It’s Time to Surrender the War on Coyotes

A western coyote stares down the camera. Source: Aspen Stevanoski.

“Good animals, of course, were those edible creatures that man enjoyed hunting and wanted to find in abundance. 

Bad animals, on the other hand, were those creatures that competed with human hunters for game. 

Good animals were bison, deer, moose, elk, antelope, and bighorn sheep. Bad animals were wolves, pumas, and coyotes.”

- Hope Ryden, God’s Dog: The North American Coyote

The coyote is an animal that provokes visceral, violent disgust in many Americans. In the rural West, they’re seen as livestock killers and shot in their thousands in gory wildlife killing contests, their bodies hung on fences or stacked in the beds of trucks. In the suburbs of the East Coast, the mere sight of a wild canine leads to an immediate pearl-clutching cry for someone to do something. Somebody think of poor Bambi!

In 2023, the USDA’s Wildlife Services killed over 68,000 coyotes. Private hunters kill an average of another 500,000 per year, out of a population of between 2.8 and 4.7 million. We’ve thrown everything we have at these crafty canines: hounding, baiting, snares, poison, shooting from helicopters, even cyanide bombs. The euphemism of “denning” encompasses a number of increasingly creative practices that kill coyote pups in their dens, from dragging them out and clubbing them to death to pouring propane into the den and lighting it on fire. 

Morals of burning puppies alive aside, this method of “management” doesn’t even work. A broad body of research shows that areas with high rates of coyote hunting actually have higher coyote abundance, especially on a local level. 

The mechanism behind this is simple: coyotes are compensatory breeders. In an established pack, only one breeding pair will raise a litter each year. When this structure is disrupted, the other members of the pack are free to reproduce as well. This means more litters, and larger ones to boot. Coyote populations have a remarkable tendency to rebound after human disturbances: one study by the USDA concluded that they could only be exterminated by eliminating 75% of the population every year for 50 years.

It’s clearly a losing battle, so why try? Perhaps the only winning move is not to play.

There are some valid concerns when it comes to coyotes. They occasionally kill livestock–one half of one percent of calves–pets, and, exceedingly rarely, people. 159 people were attacked by coyotes between 1960 and 2006. Only two deaths have ever been reported.

For pets, coyotes are a relatively serious danger. Because there are so many disparate reporting resources, data is spotty, but one crowd-sourcing app reported 135 cats and 58 dogs killed by coyotes in 2018 across the nation.

Luckily, this problem has solutions that should really be implemented regardless. Keep your cats inside. Keep an eye on your dog when it’s outside. Don’t feed the coyotes.

Keep your cat inside. Seriously, they kill 3.7 billion birds per year. Keep your cat inside or I’m rooting for the coyote on this one.

And what about poor Bambi? 

Short of livestock kills, nothing earns the coyote so much hatred as its reputation as a “fawn killer.” Where the two coexist, coyotes are a major cause of death for whitetail deer fawns. In one study in Chicago, for example, coyotes were the primary cause of fawn mortality at 77% of deaths.  

In the U.S., where wildlife management amounts to keeping deer populations as high as possible at the cost of any predator larger than a raccoon, public health, and ecosystem function, this might seem like a dire problem. But the reality is that it’s not normal–or even a good thing–for every fawn to survive.

In the wild, 12-18 deer per square mile is considered a normal population. At 20 deer per square mile, we start to see the negative impacts of deer overpopulation. In 2020, deer densities in Orange County were greater than 50 per square mile.

The negative impacts of deer overpopulation are overwhelming. Overpopulation increases the spread of diseases between deer, spilling over into humans in the form of Lyme disease. More deer means more deer-related car accidents, which result in thousands of injuries and hundreds of deaths per year. Uninhibited by predators, deer feast on suburban gardens and overgraze underbrush, leading to marked declines in habitat specialist songbirds like the Kirtland’s warbler, now one of the rarest in the United States.

If all of this isn’t convincing enough, there is one potential solution. While human hunting does not have a negative impact on coyote densities, larger predators do. Wolves, for example, despise their smaller cousins, and are known to chase, harass, and even kill them. The presence of black bears and pumas also limits coyote densities in their respective habitats.

So, I have an offer for you: let’s restore North America’s wilderness to its original state. Bring the cougar, the gray wolf, the red wolf in the east. These predators have managed one another and coexisted with Indigenous people for tens of thousands of years. The world can’t all be little pink houses and white-tailed deer, can it?

No? I didn’t think so.

Then you’re stuck with the coyotes.