U.S. Forest Service, the Park Service, or even the Bureau of Land Management, today’s Wildlife Services is a federal agency with a single constituency, in its case the agricultural sector, and in the case of coyotes specifically, the sheep industry. In my interviews with Wildlife Services scientists for the book I came away thinking this is a primary reason they seem so tone-deaf to the criticism and outrage their staggering kill rates produce in the environmental community. Under different names Wildlife Services has also been around for more than a century, so there’s a dogged sense of inertia. I did emerge from my interviews at their Predator Research Facility believing that, in the case of coyotes, they know full well their poisons and traps and aerial gunning will never reduce coyote populations anywhere. And no one in his right mind believes that taking out problem animals will ever act as a deterrent to individual coyotes getting in trouble. But Wildlife Services’ “cooperators” expect them to do something, and killing is what seems to satisfy both the industry and the agency. I drew no conclusion that Wildlife Services is looking hard for any new solution, and until taxpayers and politicians and activists force their hand, they’re going to be quite content to kill 80,000 coyotes a year from now on out.

Do you think we'll ever get to a point where true coexistence is the rule, rather than the exception?

I think the trajectory of history is pretty clear at this point: the more we know about these animals the more we’ll appreciate and enjoy them, and as that happens more towns and communities and cities are going to learn how to co-exist with them. We have to make sure the coyotes remain a little wary of us, of course, or at least think we’re a bit too weird to trust fully, but the coyotes themselves already have the co-existence thing down pretty well. We’re the part of the equation that needs to work on things. Taking the long view, ultimately I’m buoyed by the knowledge that we humans co-existed very well with coyotes for some 15,000 years. It’s only been across the past 125-150 years that the relationship really went south. But the human/coyote interaction has been on a steady upward arc since about 1970.

What's your next project?

Actually the next project is already out. My book American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains, was published at almost the same time as Coyote America. It describes how, a little more than a century ago, we Americans destroyed one of the grand wildlife spectacles in the world—the single largest slaughter of wild animals discoverable in modern history, in fact—but also how we might re-create a 21st century Great Plains wildlife park of bison, gray wolves, wild horses, grizzlies, elk, bighorn sheep, and pronghorns, to my mind the most exciting conservation project in the West today. As for a project beyond these two, I’m not sure yet. Books are an awful lot of work so I’m waiting to see how these two fare. If there is another—and there probably will be—I suspect I’ll next turn to the wolf story in America.

Is there anything else you'd like to tell your audience?

I’m an advocate of the Marc Bekoff philosophy. We’re fellow travelers out of the same evolutionary stream as the animals inhabiting the world around us. If we look for it we will find something connate in them, important things that have to do with enjoying being alive and of this planet.

Human-animal interactions in the rage of humanity

Thank you Dan. I truly appreciate your taking the time to answer these questions.

I really enjoyed Coyote America and I hope it will receive a broad and global audience because it touches on numerous topics that are essential to consider in the age—or rage—of humanity, a time when human-animal interactions are strained to the max. Coming to understand coyote-human interactions is an excellent way to come to understand much of what's happening in today's human-dominated world in which nonhuman interests are far too frequently trumped by invasive humans.

Marc Bekoff's latest books are Jasper's Story: Saving Moon Bears (with Jill Robinson), Ignoring Nature No More: The Case for Compassionate Conservation, Why Dogs Hump and Bees Get Depressed: The Fascinating Science of Animal Intelligence, Emotions, Friendship, and Conservation, Rewilding Our Hearts: Building Pathways of Compassion and Coexistence, and The Jane Effect: Celebrating Jane Goodall (edited with Dale Peterson). The Animals' Agenda: Compassion and Coexistence in the Human Age (with Jessica Pierce) will be published in early 2017. (Homepage: marcbekoff.com; @MarcBekoff)