{"id":954,"date":"2019-05-08T11:32:00","date_gmt":"2019-05-08T15:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/?p=954"},"modified":"2025-01-23T17:10:18","modified_gmt":"2025-01-23T22:10:18","slug":"coyote-america-dan-flores-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2019\/05\/coyote-america-dan-flores-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"<i>Coyote America<\/i> &#8211; Dan Flores, 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">In this book I learned about<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>&#8220;Species cleansing&#8221; (eradication, e.g. of rats)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.roadsideamerica.com\/story\/36898\">Mouse invasion<\/a> in 1927 Kern County (California), after coyotes and hawks had been eliminated, which &#8220;left highways grossly slick, and ultimately undriveable, after traffic flattened unbelievable swarms of mice&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Scapegoating coyotes after the wolves were gone<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/26449797\"><em>The Coyote&#8217;s Lament<\/em><\/a> (Disney, 1961)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Legendary federal coyote nemesis Stanley Young characterized the animal as the Biological Survey&#8217;s most frustrating opponent, an enemy members of the agency actually lumped in with fascism as a threat to the American Way.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Most predators are either solitary or social, not both. But like us, the coyote gets to have it both ways.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Coyote power: surviving by one&#8217;s intelligence and wits when others cannot; embracing existence in a mad, dancing, laughing, sympathetic expression of pure joy at evading the grimmest of fates; exulting in sheer aliveness; recognizing our shortcomings with rueful chagrin. These are the values Old Man America has embodied for thousands of years.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In my view the coyote&#8217;s howl is the original national anthem of North America &#8230; [but]  The coyote&#8217;s cry, for many Americans riveted by the sound, did not intone the ballad of the continent&#8212;America&#8217;s ancient native song&#8212;that some of us hear today. &#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A sense that so much about North America was strange and frightening and that we ought to terraform and remake it extended to every element of continental ecology, from grasses to animals of all kinds. But in truth, almost no other creature reaped the whirlwind of condescension and hostility toward &#8220;alien&#8221; American nature in quite the way coyotes did. We campaigned to erase those &#8220;manic, lunatic&#8221; howls for all time and good riddance. And even as evidence mounted of the wrongheadedness and futility of that course, we spent more than half a century in furious pursuit of it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Chemists and researchers in the Eradication Methods Laboratory [making strychnine and other poisons in huge volume], with government jobs and benefits, presumably realized the American Dream in the 1920s, buying houses, automobiles, radios, and washing machines, all the latest technologies of the decade. Their products, meanwhile, destroyed America&#8217;s wild animals, the foundations of an ecology that 20,000 years of evolution had perfected, as if their victims were of no consequence whatsoever.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">[Ernest Thompson] Seton has taken his licks across the years as a fellow traveler of the &#8220;Nature Faker&#8221; writers of the early twentieth century &#8230; One critic of Seton&#8217;s book <em>Animals I Have Known<\/em> even wrote, sarcastically, that its proper title ought to have been <em>Animals I <\/em>Alone Have Known.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The average coyote litter size is 5.7 pups, but that number can range from as low as 2 to as high as 19. The reason for such variability is that coyotes possess an autogenic trait that allows them to assess the ecological possibilities around them. If not persecuted, they saturate a landscape to carrying capacity, then usually have small litters that produce only a couple of surviving pups. But if they sense a suppressed coyote population relative to available resources, they give birth to very large littlers. The coyote&#8217;s yipping howl &#8230; has several functions, one very important one of which is to assess the size of the surrounding coyote population.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">[Olaus] Murie knew that once, in his Yellowstone research, his brother had stood rapt, watching a coyote trot along a trail with a sprig of sagebrush in its mouth. At repeated intervals it had tossed the sprig joyously into the air, caught it, then trotted on. Why had so many in the [Bureau of Biological Survey], without any science to back them up, so hated an animal that took that kind of pleasure in being alive in the world? Why had they encouraged hatred for coyotes among the public? It was not an attitude or a culture Olaus cared to be associated with. He ended up leaving the bureau for the Wilderness Society.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;Biocentrism&#8221; in one sense was actually evolutionary. It implied yet another extension of the circle of ethical treatment that had begun long ago in human affairs, when we first moved beyond kinship and our own genetics and granted rights to others outside our families.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">.Acme&#8217;s overconfidence rivaled that of the Coyote. In these classic cartoons the promise of the technological fix took the form of Acme Jet-Propelled Roller Skates, an Acme Batman Outfit, Acme Leg Muscle Vitamins, and the Acme Burmese Tiger Trap, so many mad-genius devices of pursuit that today an online poster &#8230; totals up more than one hundred of them. In iconic, American style, Wile E. trusted every one of those contraptions naively, optimistically, wonderfully. A corporation offers it for sale? <em>Then of course it&#8217;s going to work!<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In this book I learned about Legendary federal coyote nemesis Stanley Young characterized the animal as the Biological Survey&#8217;s most frustrating opponent, an enemy members of the agency actually lumped in with fascism as a threat to the American Way. Most predators are either solitary or social, not both. But like us, the coyote gets [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nature-and-environment-book-group","category-quote-dump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=954"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4472,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954\/revisions\/4472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}