The Predator Paradox: Ending the War with Wolves, Bears, Cougars, and Coyotes - Hardcover

Shivik, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807084964 ISBN 13: 9780807084960

Publisher: Beacon Press, 2014

Synopsis

An expert in wildlife management tells the stories of those who are finding new ways for humans and mammalian predators to coexist.
 
Stories of backyard bears and cat-eating coyotes are becoming increasingly common—even for people living in non-rural areas. Farmers anxious to protect their sheep from wolves aren’t the only ones concerned: suburbanites and city dwellers are also having more unwanted run-ins with mammalian predators.

And that might not be a bad thing. After all, our government has been at war with wildlife since 1914, and the death toll has been tremendous: federal agents kill a combined ninety thousand wolves, bears, coyotes, and cougars every year, often with dubious biological effectiveness. Only recently have these species begun to recover. Given improved scientific understanding and methods, can we continue to slow the slaughter and allow populations of mammalian predators to resume their positions as keystone species?

As carnivore populations increase, however, their proximity to people, pets, and livestock leads to more conflict, and we are once again left to negotiate the uneasy terrain between elimination and conservation. In The Predator Paradox, veteran wildlife management expert John Shivik argues that we can end the war while still preserving and protecting these key species as fundamental components of healthy ecosystems. By reducing almost sole reliance on broad scale “death from above” tactics and by incorporating nonlethal approaches to managing wildlife—from electrified flagging to motion-sensor lights—we can dismantle the paradox, have both people and predators on the landscape, and ensure the long-term survival of both.

As the boundary between human and animal habitat blurs, preventing human-wildlife conflict depends as much on changing animal behavior as on changing our own perceptions, attitudes, and actions. To that end, Shivik focuses on the facts, mollifies fears, and presents a variety of tools and tactics for consideration.

Blending the science of the wild with entertaining and dramatic storytelling, Shivik’s clear-eyed pragmatism allows him to appeal to both sides of the debate, while arguing for the possibility of coexistence: between ranchers and environmentalists, wildlife managers and animal-welfare activists, and humans and animals.

About this title

About the Author

John Shivik is a recognized leader in nonlethal techniques for predator management. As a federal and university researcher, he has investigated mammalian predators in ecological systems throughout the United States and Europe. His numerous scientific works have been published in the Journal of Wildlife Management, Conservation Biology, and BioScience.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter1
The Battlefield
 
Spanish Fork, Utah’s glass and steel reflected the red morning
light, sparkling like scattered rubies. On the other side of the
aircraft, under the rising sun, stretched a stark, dark contrast of
wilderness terrain. The pilot navigated over the narrow edge: the
interface of wilderness and humanity.
 
The slopes, rocky and rugged, stood too tall and steep to be
colonized by people, but the asphalt and concrete constructions
of humanity to the west were equally challenging to invasion by
wild animals. The view from the helicopter created the illusion that
the boundary of wilderness was as razor sharp and distinct as the
heights of the Wasatch.
 
If one looked closer, however, intrusions became evident; the
edge dulled and blurred. On a ridgeline, ski tracks ran down the
face. Figure eights wove in and out of an avalanche chute. The interlopers
had managed to dance down the virgin snowfield without
being swallowed by it.
 
Where humans broke trails in, animals loped their way out.
Coyotes enjoyed an advantage from the intrusion, as snowmobiles
created firm paths through the depths of Utah’s “greatest snow on
earth.” Paw prints on packed powder led to town, where dispersing
canids could find a snack of domestic house cat. Cougars followed
deer that were drawn to the rosebuds of lush suburbs. When the
bears awoke, they would find their way to apple trees on the edge of
town. The human-wildland interface below me wasn’t a razor-edge
solid border but a porous ecotone.

Our machine flew over moose—one, two, three. A mother
with her calf—four, five. Number six, reduced to a mat of hair and
jumble of bones, the hide chewed, processed, and defecated in adjacent
scats. This was the reason for our flight: reports of wolves
just outside of the suburban sprawl. We found a carcass, tracks, and
evidence, but no proof strong enough to identify true wolf from
feral dog or hybrid.

The southwest corner of wolf-range in Wyoming was barely
one hundred miles away, only a morning’s walk for a wolf. We did
not yet know if it was a jaunt or sortie, or if wolves had actually
reestablished themselves and bred in Utah, but the line between
humans and predators was blurring. It was long past time to ask the
question: Could or would we learn to live with mammalian predators
as close neighbors? Between past and future were a myriad of
considerations.

Beginning in the 1600s, European settlers came to the New
World, bringing their God-given mandate to tame the wilderness.
In addition, they carried within them generations of myth, fear,
and violent reaction to predators such as the wolf. By the turn of
the twentieth century, agricultural heavy-handedness had imposed
nearly two hundred years of ecological emptiness, and expanses
of the American West had become devoid of top predators. We
had forgotten in a very deep way what it meant to have among us
animals that made their livings eating other sentient things. By the
1950s, largely through actions of federal trappers, we had killed off
nearly every wolf and grizzly bear in the contiguous United States
and had similarly decimated black bear, cougar, and even coyote
populations in some places.1

Soon after the time of the 1962 publication of Silent Spring, the
pendulum of public opinion swung back, carrying with it a crying
Indian, the Endangered Species Act, and Earth Day. In barely a
generation, many North Americans had developed a sense of environmentalism
and a depth of ecology that lacked such a concept as
“varmints” (except perhaps humans). They wanted coyotes, bears,
cougars, and wolves to exist. Even more, they wanted people to
stop killing them.

I was studying wildlife biology as the field grew rapidly and
diversified. The discipline had been utilitarian, hook-and-bullet, strictly about game management, but all of a sudden it was adding
elements of pure and deep ecology. As a graduate student in the
1990s, I captured, radio-collared, and followed coyotes because I
believed that studying predators would lead us on the path toward
coexistence. An MS, a PhD, and dozens of students and studies
later, I am still sorting out the paradox of desperately wanting to
conserve and increase populations of the animals that we spent so
much time and energy exterminating.

In North America, we think differently about predators than
we used to, especially on the burgeoning, suburbanizing coasts. It
puts us humans on a collision course with remaining and rebounding
populations of wolves, bears, cougars, and coyotes. The rapid
sprawl of civilization forces the issue: Is there anywhere else for
predators to go if they can’t live on humanity’s doorstep? Are there
options that would allow us to have carnivores in our kingdom
while we protect our livestock, property, and people? Finally, who
is going to jump in the fray between people and predators and end
the feud?
 
“My God, they’re beautiful,” Lynne Gilbert-Norton gasped, seeing
a coyote for the first time.
 
The coyote was a few yards away, on the other side of a fence,
standing broadside to us. Its black-furred back faded to tan, then
brushed into the red that lined the outer edges of its pointed ears,
which flittered up like furry pyramids focusing sound. The yellow
fires of its eyes did not look away from Lynne in deference, but
peered back, insubordinately, into hers. Black lines, like Cleopatra’s
eyeliner, ran from their corners. Superfluously painted and defiant,
the coyote’s eyes had the duality of menace and allure.
 
Lynne, of the University of Exeter, had been sent to study something
uniquely American. She acknowledged that coyotes weren’t
animals normally studied by her colleagues and professors. “I’m a
psychologist, a Brit,” she said. “I read, but still don’t feel like I know
much about coyotes.”
 
“Hardly anyone sees a coyote close up like this,” I said. “Even
Americans.” I prodded, “So you’re lucky. The question is, What
are you going to do with them?”

The issue, of course, was much more complicated than my innocent
inquiry suggested. I was asking Lynne to find out how to
live with animals that have no qualms about eating our livestock,
our property, even us. How do we outsmart them on their own
playing field? I knew it was going to take more than one or two
biologists or a few grandfathers of conservation biology to find the
answers. It would also require an army of young diverse minds,
everyone from foreigners to farm boys.
 
More than a hundred coyotes responded to my question. Waves
of rapid ululations and high-pitched barks and yips filled the air.
Lynne froze, uncertain. It sounded like the home team had scored
in a nearby football stadium.

Above us stood nature’s castellation, the raw edges of the Bear
River Range. The United States had towering castles and cathedrals
as did England, but ours were geological. Everywhere the
new world collided with the ancient. The road leading to our location
weaved between fields, one flooded with water and whitefaced
ibis, others yielding young stalks of corn. An inconspicuous
blue and white sign marked state property, “Utah State University
Millville Wildlife Research Center,” alongside a humble plaque
reading, “United States Department of Agriculture, Wildlife Services,
Predator Research Facility,” indicating the collaborative federal
pens and buildings sharing the land.
 
The Predator Research Facility was crammed between rugged
desert and high country mountaintops, between the fantasy of apple
pie America and the reality of the abattoirs of the nearby town
of Hyrum, Utah. It was wedged between university professors’
tentative search for truth and Utah’s religious roots in dominating
nature and demanding that the desert bloom. For Lynne and her
fellow students, it was also the base camp for a journey. She had no
idea of the significance of the research that she’d signed up for, or
how a simple little predator would change her life.

Charismatic song dogs to some, vile varmints to others, the coyote
is our most widespread North American meat eater. Typically
considered the second-class cousin to the wolf, coyotes were confined
to the American southwest at the time of European arrival. As hedgerows, irrigation, crops, and humans displaced the larger and 
less compromising wolf, coyotes filled the void. Seizing the opportunity,
they became a continental predator, and are currently found
from Central America to Alaska.2 Today, coyotes are seen, or their
effects felt, by citizens of every state except Hawaii. Drawn by both
cat food and cats as food, they are literally at our kitchen doors.3
 
Varying in form and habit across their range, coyotes as a species
seem infinitely adaptable, at home in cities, towns, tall mountains,
and open deserts. They tend to be smaller in the southern
part of their range, weighing perhaps twenty pounds as adults,
and larger in the north, nearing forty pounds. The animal known
as the eastern coyote is the giant of the species, sometimes weighing
more than fifty pounds, rivaling the size of a well-fed German
shepherd.4

In Native American traditions dating back to the Aztecs, the
coyote has been assigned a variety of personalities and responsibilities.
From a creator of the earth, to mischief maker, to utter fool,
he is the Native American Robin Goodfellow, and his spirit and
symbolism are equally protean. Even within the pantheon of the
Aztecs, the coyote had many faces. Tezcatlipoca would transform
himself into a coyote and trot ahead to warn travelers of robbers or
other dangers in front of them. In contrast, Huehuecoyotl, the Old
Coyote, was a nefarious mischief-maker.5

Farther to the north, Native American tribes had similar impressions
of the coyote: godlike in cunning, but with a humanlike
sense of morality. The demigod of coyote was said to be responsible
for the presence of fish in the Klamath River and for giving the
bison, with a kick of dust, its poor eyesight. The coyote brought
fire to the people as the Native American Prometheus, but he was
also their Azrael, bringing death. When the just and worthy died,
their souls went to a good place, but the wicked were reborn into
coyotes.6

The legends, much like the animal, changed with the arrival
of newcomers. The Spanish adopted the Aztec word, coyotl, which
morphed over time, the final “l” becoming an “e.” Subtle changes
of meaning crept in. In Steinbeck’s The Pearl, Kino and Juana’s only
son is named Coyotito, little coyote, and in the Spanish of the time
the term referred to the last child produced by a family, magnifying the tragedy of his demise.7 The coyote of today’s Mexican vernacular
is a shady character who smuggles people across the desert. The
coyote operates in both shadow and light: it is never entirely clear
whether he is beneficent or malevolent.

The folklore accurately assesses the scrappy, multifaceted essence
of the biological coyote as well. Coyotes sometimes live in
packs and drag down large prey, but other times they subsist solitarily
on field mice. The coyote is a character; even to the shortsleeved,
white button-down-shirted statisticians of the National
Agricultural Statistics Service. Yearly reports estimate that coyotes
are responsible for 60.5 percent of all sheep losses to predation,
representing an estimated $18.3 million in total losses.8 Stemming
from a long and antagonistic history, the tongue-in-cheek advertisement
“Eat lamb—20,000 coyotes can’t be wrong,” continues to
grace the bumpers of many pickup trucks in the American West.
The object of many a coyote’s appetitive affections is the domestic
sheep, a dumbed down version of the mouflon, which resembles
the bighorn of North America. Our sheep originated in
Mesopotamia 11,000 years ago, near the confluence of the Tigris
and Euphrates.9 By 1000 AD, Spain was a major player in sheep
production. It was only natural for the beasts, which even sailed
with Columbus, to expand across the American West. Predatory
defenses are largely nonexistent in the domestic sheep. They are
awkward and slow, like wooly dinner with hooves. As biologists often
put it, “Sheep are born. Then they spend the rest of their lives
looking for a place to die.”

Domestic sheep, especially lambs, are not much of a challenge
for a coyote, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the closely
related golden jackal, which would have eaten the domestic sheep’s
ancestors on the Arabian Peninsula. The ongoing battle between
humans and predators started even before our religious divisions
did. Over the ages, fear and loathing of all predators has become as
natural to us as growing food has.

Ironically, the urban population centers of the coasts have tended
to be blissfully unaware of the deep-seated resentment and conflict
on the rural prairies. Until recently, only livestock producers felt the majority of the economic and emotional impact of the pesky
predator. Although coyotes may now have a certain symbolism and
mysticism for newcomers to the West, management in rural areas
has been a long, intensive, and passionate tradition, inherited
through generations, like a hundred-years’ war.
And a war it has been. As sheep production in the United
States was peaking in the 1940s, demobilization caused a surplus of
military-trained pilots with the skill, fortitude, and willingness to
fly at low levels. It is expected that the technological advances of
war would be incorporated into other elements of life. Armed with
shotguns and hanging out the back of a Piper Cub, hunters could
experience the thrill of the chase while minimizing the danger of
low-level flying. At least no one was shooting back.

Aerial hunting, as it is called, remains a zealously embraced tool
of Wildlife Services, the branch of the United States Department
of Agriculture that has stepped up to control our interstate predators.
Critics often refer to it as “aerial gunning,” because raining
bullets from the sky onto coyotes caught in the middle of a vast
snowfield doesn’t sound like hunting. Body counts can be phenomenal;
from 2001 to 2007, a total of 252,713 animals were taken
from the air. Of those, coyotes accounted for a majority, 210,306.10
The agency’s summary from 2008 reported that 50,846 animals
were lethally removed from sixteen states using fixed wing aircraft
(30,537 animals) and helicopters (20,309). Coyotes were the most
numerous of the species taken, with a death toll of 3...

Edition details

• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0807084964
• ISBN 13: 9780807084960
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 208