How is there conservation in extermination?

By Rob Bender
Posted Apr 2, 2019

As I exited my car with my retriever early one brisk October morning, I was struck by a wild series of howls coming from the bog where we were heading for our walk. I had never heard such a sound on Cape Cod, but certainly in movies - Westerns, usually. The howls were chilling, but at the same time plaintive, lonely somehow, calling out something inchoate in myself. They began with a bark, then howl, then silence, then bark and howl again. I had to see the source of this.

I leashed my dog and hurried with him into the bog, and there, across a field of red cranberries, was a beautiful silver-and-buff-colored coyote, right out in the open, proudly proclaiming into the dawn his right to be there. I inched closer with my dog, cursing my forgotten binoculars. The coyote didn’t move, just kept singing to the sky. We crossed over to his side of the bog, but kept our distance. Eventually, he drifted back into the woods. We began walking the path, and just as we passed closer to his vanishing place, the coyote emerged behind us, stood watching us for a moment, then trotted warily in our tracks. We stopped, turned and scrutinized him. He did the same with us, eventually stretching out in a sunlit swath of green maybe a hundred yards away.

Initially my dog pulled at the leash to join him, but settled after a few sit commands from me. There they were, two canines locked in eye contact, sharing a moment of absolute connection. After several minutes, the coyote got up, yawned, stretched and returned to the woods.

The science of awe, they call it, when, to quote Sierra Club, “people encounter a vast and unexpected stimulus, something that makes them feel small and forces them to revise their mental models of what’s possible in the world.” On Cape Cod there are many, many moments of natural appreciation, but none quite so unique, perhaps, as the silent, tranquil enjoyment of a moment of curiosity between species. I felt no fear, though I took precautions with my dog. What I felt was a sudden rush of thankfulness - for this moment, for the wind on my cheeks and the sun on my face, for the gift of this place, where the machineries of capitalism are muted because tourism demands nature.

I returned the next morning and there he was again, singing his heart out. And again the next morning. A week later, the singing stopped. A few days after that I found a flayed coyote carcass grotesquely displayed on a grassy mound at the entrance to the bog. I had no doubt it was my coyote, and that whoever killed him was pathetically proud of it. A few weeks later, I learned of the new coyote-killing contest on Cape Cod.

Federal and personal annihilation campaigns have been waged against the coyote for centuries in America, employing gases, helicopters, traps, strychnine, etc., often at the behest of ranchers and “sport” hunters. Even now, as I write this, 10,000 coyotes are being slaughtered annually simply to supply the fur for the trim ruff on hooded parkas.

In fact, our history is a sad one of humans killing their way across a continent in the name of progress, from the extermination of indigenous tribes to animals slaughtered to extinction for target practice. The further we drift from our place in the natural world, the more we regard other living creatures as “things” - objects of disdain or greed or fear. We have become the apex predator, a far more implacable killing organism than coyotes or wolves, capable of extreme cruelty just because we choose to be.

It is long past time for all this to stop. Hunters always claim that hunting is conservation. How in the name of the great god is there any conservation to be found in extermination?

https://www.capecodtimes.com/opinion/20190402/how-is-there-conservation-in-extermination?fbclid=IwAR0U2Z3r0hpRHwKa7PrwAYKj1OsCDlmtCz9PVP70OdZPjyTQXu4ZWdAHy08