Learning to live with wild dogs
We packed the car for a picnic dinner Sunday after suffering
through a thankfully oh-so-rare hot, humid day in San Benito
County.
Learning to live with wild dogs
We packed the car for a picnic dinner Sunday after suffering through a thankfully oh-so-rare hot, humid day in San Benito County.
We didn’t seek out a park, but just a quiet, scenic spot alongside a country road. It’s a common practice in many other countries, but in the course of our leisurely meal, the two passersby made it clear that we were something of an event. We had spread our meal out at the edge of the intersection of Browns Valley and Santa Anita Roads, a spot overlooking a bowl of grassy hills, punctuated with oaks and large boulders. The first person to pass rolled down a window and stopped to remark he’d never encountered anything like us before. The second just slowed and smiled.
As the sun dipped below the horizon and a cool ocean breeze freshened, we decided that a dessert of watermelon would be best enjoyed back at home, and packed the car. But as we were preparing to go, I heard the first yipping of coyotes that evening.
The drive home was mesmerizing, as the light turned the landscape golden. Deer grazed near the roadside and a boar feral pig did his best to ignore us.
Wild dogs stitched together the day’s theme it seemed.
Just that morning, Tom Stienstra, the outdoors columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, had published a piece about the loss of his beloved black chow dog, Black Bart.
The suspected culprits? A pack of hungry coyotes.
I’ve never felt menaced by a coyote. More times than I can count, they’ve watched me or even followed me, but my sense is that it was curiosity that motivated them. Stienstra explained that a lone coyote will often lure a solitary dog away, allowing the whole pack to attack and consume the dog. That seems plausible. A coyote once followed our little dog and me for nearly an hour, barking and carrying on much of the time.
After polishing off that watermelon, I settled in with the current issue of Audubon magazine.
In it, Ted Williams writes of the stunning recovery of the northern Rockies wolf population. Williams is perhaps America’s best living nature writer. His work is carefully researched and always provocative.
The first wolves were reintroduced in 1995. Fifteen went to Yellowstone and 17 to central Idaho.
Wildlife biologists hoped that some day the population would grow to at least 100 wolves and 10 breeding pairs in each of three states – Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. That would allow the animals to lose their official “endangered” status.
By February of this year, just 12 years after 32 animals were released, the population was estimated at 1,294 wolves and 86 breeding pairs.
The wolves appear to be thriving, and so does the controversy that began to surround them long before they were captured for the planned U.S. introduction.
The facts would not appear to attach themselves to the emotions expressed. Fewer than 1 percent of all cattle deaths in the re-introduction area over the past 12 years can be connected to wolves. Their preferred prey, elk, continues to thrive to the point that the states are working to cut their numbers.
Although there are scattered reports of wolves in the northern Sierra today, it’s generally agreed that California’s only wild dog is the coyote, a much smaller animal that, unlike wolves, coexists successfully near large numbers of people.
Much is known about coyotes and their behavior, because we’ve had ample opportunity to study them in more than 100 years of government-subsidized efforts to eliminate them, or at least reduce their numbers.
During that time, the coyote’s range and numbers both expanded.
Here’s a documented fact: coyotes can maintain their numbers, even if 70 percent of a population is killed annually. In most areas, government efforts to control coyote populations were abandoned as costly and ineffective.
In San Benito County, the Board of Supervisors is mulling over the idea of restoring a paid position dedicated to controlling unwanted animals. That’s insanity that a poor county like ours can ill afford.
We were all weaned on fairy tales that cast wolves in the bad guy role, just as most of us were taught that coyotes are contemptible, sneaky vermin.
It’s more sensible – and certainly cheaper – to recognize the North America’s wild dogs are with us – forever. Then we can get on to the business of learning to live with them.
