Researching How to Live With Coyotes | Short Film Showcase
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Into a security guard arm one. No, I was raised in Wyoming, a large commercial sheep operation. We had probably about 4,000 head of sheep that ranged on the public lands in Wyoming. One of my jobs as a kid when I was growing up there was they would bring orphaned lambs home to me on the ranch, and I would bottle-feed them.
This is a more intensive operation; it's more hands-on. When you do a commercial operation, you don't get to handle the lambs like we do here, but each and every one of them we get to handle and work with, and you do become a little bit more attached. They have names. This is Wheezy.
There's significant value in what we do; they’re just not a product, they're their lives, they're living, and I hate to see them hurt. If a coyote comes in and gets a lamb or a kid goat, they're gone. This, Chad, just let you know, they went out this morning and found three lambs that were killed. That happened last night. I know it's just an ignoble everything here, whatever you call it, but that's what happens.
They've got the lambs up there, and the trapper will go up and get them. I don't want coyotes dead; I just don't want coyotes killing my animals. That's as simple as it is. I didn't grow up hating coyotes; I grew up hating the fact that coyotes are killing my sheep. I guess we work to coexist together. I don't want them, and I don't want them killing my sheep; that has to be understandable.
We talked to the herders; we compensate the herders every time they kill a coyote. We don't want them hunting coyotes; they've got to be watching the sheep. But they'll go out, and if they get a coyote, they bring us a tail, and we'll compensate them. The bounty program incentivizes people to go out and hunt coyotes and shoot them.
I've never honestly participated in the bounty program, but I think the bounty program, if it takes more coyotes, then it's helpful to me. Coyotes are extremely smart animals; they know when you're moving in on them. They can sense when their existence is being threatened. You take a shot at a coyote once, and you may never get a second shot.
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They become educated very fast. So, new bounty hunters that come out sometimes do a great job of educating the coyotes; they don't do quite as great a job of killing them. I think a lot of the idea is really removing coyotes from the landscape in the hopes that it will help deer and maybe even have side benefits on livestock and those species too. They're all in the same range.
Whether or not it's helping is something where the jury's still out. If people are thinking that we're going to remove all coyotes from Utah or the West, that's not going to happen. The research is really strong on this one that if you want to reduce coyote populations, you need to remove 70% of the animals from a given area for a few years in a row.
They're incredibly reproductive; they bounce back really quickly. Just sheer numbers, there's so many coyotes that have to be taken to have any impact on the population statewide. It's not so much people have moved into the coyote's habitat; we've created nice places for them to live with food and cover.
Coyotes historically were known to live in the southwest U.S. There's been a lot of changes since those times. The way land use has done things, like agriculture, they do quite well in. You put out that many sheep on the landscape, they'll take advantage of that.
They're very individual in the sense that if there's a certain condition where a coyote could live, there will be a coyote out there. They'll find a way to live in that condition; they'll adapt to urban areas about as well as rural areas. Because of that, they've spread and extended their range from South America up to Alaska, essentially, and all the way from the west coast to the east coast.
They show up in places like Central Park, not again in urban environments. We sort of almost encouraged coyotes to hang with us. We do landscaping, we have irrigation, we have fruit trees, we have open spaces that we've preserved within these sort of oases, and then when we see coyotes, we tend to either dismiss them or actually be excited about it and take a picture with our phone.
Some people actually encourage them to come closer, and so if you think about that difference, the urban coyote has a very different sense of what the presence of human beings means from a rural coyote. How you test that and research that gets very complicated, for sure.
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So, we're inside the predator research facility in a lab where we're keeping some young pups that were born in the wild. The mother of this litter was caught depredating on some sheep and was legally removed from an area where non-lethal tools had been working. After they removed her, they found again because there's evidence that she had pups and was lactating, and so we were able to find the den and get these pups and use them as part of our captive facility.
Now, I got started in coyote research a long time ago; I did my PhD on coyotes. I knew pretty much at a young age I wanted to work with something involving animals and the outdoors, but as a child, I thought that meant being a veterinarian. We do a lot of different things here as a predator research facility. We have about a hundred adult coyotes in captivity that we use to look at different issues to reduce human-wildlife conflict, and we do that through a number of experiments both here with captive animals and then also with wild animals.
When you talk about metro areas, there's a coyote camps one camp that is very adamant they don't belong here. We should shoot them all and get rid of them, and everything will be fine. And there's another camp that's very much; we love the coyotes. We took their habitat; they were here first; we need to just live with them. By the way, we love them. I think the biggest challenge about what we do as researchers and what we do as educators is bringing those two camps together because actually, neither are very correct.
In the 90s, they had a group of people that identified themselves with members of the Animal Liberation Front that came to our facility and tried to release coyotes from their pens. I think they might have used fire as a distraction while they were releasing coyotes.
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It was not very successful for one thing; these coyotes are born and raised here, and so these are their territories. Most of them didn't want to leave their pens, and they're also very territorial animals. So, the ones that did get out and get into somebody else's territory fought, and the facility had to put down a lot of coyotes that were injured from fights within coyotes. So, it ended up being quite a bit of a tragedy for the staff that had to work here through that time.
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Seventeen years ago, I got my first horse and started riding out here in Aurora, Colorado. Through riding on the trails, I met a group of people that were going to construct a trail, so I became their first equestrian.
Well, I've had training in first aid and how to communicate with the public about the nature in Aurora, including the geology, the coyotes, the biology, the sad things I've seen on this trail. Our friend back here, I found him when he had been shot; he was dead already, but it was a fresh kill, and I called the park ranger immediately to let them know that someone had been in the open space with a gun, which was against the law, and had killed one of our coyotes.
When you just can't be shooting guns in the city of Denver, coyotes really do respond to hazing. You make yourself big, and you yell, and you clap your hands at them. You can actually chunk rocks at them—not to go after to hit them—but to scare them enough and let them know they're not welcome in your yard or on your street, and they usually will take off. As the coyotes moved closer to the city and the human population doesn't understand hazing, then the coyotes start thinking of other behaviors.
They start looking for cats; they start looking for dog food bowls. I hate to say this, but we have a lady in our neighborhood that actually has a heated pet bed for a coyote to sleep in on cold days. If they will haze the coyotes and keep them in the urban corridors of streams, then the coyotes will stay down there and eat the rabbits and the bowls and the prairie dogs like they're supposed to, and not Friskies.
We do have people that don't like to have any lethal removals going on or legal tools being used. We also have some people that don't want any normally go through venues. So, I figure as long as there are people unhappy with me on both sides of the issue, then I'm doing a pretty good job at my job because I'm finding that balance where we can use a majority of non-lethal tools and only incorporate those lethal tools when it's the absolute final answer.
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When we send our animals out on the mountain during the summer months, they're there on their own. We stand along with them as guard dogs; they have really helped us tremendously. They work really well on coyotes; they actually work a little more in the nighttime than in the daytime. At night, that's when many of the predators are most active.
The other measure we like is the longer the llamas, of course, can graze right with them. Because they're going to be on the same kind of a diet, it gives us a real opportunity to use those and have them with them one hundred percent of the time. They're there enough of a dominant force that often that'll just end the situation.
But it's not a hundred percent by any stretch. It's no great joy for us to kill an animal, whether it's a predator or whether it's putting down one of our sheep that's been injured or a meat goat that's been torn up from a predator, from a coyote. We find no joy in any of that.
We'd be much happier if we could just go about applying research, improving our wool quality, or whatever the production issue is. We'd be much after doing those things, and we would be controlling predators, but we have to somehow figure out a way to survive, and controlling coyotes is one of those key factors for us this year and for the future.
For urban families, I totally understand rural coyotes and that they can be a problem. I totally understand; I was brought up in the country. But for urban people, they just need to learn and follow the rule. That would be the only thing that I would share—just be mindful of our wildlife; let's embrace them and educate ourselves.
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Here's the secret about wildlife management: wildlife management is really a misnomer; it's about managing people and law. The way these blazing animals are easy, we know the biology and kind of what makes them tick. We know the numbers of coyotes that we have to remove in order to get rid of them.
For instance, we know that we're not going to be able to get there. What wildlife managers have to do is walk that tightrope between the two. The predator paradox is this issue where we want it all. We want healthy deer populations; we want livestock to be on the grass, but we also want nature; we want, you know, predators on the landscape.
And that's a really difficult balance to achieve.
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The fact is predators kill things for a living; that's what they do. Coyotes can be devastating, especially for individuals.
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The challenge is to figure out how we are going to have all these animals, but who's going to bear the cost of it?
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