This may seem like an odd topic for a post, but I was talking with a man the other day who is in a state of grief over the killing of his two Labrador retrievers by what he said were coyotes. I’m not a zoologist, but it initially struck me as odd that Labradors (large hunting dogs) could be killed by coyotes. Coyotes are not that large (considerably smaller than wolves) and usually weigh around 25 lbs. Occasionally, they can be as big as 50 lbs. So I pressed the guy for details, and he told me that he got permission to ahead and hunt the coyotes (as a nuisance) from the local Fish and Game guy, who told him he could shoot as many as he could find. The deaths of his dogs (which he found torn up after never coming back inside) seems to have triggered a one man anti-coyote campaign, and this man has spent a lot of time trying to take out as many as he could.
But one of the details seemed awfully strange to me. He told me that these coyotes are huge, scary animals, and that one of the ones he shot weighed 100 lbs.
Wow.
The problem is that coyotes simply do not weigh 100 lbs. This man was not lying or bragging, and he said that he was relying on the official assurances of Fish and Game. After all, they are the experts, right?
Not so fast. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was not right, so I researched the issue, and learned something new. Apparently because of bureaucratic issues, wolves are being rebadged as coyotes by officials who know better.
“TheDNRdoesn’t have any money to manage a wolf population in theLower Peninsula, and they don’t want the social problems they’ll get if wolves start eating pets and scaring people,” said Dennis Fijalkowski, executive director of the Michigan Wildlife Conservancy inBath. “So they’ll call them coyotes in theLower Peninsulaand let hunters shoot them and eliminate the problem.
“But a lot of people have seen these animals, and no one would call them a coyote. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. And those animals are wolves.”
Brian Roell is theDNR’s wolf program coordinator inMarquette, managing theUpper Peninsula’s population of 600-1,000 wolves. He said that although a few wolves have crossed the ice from the U.P. to theLower Peninsula, the numbers are so low that they are undetectable.
Roell said that tests carried out on the animals that have been shot or trapped in theLower Peninsulashow that genetically they are coyotes, although they had many wolf characteristics such as longer legs and bigger bodies.
Fijalkowski answers, “A female coyote is 25-35 pounds. One of the wolves trapped in theLower Peninsulawas a young female that weighed 74 pounds. No matter what the (DNR) says, that was a wolf.”
So, it looks like the man I talked to was lied to for similar reasons.
If I hadn’t talked to him, I would never have stumbled upon one small example of a larger pattern involving scientific corruption, official coverups, and more.
“Politics has trumped biology.”
…many of the decisions made by wolf managers have been shrouded in secrecy. A recent public records request seeking the details behind decisions that led to the capture of wolf No. 1188 netted nearly 700 blacked-out pages.
“The Mexican wolf recovery program has been a complete disaster because politics has trumped biology,” said Wendy Keefover, director of WildEarth Guardians’ carnivore protection program.
Over the last five years, the federal government and state wildlife agencies in New Mexico and Arizona have spent an average of about $2.5 million a year on the reintroduction program. More is spent by the dozens of zoos and sanctuaries around the U.S. and in Mexico that care for the nearly 260 wolves that are part of the captive population.
The funding goes to everything from the salaries of biologists and veterinarians to meetings, fuel for vehicles, capture operations and root canals and other medical care for the wolves.
More than $500,000 has also been spent over the last few years on range riders, special fencing and other tools for keeping wolves away from cattle. The federal government and two nonprofit groups also pitch in to repay ranchers who have lost cattle.
The program has been the target of numerous legal challenges, including a flurry of complaints filed in recent months by environmentalists who want to see more wolves released into the wild and more transparency on the part of the federal government.
On the other hand, wolves are still being illegally shot and distain for the animals continues to pulse through rural communities, where ranchers feel their livelihoods are at risk.
So they’re introducing wolves with taxpayers’ money, then paying off the ranchers who lose livestock with taxpayers’ money, lying to the public, and covering everything up.
Why, you would almost think there was no accountability!
Little wonder the Fish and Game folks are using the coyote loophole. Wolves are federally protected, and on the Endangered Species list, which means shooting them is illegal both federally, and in Michigan. Any killing of wolves — even when state sanctioned — is a bureaucratic mess.
Coyotes, OTOH, may be shot when they mess with livestock, and they are a problem in Michigan. But even 40 lbs. is considered suspiciously large:
Coyotes, which increasingly have been turning up in urban areas, typically eat small mammals such as squirrels, mice and even deer.
Locally, there have been reports of hunters killing coyotes weighing 40 pounds, which would be large for an average coyote.
Last year, researchers studying the genes of coyotes in the Northeastern U.S. said they found evidence the animals were coyote-wolf hybrids, carrying the DNA of both, according to a recent New York Times article. These hybrids typically are larger and have different coat colors than coyotes in the West.
The researchers suggested that as coyotes from the Western states traveled east in the last several decades, they bred with wolves, establishing that DNA in the Northeast hybrids.
I suspect that the guy I talked to is dealing with either wolves, or wolf-coyote hybrids.
Maybe the “tainting” of wolves with coyote blood supplies a loophole. It seems to me that if the animals freely interbreed, calling them separate species is just another way of torturing science.
What I cannot figure out is whether bad law makes for bad science, or the other way around.
Comments
14 responses to “If the government loves wolves, then why are they calling them coyotes?”
Personally, I’d say the DNR is handling it just right. Some things are better left unsaid.
Whether they’ve mated with wolves or whether they’re coy-dogs, coyotes are aggressive and adaptable. They have to be managed aggressively or they’ll become a real problem. We have a long road ahead of us before the “don’t kill bambi” crowd learns to accept that.
I agree that they should be shot. But it seems that science is being ignored — by people who are supposed to be scientific.
Why pretend wolves are not wolves? I think this is being done not so much to help humans as it is to help cover up (and thus enable) the campaign to reintroduce wolves into areas where humans live. It is also meant to protect the doctrine that wolves cannot be shot, and that when there are negative interactions, it’s because humans are “encroaching” on “their” (the reintroduced wolves) turf. From an environmentalist perspective, the fewer wolf incident reports there are, the better!
This brings to mind a post by LabRat from a couple of years back, regarding the genetic differences between wolves and coyotes.
http://www.atomicnerds.com/?p=3725
Either one is an apex predator. Very difficult to hunt. Even harder if the intent is to reduce the local population. A field expidient solution would be to place a few cut down 5 gallon pails filled with radiator fluid near their runs. and yes, shut up about it.
I’ve seen suspiciously large coyotes in New Jersey even. I thought maybe crosses with bigger dogs. There is certainly enough non-migratory geese and road-kill deer to keep them well fed.
Eric,
I doubt the local rabbit sheriff is trying to cover up for the wolves. More likely, he’s trying to keep a infestation under control while under threat from environmental groups.
The problem is that wolves have the force of law behind them. If it got out that DNR officials were sanctioning (even unofficially) the killing of something that might be a wolf, or might even be partly a wolf, there’d be a lawsuit and instant oversight of the extermination of coyotes as a pest.
Unless the Endangered Species Act can be moderated at some point in the future, I think this is about as good as it gets.
I hope you emailed him back with your findings.
Wolves and coyotes can both be very dangerous. Mistaking one for the other, even more so. The ranchers should know, AND claim to have killed a coyote.
BTW, defending your dogs should count as self defense.
Species are not immutable. They change according to their environment.
That was one of the points Darwin made in “Origin of the Species”. There is now DNA evidence to back him up.
Thinking of species as something special is the origin of the difficulties. We have confused words with reality.
Genetically, the whole genus Canis is a mess. Red wolf, gray wolf, dogs, coyotes, the three species of jackals — they can all interbreed under certain circumstances. And Simon’s got it right: eastern canids show every sign of evolution in action, as coyotes breed with remnant wolves and with feral dogs, and also undergo natural selection in the direction of a larger predator able to exploit the huge food supply of whitetail deer.
Returning to the original topic: how certain are the weights of these animals? Coyotes and wolves are both notorious for looking bigger and heavier than they actually are. 100lbs would be damned big for a Lower 48 wolf — only in the far north, where they hunt mega-herbivores like buffalo and musk-oxen, do wolves routinely get that big.
Even if coyote-wolf and coyote-feral-dog interbreeding isn’t occurring (and I’d expect it would be happening), you should expect larger and heavier coyotes if they live where food (suburban pets, deer, dumpsters, etc.) is abundant.
Any top predator feeding in that habitat will likely be better nourished, hence larger, stronger, and heavier.
Some interesting biology/zoology could come out of this. But the tangle of public opinion and regulations make any sort of scientific study doubtful — unless it’s carried out on the down-low.
Read Jim Sterba’s Nature Wars for an interesting look at the interactions of suburbia and exurbia with animal life. Also, David Baron’s earlier book, Beast in the Garden, on mountain lions around Boulder.
What prompted my curiosity (and hence this post) is that coyotes are not supposed to weigh 100 lbs. If in fact they can (the dead one was weighed, still under the assumption it was a coyote) that should be reflected somewhere other than anecdotal accounts — preferably in the natural sciences literature.
If it really weighed 100lbs, then obviously it wasn’t a coyote. But it probably wasn’t a pure wolf either. Wolves vary greatly in size, from around 40 lbs for an Arabian wolf to 125 or more for an adult Alaskan or Canadian wolf. But today, in the central/eastern United States, the standard-issue gray wolf is about 70-80lbs. A 100-lb canid in Lower Michigan is probably some kind of hybrid — wolf/dog, coyote/dog, wolf/coyote, or maybe even all three.
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