jaymatt wrote:
Farmers and ranchers--deer can easily eat corn and soybean crops, as well as do raccoons, groundhogs, etc. It is a battle. And coyotes kill and eat farmers' animals--baby calves, cats, small dogs, chickens, etc. No one seems to care about coyotes until they kill a cat or dog in town, and then all hell breaks looks on the news because Fluffy got eaten.
Sure, but we aren't allowed to shoot the deer and the other animals are easier to trap than shoot.
Killing coyotes makes the problem worse.
"Why would predation increase after predators are killed? When pack animals such as coyotes, dingoes and wolves are killed, the social structure of their packs breaks down. Female coyotes become more likely to breed and their pups are more likely to survive, so their numbers may actually increase. Packs generally protect territories, so breaking up a pack allows new animals to come in, raising the population. In addition, some new arrivals may opportunistically prey on livestock, which can increase predation rates."
Non-lethal methods of coyote control have proven to be more effective than lethal methods.
"Few Americans probably know that their tax dollars paid to kill 76,859 coyotes in 2016. The responsible agency was Wildlife Services (WS), part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Its mission is to 'resolve wildlife conflicts to allow people and wildlife to coexist.'"
"It is understandable for struggling ranchers to blame coyotes for economic losses, since kills leave tangible signs and killing predators seems like a logical solution. However, a widely cited 2006 study called coyotes scapegoats for factors that were more directly related to the decline of sheep ranching in the United States."
"The author, Dr. Kim Murray Berger, who was then a research biologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, built and tested a series of statistical models to explain the declining number of sheep being bred in the United States. She found that variables including the price of hay, wage rates and the price of lamb explained most of the decline, and that the amount of money spent on predator control had little effect. Other research indicates that even if predation is one factor in ranchers’ economic losses, lethal control is not the best way to reduce it."
https://theconversation.com/why-killing-coyotes-doesnt-make-livestock-safer-75684