← The American West
The American West
Ep. 20: Coyote: America’s Jackal and Its Roller-Coaster Ride Through History
00:53:05
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- [00:00]
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- [01:17]
Randall
What'S available now as a poster Animal of the west, the coyote has a roller coaster biography seen as a sacred deity in one phase and a varmint.
- [01:29]
Dan Flores
Meriting eradication in another.
- [01:31]
Randall
The ultimate outcome is not what anyone would predict.
- [01:35]
Dan Flores
I'm Dan Flores and this is the.
- [01:38]
Randall
American west, brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at velvetbuckvineards.com enjoy respons. Coyote America's Jackal and its Roller coaster ride through History. In the year 1900, the Canadian American nature writer Ernest Thompson Seton wrote one of the more intriguing stories ever penned about coyotes. Since coyotes have been inspiring human storytellers for more than 10,000 years, that's enough faint praise among early American writers. Even Lewis and Clark, who introduced Americans to the animal and named it prairie wolf, were late to the game. Way back in 1651, Spanish author Francisco Hernandez had written concerning the Coyotl, or Indian Fox, a piece that included a curious take about an intelligent animal who didn't forget. The coyote is a persevering revenger of injuries, the Spaniard wrote, but by the same token, and is grateful to those who do well by it. Closer in time to Seton, there was Mark Twain's several pages of coyote description in his best selling book Roughing it the proper pronunciation of the name is coyote, Twain told readers. But he didn't stop. There he is, a long, slim, sick and sorry looking skeleton with a gray wolf skin stretched over it. He has a general slinking expression. All over the coyote is a living, breathing allegory of want. The bar then was high. But Seaton's Tito, the story of the coyote that learned how, wasn't just the lead piece in scribner's in the 1900 August issue. Like many of the Indian coyote stories folklorists were just beginning to collect, Tito took a widely observable truth and offered an explanation for it. That truth was a widespread puzzlement about coyotes. Why weren't these wild dogs doing the proper thing and dying off? At the turn of the 20th century, the United States was waist deep in the largest destruction and die off of wildlife discoverable anywhere in modern world history. 30 million bison were down to fewer than a thousand. 15 million pronghorns were all but gone. We had so devastated elk, bighorn sheep, and grizzly bears that they were surviving only as tiny remnants hiding in the deepest mountains. Five million wild horses were about to end up in Pet France food cans, and by 1920 we would have poisoned to death a million gray wolves. When Seton wrote Tito, the most numerous bird species on Earth, American passenger pigeons, had 14 years of existence left. Yet, as the Scribner's article put it, despite the fierce war that had for a long time been waged against the coyote kine, for some inexplicable reason, coyotes were not following suit. Indeed, the more we shot them, poisoned them, trapped them, ran them with dogs, blew up their dens, the more of them there seemed to be. By way of an explanation, Seton invented the Tito of his story. She is a little female coyote who is captured as a pup and chained in a ranch yard as a curiosity, where she shrewdly observes how her human captors use guns, traps, dogs and poisons against her kin. Ultimately, she escapes, finds a mate, has pups of her own, and then proceeds to teach her pups and their children's children, as Satan phrased it, all the tricks of coyote extermination. Satan's human analog Moses, of course, an Israelite who by growing up among the Egyptians was able to learn their plans, which enabled him to save his people from destruction. Tito is a charming story belonging to a genre the literati among us would call allegory. If you weren't a sheepman or a predator hunter paid by one of the livestock associations, no doubt it was fun to imagine it Might be true, and in any case, it fit well with the kind of Darwinian Animals are our kin stories writers like Seton and Jack London were writing then. But in 1900, coyotes really were becoming more numerous. And not just that. In arid southwestern cities like Los Angeles, the wild song dogs were already attracting attention as urban dwellers. They were also primed for spreading out of the west and over the next 80 years would start showing up in urban jungles as far flung as Denver, Chicago, New York, as well as Seattle, Portland and San Francisco. It turned out the coyote puzzle Seton tried to resolve with Tito was going to require figuring out a hell of a lot more of the coyote biography than we ever knew. Looking Both directions in 1900, what a crazy roller coaster of a biography that.
- [07:59]
Dan Flores
Has turned out to be.
- [08:02]
Randall
When we humans got to North America 23,000 years ago, coyotes greeted us at the front door. The Canadae family. It produced not just dire wolves, gray wolves, jackals and coyotes, but also your pup at home is a five and a half million year old family of American animals. Jackals, gray wolves and others did eventually migrate across the land bridges into the Old World. Gray wolf ancestors in particular colonizing most of the Northern hemisphere before returning to America about 30,000 years ago. Coyotes though, never left and by 800,000 years ago were evolving into their modern form as a medium sized jackal like wolf. If you want to know what it's like to be an American, get to know the Canaan that never left. Coyotes have been yipping and howling the original national anthem across the continent for nearly a million years. When humans wandering out of Africa and across Asia finally made it to North America, they confronted a massive die off, oddly similar to the one Seton would one day invoke in Scribner's magazine. Mammoths, camels, horses, lions, all were disappearing. But a particular survivor of that crash caught the attention of these first Americans. And soon they started thinking of it as an avatar, a stand in for.
- [09:30]
Dan Flores
Humans in the imagination.
- [09:33]
Randall
Coyote with a capital C is not only a native deity from the Paleolithic, thus the oldest American God, the of which we have a record as Old Man America. Coyote was also the chief protagonist in this continent's oldest literature, both hero and fool of stories told around campfires and preserved by Native people for 10 millennia or more. Europeans arrived in America with experiences with bears, foxes and wolves, but no prior experiences of any sort with coyotes. Innocent of any knowledge of Indians ancient familiarity with the animal, even from accounts in Mesoamerica, where the Aztecs had long before named the animals Coyote Americans on the eastern seaboard didn't know of coyotes until Lewis and Clark named them prairie wolves. A line in Moby Dick testifies that when Melville was writing his masterpiece, we were still using that name. But by then, Southwestern travelers like Thomas Nuttall, Frederick Ruxton, Josiah Gregg and Mark Twain were hearing the Hispanicized three syllable version coyote that Western locals used. That led Twain to instruct Americans on how to say the name in his book. In the early 1870s, but not before Mountain man and TR, unwilling to decorate a dog like animal that snuck around their camps with three whole syllables, took coyote back to the Midwest and the South. With no Old World mythology to call on and scant interest in Indian religions or fables about a coyote deity, Americans found coyotes ripe for original interpretation. Beginning in the 1870s and for the rest of the 19th century, a new unflatter impression formed in the American mind. Twain's coyote description in Roughing it was intended as comedy, but laid the foundation for an assessment that grew worse as time went on. Gone now was the Indian deity who had created the world. Gone was even the perplexing prairie wolf of earlier in the century. Now a new repetitive trope emerged. To New York journalist Horace Greeley, the coyote was a sneaking, cowardly little wretch. Ernest Ingersoll's 1887 the Hound of the Plains in Popular Science Monthly and Edwin Sabin's the Coyote in Overland Monthly in 1908 described coyotes as contemptible and especially perverse. Their howls were eerie and blood stealing. Even defiant coyotes lacked higher morals and were cowardly to the last degree, they wrote, exploring ideas for commercial gain from the killing of coyotes. By 1920, an article in no less than Scientific American asserted that while coyotes weren't worth the price of the ammunition to shoot them, every patriotic American ought to kill coyotes on sight, since the coyote, the writer averred, was the original Bolshevik, the original communist. From the perspective of Western stockmen, the impression the coyote gave of being a small wolf seemed all they needed to know. The first environmental act Old World colonists had implemented in America was to launch a war of extermination against wolves. And the coyote's turn had now come. Both stock associations and governments lavishly funded bounties to the point of creating a new economic niche in the West. The bounty hunter. Montana was typical. As a territory, it created the first bounties on Canid predators and in 1883, and proceeded then to prostitute itself to the ranching industry's predator hatred. Between 1883 and 1928, Montana paid bounties on a staggering 111,545 wolves and 886,367 coyotes, a ranching subsidy that grew so large during the territorial stage that it devoured two thirds of the government's budgets. As a state, Montana outdid mere bounties. In 1905, its legislature passed a law requiring veterinarians to introduce sarcoptic mange into the wild canid population, an early form of state sanctioned biological warfare. A century later, coyotes and wolves in the northern west still haven't recovered from that disease. When the forerunner of the U.S. fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. biological Survey, began to cast about for more reliable congressional funding in the early 20th century, Director C. Hart Merriam hit on the idea of making the Bureau the answer to the so called predator problem. Faithful to a fault to their packs, mates and pups, wolves were relatively easy marks for government hunters armed with poison bait. As Ernest Thompson Seton wrote in perhaps the most famous of his wildlife stories, lobo, King of Karumpaugh. With the scent of a dispatched pack member, a hunter could proceed to lure and kill every additional member of a wolf pack. In Montana, 23,575 wolves had died in 1899. By 1920, the number had fallen to 17. So by the mid-20s, the Bureau reset its focus on coyotes, an animal that Bureau Scientist E.A. goldman now labeled the arch predator of our time. Typical of American wildlife decisions of the age, the most vicious war of extermination we ever attempted against a native animal took place entirely absent of any scientific research into how coyotes functioned in ecosystems or indeed in human economies. When government finally did dispatch ecologists with the charge of proving coyote villainy and justifying their eradication, only to have studies by Olas and Adolph Murie determined that in fact, coyotes were ancient curators of ecologies whose actions were overwhelmingly beneficial to humans, the Bureau doubled down on coyote eradication. Its public relations arm even sent canned articles to newspapers that brainwashed whole generations about predators, positioning coyotes in the minds of many as the most contemptible of American animals. Old World folk wisdom had long since said predators had to go. So with little evidence to send its coyotes to eradication, that's what had to happen. First with strychnine, then with newer, more effective poisons like thalium sulfate, sodium fluoroacetate, better known as 1080, and sodium cyanide. Federal hunters between 1915 and 1972 killed an incredible eight and a half million coyotes. In the wake of Rachel Carson's historic anti poisons book, Silent Spring. Though of all the unlikely politicians, it was Richard Nixon who finally ended blanket coyote genocide. The old notion that the only good predator is a dead one is no longer acceptable, he told the American public in 1972. Nixon went on. The widespread use of highly toxic poisons to kill coyotes and other predatory animals and birds is a practice for which has been a source of increasing concern to the American public. I am today issuing an executive order banning the use of poisons for predator control on all public lands. Looking back on this history, it seems clear that persecuting coyotes without any scientific basis was purely and simply an act of myopic ideology. The nations of Western Europe had long before destroyed their own wild predators, and making America into the image of Europe obviously meant we should do the same. That European template was in place prior to Darwin, though, and preceded the emergence of the new 20th century science of ecology to issue a corrective. But Starting in the 1920s, ecologists like Joseph Grinnell, who with his student E. Raymond hall, did foundational work on ecological niches, and eventually Aldo Leopold, who combined first rate science with a literary gift for reaching the public, became opponents of the reflexive war on coyotes. So were the Murie brothers, who did basic foundational science on coyotes in Jackson Hole and Yellowstone in the late 1930s. Since Ernest Thompson Seton had written Tito at the start of the 20th century, policymakers had just assumed that tripling down on the coyote of war eventually would work. According to a story in Sports of Feel, by the late 1950s, we'd thrown $500 million of taxpayer money at coyote killing. No one was prepared for the actual, entirely unexpected outcome. Millions of individual coyotes died, to be sure, but somehow, coyotes not only were undiminished in the west, the war began to spread them out of their original range and into states in the Midwest, south and east, where predator eradication had successfully wiped out wolves. And with towns and cities of every size setting up dog catchers and pounds to eliminate stray town dogs, now new possibilities open for coyotes in cities. Coyotes, after all, have lived in our midst forever. Archaeological work at ancient American cities like Chaco Canyon indicate as much. So do suburbs named for coyotes. In the old Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, naturalist Thomas Nuttall found coyotes running through the streets of Carmel Mission on the central coast of California in the 1830s. Los Angeles has never been without coyotes since its founding. So as coyotes spread across america in the 20th century, they eyed rats, mice, geese and fruit trees. In short, all the opportunities where people weren't trapping or poisoning them or calling Wildlife Service hunters on them and moved in with us. Coyotes in Denver, Chicago and everywhere else, including my parents Little Town of 600 people in Louisiana have been the result. Yet again, we have to learn to coexist because resistance is futile. How have coyotes managed to survive what wolves and scores of other species could not? Tito had been an allegorical answer. Another came from folk tradition in the Southwest, the only thing smarter than a coyote is God. But a pair of biologists, Guy Connolly and Fred Knowlton, finally came up with the answer. As a result of co evolution alongside larger wolves which had long harassed them, coyotes had evolved a remarkable set of survival traits. Under assault, they have larger litters. If coyote numbers go down, more food sources mean they get more pups to adulthood. If the breeding alpha female of a pack dies, beta females breed and have more pups. Most remarkably, coyotes had evolved a rare ability we humans share called fission fusion. Like us, they are normally a social or fusion species, but also like us. When conditions warrant, they can split into floaters and pairs, fission and scatter and colonize. Connolly and Knowlton showed that you could kill 70% of a coyote population year after year without ultimately reducing its numbers. But you very likely did spread them.
- [23:17]
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- [24:31]
Randall
Let me share a personal story. In the 21st century west, something resembling this is so common the experience might not even be mine. Although I'm pretty sure this particular one is. My wife Sarah and I are up early brewing coffee as crimson and gold set off the kitchen of our house in and Technicolor Southwestern hues. An ordinary autumn dawn beautiful enough to break your heart, is unfolding in the Galiseo Valley south of Santa Fe. Then I see Sarah's eyes widen. She's looking past me through the windows, so I track her line of sight. Five coyotes, three of them gangly fall pups looking for all the world like a posse of cruising teenagers, are trotting single file past our kitchen, backlit by the colors of the breaking day. Every hair on their sharp muzzles, upright ears, and floating tails is outlined in chromium yellow light. The alpha pair, a robust male and a gracile female, is bringing up the rear. And as they trot that effortless coyote gait past us, I note two more details right off. The female is familiar. I know her. She's an unusual coyote, recognizable because she sports a white rather than the more normal black tip at the end of her tail. At the same time, I register that two of the yearlings carry that same genetic marker, although in a less pronounced form, their cream tail tips speckled with black. This distinctive female is has raised pups in the canyon below the house for at least the past three years. I've watched her even longer. Second detail the male seems to be a new consort. Has some accident befallen her mate with the split ear, and his reaction makes me laugh. Gliding past the house as if he's on skates, his golden eyes suddenly narrow as he spots our brawny Alaskan malamute coating sleepily lounging on the front porch, never breaking stride but with a quick lip curl and grimace. No time to hang out. The new male bears a row of lovely white teeth. Cody has been around coyotes all his life, and seeing them in the yard isn't all that novel. So he merely sits up and watches as the parade goes by. So do we. It's a wild canid show to match the dawn, and we haven't had to go to Yellowstone or Alaska to see it. Our coffee cups steaming the air, we've just stood in the kitchen and looked outside. In one of the most intriguing wildlife stories of our time, not just Westerners, but everyone in America is now getting to see small Western wolves out the kitchen windows. The coyote has turned out to be the dude, and the dude absolutely abides. Difficult as it is to expel politics from our minds these days, a coyote in the yard can manage it. Whether those golden eyes, that slender snout, or the insolent swish of a tail charm you or outrage you, the sight of a coyote is never boring. Materializing magically into familiar surroundings, we long ago assumed were bled of anything wild. A single coyote can evaporate all illusions of our successful transplant of civilization to the continent. No world that has a jackal like wolf glancing at you as it trots by with houses and highways in the background can ever be said to have banished the wild. I've never had so much fun writing a book as I had writing one. I called Coyote America, and one of the reasons was that its narrative arc inverted everything we're used to in environmental stories. In Coyote America, nature wins. Coyotes have taken everything we humans can throw at them, then calmly occupied the very ground we're standing on. And they've done it repeatedly. Dire wolves, mammoths, and saber toothed cats may not have been able to survive the Pleistocene, but coyotes did. America's scorched earth campaigns against the country's wildlife a century ago drove numerous species to extinction or the edge of it. That was not the coyote's fate, who thrived as other creatures, big and small, disappeared on all sides, Targets of wholesale extermination in the 20th century, coyotes have responded to that by spreading across America, making it today Delaware, their 49th conquest in 2011. Only Hawaii lacks them. No other mammal except humans has ever exhibited such cosmopolitan talents. For that kind of successful expansion, to do the coyote justice, you have to engage not just with the animal itself, and every field from evolution, biology, ecology to anthropology, history and folklore, even literature, art and film has done so, but also with a rich range of us bipedal animals involved. Obviously, Ernest Thompson Seton is there, and so is everyone from Mark Twain to the biological survey coyote killers to Richard Nixon, and to be honest, the psychologist Carl Jung, the poet Gary Snyder, the painter Harry Fonseca, and if you can imagine such a person, the genius Paleolithic American who created the first coyote avatar story so far back in time, we can't fathom either the depths of coyote stories or their future. Of course, our resident super genius, Wile E. Coyote is in the mix, and I can report with some delight about Wiley that his New Yorker inspired product liability lawsuit against the Acme corporation is about to have its day in court with the film Coyote v. Acme coming to movie theaters in late 2026. What I've also learned following coyotes through history is that their story is far from over. As one remarkable example of that, right now, coyotes are on the cusp of of becoming the first North American species in 3 million years to cross from this continent into another one. In this case, into South America. Expansion across a continent is one thing, but into another While the locust of their evolutionary origin seems to have been in the southwest of the present United States, coyotes do seem to have been occasionally on the scene of south of Mexico, in Guatemala, Honduras, San Salvador and Nicaragua, even before Spanish colonization there. Fond of open country and most certainly attracted to the sheep and goats Spanish colonizers introduced, coyotes apparently veered away from the cat filled jungles to the south. But as humans steadily cleared the Central American forest, dispersing coyotes began colonizing Costa rica during the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, they have steadily pushed into Panama and the Grand Isthmus between the continents. They crossed the Panama Canal in 2010 and are colonizing south at a rate of about 40 miles a year. Which means that by 2018 they began to approach Darien national park athwart the isthmus, beyond which lies Colombia and all of South America. The intertwined green density of Darien National Park, a jungle of spider monkeys, tapirs, giant anteaters, peccaries and birds, reptiles and amphibians almost beyond count, would not strike a fan of Wile E. Coyote roadrunner cartoons as classic coyote habitat. Replete with mountain lions and jaguars that would enjoy taking out a migrating canid. Darion surely looms as a coyote obstacle. But coyotes have confronted unfamiliar settings before without blanching. Their numbers, like ours, possess some individuals who can take on situations like big cities or jungles with a calm conviction of purpose. Adventurous ones may be hit by cars or taken out by a jaguar. But just as there are coyotes in Chicago and Manhattan, some are without question pushing through Darien park to Columbia. As I write this, when they succeed, they will almost certainly spread across all of South America. For coyotes, this may well be their version of a planet B of a Mars. Perhaps, given their candid version of a human like self confidence, coyotes have a certain penchant for making the news. Colonizing another continent is a story that's hard to top. But there are other candidates. Not many other animals are participating in the rescue of fellow mammal from extinction. But a particular coyote population in Texas and Louisiana, which residents and biologists have now named ghost wolves, has attracted attention from geneticists for doing exactly that. The species they're helping to rescue is the red wolf, the most endangered wolf on the planet. There's a true irony in this particular story. Since a half century ago, biologists believe the primary threat to red wolf survival was interbreeding with migrating coyotes who were swamping red wolf genetics. I was a young teenager in Louisiana, just when these hybridization events were happening. Among the coyotes, I was Seeing back then, I twice came face to face with strapping, leggy animals with mesmerizing yellow eyes that sure looked like wolfie coyotes. If these were coyote red wolf hybrids, and they almost certainly were. That mixture made for gorgeous animals. But for the next several decades, the recovery program for saving red wolves under the Endangered Species act largely meant destroying hybrid animals and sequestering pure red wolves away from coyotes. So how delicious is it now that, unlike gray wolves in the west, red wolves having been particularly difficult to pull back from the brink and have a new chance? With a rescued population in 1980 of a mere 14 founding animals, red wolves for half a century have suffered from a sharply constrained genetic diversity. On the pair of North Carolina national wildlife refuges where we've tried to save them, the wild population of red wolves right now has dropped to a mere 25. Meanwhile, though, local residents in Galveston, Texas, have for several years been noticing that some of the coyotes on their island are at the least unusual looking. Starting in 2018, genetic analysis of coyotes there and in nearby Louisiana reveals something that, in retrospect, shouldn't have surprised us. It turns out there are still canids in that part of the world carrying red wolf ancestry, often 10% or more. Occasionally, an animal has turned up whose red wolf genes approach 75%. Even more startling, some of these wild coyotes possess red wolf alleles entirely distinctive from the makeup of the North Carolina red wolf populations, whose complete genome had suffered when we attempted to rebuild their numbers from such a small group of founders. So not only are these mixed coyote red wolf animals I saw as a teenager still out there, all along, they've preserved wolf genetics that, with the assistance of modern science, can diversify red wolves and help save them. Colossal Biosciences, the famed DE extreme extinction company that in 2025, genetically engineered dire wolves simultaneously announced that it had birthed four cloned red wolf puppies from the lost wolf genetics preserved by these Deep south hybrid coyotes. Hope, or Naika Kaida, her Caronkawa name is the sole female of the folks. Blaze, Concern and Cinder are the three males. The odds of saving red wolves and a more healthy and complete version of them have suddenly gone up dramatically. Paying attention to coyotes has taught me one final valuable lesson about them and us. Since the beginnings of wildlife management, we humans, all committed individually ourselves, have thought of other animals almost entirely in terms of species, a lumpen aggregate of like creatures. Naturalists such as Seton tried to redirect that thinking with articles like Tito, only to have no less than a president of the United states Teddy Roosevelt castigate him as a nature faker. Yet when famed ecologist Adolph Murie studied the wolves of Mount McKinley Park 40 years later, he found the gray wolves there to be very distinct individuals. Murie even gave his study animals names Dandy, Robber, Mask, Grandpa and Wags. It strikes me as a myopic disconnect that we humans have no trouble understanding our companion animals as individuals, yet can still insist that Walt Disney was anthropomorphizing deer when he gave one a personality and called him Bambi. That long standing recourse to a species focus in wildlife management is still there, but the world of 21st century human wildlife coexistence is shifting. Despite it, the evidence is everywhere. The New York Times actually ran an obituary of the female Yellowstone wolf biologists had named 06 when she was killed by a Montana hunter. Park naturalist Rick McIntyre is even now publishing biographical books about individual wolves in Yellowstone. The Hollywood Hills Griffith park Cougar known as P22 became a celebrity lion in celebrity filled Los Angeles. On the opposite side of the country. For several decades now, Manhattanites have recognized Central Park's red tailed hawks, barred owls and yes, coyotes with individual names like Romeo and Juliet, the mated pair in Central park in 2025. Coyotes are not just their own animals who experience existence differently one from the other and love their own unique aliveness. As science at the Predator Research Facility in Utah has shown, they are truly remarkably singular. To understand the coyotes we're coexisting with in a way that's good both for you and and for the four legged animal looking back at you sometimes make an effort to identify a specific individual coyote. To be sure, coyotes tend to look the same to us and no doubt initially they return that non discriminating favor. But there are often distinctive markers you can pick out. I can tell you from my experience with the female with the white tip tail who dens in the canyon below my house in New Mexico. Once I identified her as a particular animal, she quickly did the same with me. Our mutual curiosity has led to an interesting, even intriguing relationship. We sometimes don't see one another for weeks. Then, hiking in the canyon, I'll spot her often with other coyotes, and before she moves off, she will sometimes direct me with her nose and ear to something of interest to both of us. I'll return from an absence and she'll be sitting in the front yard like a dog I've absentmindedly forgotten to take along. Moving off calmly and reluctantly as I park my jeep from a respectable distance, she's inspected our new malamute, Kiska, and she is clearly willing to bring her family, her new pups, past the windows. I don't know why she does these things, and I'm not about to claim I do. She knows she's not in danger, of course, but I certainly don't feed her or otherwise encourage her. But this much I do know. I like it that every so often a wild coyote apparently thinks of me. So I'll suggest something radical. Try meeting a coyote halfway and see how it goes.
- [42:26]
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- [43:35]
Interviewer
I think there's a lot of ways we could start this one, but I think because we can take coyotes anywhere they go everywhere. But as you point out, this is one story in which the animals win.
- [43:50]
Dan Flores
Yeah.
- [43:51]
Interviewer
And so if I were going to unpack that a little bit because it's a fun, it's a fun idea to play with.
- [43:57]
Dan Flores
Yeah. As I, as I said in the, in the episode Coyote America has Been was still is because I'm doing a new version of it that's coming out soon. The most fun book to write I've ever written. And that's really the reason we're dealing with the coyote with an animal that has a biography that not only is a roller coaster ride up and down and around swerving curves, and it's also an animal that as native people recognize is very much like us. It's an animal that lives by its wits and is successful as a result of that. And it's also the rare, irrepressible animal so many of our grand species in the past, all the way back to the Pleistocene. I mean, we lose our mammoths, we lose our saber toothed cats, we lose our lions. And then in the, the more modern historic period, I mean, we lose passenger pigeons, the most numerous bird on earth, we lose Carolina parakeets and ivory bill woodpeckers.
- [45:18]
Randall
I mean, it just on and on.
- [45:20]
Dan Flores
And yet here is this creature that.
- [45:24]
Randall
In fact, we do everything we can possibly think of to wipe them out.
- [45:30]
Dan Flores
And the result is exactly the opposite of what our intentions are. We end up, not only do their numbers remain viable even in the west, where we're launching such a war against them, but in fact our efforts spread them out across the rest of the country and so, and into cities and towns. And it's this kind of remarkable story to me. And one of the things I wanted to say here, and because I think it is a remarkable thing, is that. We can't delude ourselves that we have created a completely tamed, as it were, emasculated country. When you can look out the window of your house in a suburb anywhere in America and see a jackal sized wolf trotting down the street, glancing at you with highways and houses behind it as it goes by, I mean, that's a kind of a rare wildlife victory in America that you don't get to enjoy very much.
- [46:44]
Interviewer
Yeah, and I think another, another point that's stood out to me here is when you're talking about coyotes moving into South America and whenever you're reading environmental history and you're thinking about these giant large scale movement of animals around the world, you know, without human help.
- [47:07]
Randall
Right.
- [47:08]
Interviewer
To say, you know, ignoring the, the old new world exchanges, when you think about animals moving across the Siberian land bridge or the Bering land bridge, or you know, like bison moving east and then moving back west, I often find myself thinking like, wow, I wonder what that would have looked like. It's almost unimaginable. But in fact, as you point out, we're witnessing what we would think of as like this ancient sort of unimaginable phenomenon right now. And it just looks like, you know, a coyote showing up in someone's backyard.
- [47:46]
Dan Flores
That's what it looks like, you know, and I, I mean, I got to experience it as a kid growing up in Louisiana. I got to experience a little bit of what this was because when I was younger and you know, being a kid who grew up in a small town with the woods 100 yards away, I mean, from the time I was really little, I was going out into the woods and hanging out on creeks and looking at the natural world. But from the time I was six or seven years old, my parents would let me do that. Up until the time I was about 13 or 14, I never saw a coyote. Or when they first started showing up in Louisiana, what people referred, they called them wolves.
- [48:29]
Randall
I never saw a single one. Never even occurred to me that there.
- [48:33]
Dan Flores
Might be something like that.
- [48:34]
Randall
And all of a sudden, one day.
- [48:38]
Dan Flores
Here is this animal that to me, it was like rounding a corner in.
- [48:45]
Randall
New Orleans and having a moose be.
- [48:46]
Dan Flores
Standing on the street, on the intersection.
- [48:50]
Randall
Suddenly, here was an animal that I.
- [48:52]
Dan Flores
In no way expected to ever be in Louisiana. And here it was. And as I started paying attention, they were there more and more and more. And what I realized later on, I began to, in fact, engage with biologists at Louisiana Parks and Wildlife. What's going on? I think I'm seeing these. And they did the generosity of writing me back and saying, yes, you have probably seen coyotes, because coyotes are beginning to colonize in Louisiana. So I think that's what people in Colombia and the first, the most northerly of the South American countries are going to experience is something like I did in Louisiana. Here is this animal that.
- [49:36]
Randall
What in the hell?
- [49:37]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [49:38]
Dan Flores
And that's kind of the reaction. And, you know, maybe it's really magnified when you're 13, 14 years old and are seeing it. But that's what is about to happen in South America. Coyotes. And you know, as the biologists who are studying this have pointed out, man, once they get through Darien national park and cross into Colombia into more open and cleared country, all of South America is in front of them. They're probably going to colonize the entire country continent.
- [50:07]
Randall
I mean.
- [50:07]
Interviewer
Yeah, I. Another aspect of this story is the. When we think of wildlife politics today, we often imagine rural residents and urban dwellers, and it's sort of a social issue. But you introduce here the role of just institutional inertia and government agencies in sort of steering the course of history. Right. With the Bureau of Biological Survey needing something to hold on to as a sort of organizing mission or organizing principle. And it's coyote eradication, predator eradication more broadly. But the role of the government in this story is striking just in terms of government intervening in the natural world in a way that's unimaginable to us today.
- [51:07]
Dan Flores
Yeah, it is a massive intervention, and it happens in part in order to keep a bureau alive. Sea Hart Miriam, who's the first director of Biological Survey, is finding it difficulty to get funding from Congress in like 1904, 1905. And he comes up with the idea, they don't want to fund us because we're doing pure science. Let's become the resolution for the predator problem. And of course, he's right. Once he, he lays out the bureau as that kind of agency, then the funding does follow. And so I think, to your point, Randall, about this is a government agency that needs to have something solid to, to rest its feet on going into the future in the 20th century in America. They come out of, so many of them come out of this background where they're not ecologists, Ecology is a brand new science they're a little suspicious of. And so they, they don't know it well.
- [52:14]
Randall
And they just come from this assumption that what we're doing in America is.
- [52:20]
Dan Flores
We'Re remaking North America into a kind.
- [52:23]
Randall
Of a Western European country.
- [52:26]
Dan Flores
And what people in Western Europe did, which we don't even question, is they.
- [52:30]
Randall
Got rid of all the predators.
- [52:32]
Dan Flores
And so this is something we're going to do. And, and what struck me also when I was doing the research on this is the fact that they're willing to.
- [52:42]
Randall
Do this without ever having any scientific research to back it up.
- [52:47]
Dan Flores
And then when they send people out to come up with the, the information, the scientific research, they're convinced is going to, you know, make coyotes the arch predator of our time. And the Murie brothers come back and say, well, wow, that's not what we're finding. And, you know, I mean, it looks like 80 to 90% of what coyotes do in the world is actually beneficial to humans.
- [53:13]
Randall
And they also are, seem to be, they seem to have this really long term predatory relationship with other creatures out there in the world.
- [53:22]
Dan Flores
And there are all these, these kind.
- [53:24]
Randall
Of intertwined relationships that seem to balance one another out.
- [53:29]
Dan Flores
That was absolutely not what the bureau wanted to hear. So, I mean, this has happened a lot of times in history. You get a report that, okay, that's.
- [53:38]
Randall
Not what I want to hear, you just throw it out the window and double down.
- [53:42]
Dan Flores
And that's what they did. I mean, they just doubled down again and again.
- [53:48]
Randall
And of course, no amount of doubling.
- [53:50]
Dan Flores
Down or tripling down, inventing a whole host of new poisons to kill coyotes, none of it ended up working. All it essentially did, as biologists finally figured out, was to trigger these adaptive responses that coyotes had long ago evolved because they were harassed by wolves. And now, as humans harassed them, they called on these adaptations to keep their populations alive. And it also triggered their expansion. And so as I said it's this kind of really, you know, fun story because it's like, you know, like the movie Avatar, where you don't expect that the blue people in the end are going to win, but they do. And so in this case, it's the coyotes who win. And that. That's pretty fun.
- [54:45]
Interviewer
And one final question. Speaking of surprises, I'm usually never surprised when I learn something new about Richard Nixon in environmental politics, but his statement about the use of poisons for coyote control was. That was a new one for me. Yeah, I mean, I feel like I'm ready for the unexpected when it comes to Nixon. But, yeah, I mean, it's an interesting moment in environmental politics at the federal level.
- [55:16]
Dan Flores
Yeah, it is. And, you know, the truth is, if you have a bookcase of American presidents and you're looking for the people who are most interested in the natural world, you have, like, Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt on one end, and on the other end of those least interested, Richard Nixon is one of those who is going to appear as the other bookend. But in this particular instance, Nixon, of course, is a consummate politician, and his idea is the ecology movement is in full swing. We've just had the first Earth Day. The public, after Silent Spring is really alarmed at the use of poisons. I'm going to get on top of this because it's going to be a political surge on my behalf.
- [56:04]
Randall
It doesn't work out that way, but.
- [56:06]
Dan Flores
I mean, he's essentially attempting to take advantage of a movement that he perceives he might be able to surf.
- [56:13]
Interviewer
Yeah. Always calculating.
- [56:15]
Dan Flores
Always calculating. Yeah.
- [56:17]
Interviewer
Well, Dan, thanks again.
- [56:18]
Dan Flores
Oh, Randall, great fun.
- [56:28]
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