Re: Why shoot coyotes?
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Ankeny</div><div class="ubbcode-body">I wanted to stay out of the coyote vs. mature deer debate, but FWIW I don't feel a pair of our runty Wyoming coyotes pose much of a threat to a mature, healthy, branch antlered deer. On the flip side, they raise hell with about every mammal that draws breath if it is young, crippled...etc. </div></div>
Deer are deer, and their paranoid ungulate herbivore instict tells them, nearly universally, that everything else out there on the entire planet that is not a squirrel, rabbit, or turkey, is trying to eat them. That is why, unless opposed by a perceived equivilent member of their own species during rut, they are far more prone to flight than they are to fight.
A coyote dries up and blows away in the wind if they do not make a serious habit out of killing something to eat. They will do this however they can, and have adapted quite well to the cards they've been dealt. Killing small things solo is easy for the coyote, killing big things requires them to do what most canine carnivores are prone to do...hunt in a pack.
Some of the misinterpretation of the coyote that relates to them taking down a full grown healty deer probably stems from the difference between the western coyote and the eastern coyote. Although the "same" animal, the two are very different in the way they hunt. Both take targets of opportunity wherever they are found, and probably spend a good share of their time eating the small game that a solo dog or a pair can find just about anywhere. Cornell University, though, in upstate NY, has done a study on the Eastern Coyote and found that they do contain DNA from the Eastern Red Wolf. The Red Wolf at one time habitated the east coast from South Carolina to Canada. The encroachment of the Western Coyote, for what ever the reasoning of Mother Nature; probably simply a factor of population and food competition; has long ago pushed the Red Wolf north and into Quebec, if I understood the research correctly, with the coyote taking over it's place.
The cross breeding however, that has occured along the way, has implanted some of the Red Wolf's traits into this hybrid coyote. One distinct trait being that they run in hunting packs here in the east, just like any other wolf does...where in the western wide open spaces that's not the usual scenario with the typical western coyote. All the video of western preditor hunting that I've ever seen shows a solo dog, or a pair, or maybe once in a great while three or four approaching the call. Here in the east, you will see the same thing most of the time but when they've made a large kill it's not just two or three you are hearing in the middle of the night....it's a damn pile of 'em.
A number of years back, on one particularly sub zero night, in another state far north of where I'm at now, I was driving down a frozen snow covered dirt road going home late after visiting with some friends of the chick I was seeing at the time. They lived way out in the woods on this dirt road, a long way from "town". As I drove out of the wooded area they lived in and towards a stretch with cornfield on both sides, my headlights swung around a curve in the road. The road was full of coyotes there at the far reach of the high beams. I don't know how many had already crossed before we got there but as I stopped and watched, a total of 13 more crossed in front of us. I went up and looked at the tracks and I'd bet the last dollar in my wallet that there were 13+ that crossed that road that night.
That's a pack.........
Here, in the east, to take down a large animal, it's a simple matter of running that large paranoid ungulate herbivore nearly to death; and to a point of fatigue where it simply cannot run any more or even try to defend itself. The only difference being that running a smaller, weaker or less healthy animal, to fatigue, takes less time than it does with a larger healthier animal...the end result is still the same, a dead animal to feed on. I seriously doubt though that every attempt by the eastern coyote to kill large healthy deer is successful. If it were, here in VA, with the explosion of the coyote population, we wouldn't also be having an explosion of the deer population.
The human animal is likely the most comical in this sort debate, because the majority of us just don't spend enough time in the woods to really understand what takes place there. Some of us hunt only a few days a year and firmly believe that everything we see during that period of time in the woods is ONLY what happens in the woods, and there can't possibly be anything else........then there are those who understand that the time frame from sun down to sun up is a very long time and that a LOT of stuff happens while we are tucked in our warm beds oblivious to what's taking place in Nature, and in real time.
