Coyote America

by Dan Flores

  In a story in a magazine read by hunters and fishermen, a caption for a photo of a coyote killed by 1080 minced no words: “Agonizing death throes of coyote killed by 1080, one of the deadliest poisons yet devised, show in snow furrowed away by thrashing of head, legs.” In 1958, Carhart told his readers that for two decades a federal program had spent $500 million to spread the new poisons across 100 million acres in the United States, producing “a parade of death.” Carhart was a tough westerner, but he ended his exposé with a powerful declaration: “I am scared.”

  Taxpayer-funded Wildlife Services still kills 80,000 coyotes a year. Courtesy Dan Flores.

  Carson was scared too. She had become aware of and increasingly alarmed about DDT for the same reason that the mammalogists in the 1930s had called out the predacides in use then. Like the strychnine used against coyotes, DDT, commonly applied though aerial spraying, produced enormous collateral damage among nontarget species. DDT had first attracted attention for its success against typhus-carrying lice among World War II troops. After the war the chemical companies widely advertised it as a modern miracle, the solution for everything from agricultural pests to backyard mosquitos. They told a trusting public the spray was utterly harmless, and evidently we believed them. To a kid like me, growing up in sweltering Louisiana summers, only Jesus appearing in the clouds would have been more miraculous than the visits of the “spray truck.” Suddenly it was possible to play outside in the summertime without becoming a mass of red welts from bayou mosquitos, and since everyone said it was safe, my friends and I rode our bicycles blissfully in the wet, white spray behind the trucks that rumbled regularly through town.

  About the time my mother was making me change my DDT-drenched shirts before coming to dinner, Rachel Carson discovered that the chemical sprayed over a wildlife sanctuary near her home in Maryland was not just killing insects. Birds, in particular, were dying horribly in the days following spraying episodes. As she began to work on what became Silent Spring, Carson became convinced that by poisoning nature, we were not just fouling the environment around us; we were poisoning ourselves. As sensitive as the author was to the impact of poisons on nontarget creatures like birds, this was not Aldo Leopold’s truly revolutionary biocentrism. Carson’s major point was that human bodies are permeable and that DDT sprayed on insects bioaccumulated up the food chain to humans. Ultimately this anthropocentric argument made Silent Spring the revolutionary book it became. As she said, “If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers could conceive of no such problem.”

  Despite the chemical and agricultural industries’ best efforts to portray Silent Spring and its author as “hysterical,” within a year the book had gone through three printings, and some forty state legislatures were entertaining pesticide bills. Eventually it produced a ban on DDT use in the United States. But in a larger way, Carson’s book aroused in the American public a growing revulsion at the ill-considered poisoning of the natural world taking place around us every day of the week. As she put it, misguided government policies were placing “poisonous and biologically potent chemicals… indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm.” And much of that poisoning was in the service of the outright eradication of species after species, as if somehow North American evolution had floundered along for eons just waiting for us to show up to weed the place properly.

  That kind of thing had been happening in coyote country for half a century already. But Leopold and Carson, and Walt Disney too, were making the world a different place in the 1960s. In 1963 John Kennedy’s secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall, appointed a board to report on wildlife management in the national parks and asked it to look also at federal predator-control policies, particularly as they involved the use of poisons and especially on the public lands managed by federal agencies. One of the committee members, A. Starker Leopold, son of the now late famous author and biologist, had spent the last few years studying grizzlies in Mexico, where he and his graduate students had discovered that poisons put out by PARC Fish and Wildlife Service personnel threatened the bears’ very existence.

  The board’s report to Udall, famous back in the age of ecology as the “Leopold Report,” fell under Secretary Udall’s eyes in the spring of 1964. Various constituencies over the years have either hailed or decried it. Among certain cognoscenti it is probably best known now for its historically naive assumption that Europeans had inherited a “wilderness” continent when they began colonizing America. Despite at least 15,000 years of Indian life in America and the obvious manipulation of continental ecology that implied, the Leopold Report recommended that the national parks be considered wilderness vignettes and preserved in the timeless condition they enjoyed when white eyes first fell on them. Postmodernist academics refer to this, in classes full of earnest graduate students, as “privileging a point of view.”

  Thirty years after the Leopold Report, I had several private breakfasts with Stewart Udall in Missoula, Montana, where I taught at the university, and asked him about the Leopold Report’s seeming blindness to North American history. I recall that the former interior secretary paused for only a moment, then reminded me of how innocent the country had been in so many ways in the early 1960s, to the point that we barely considered that America even had a history before Europeans had arrived. “We seemed to think back then that somehow, some way, things like nature and evolution had gotten repealed by the twentieth century.” He shook his head. “We thought we didn’t have to pay any attention to nature anymore. The sixties pretty much disabused us of that!”

  We haven’t remembered the Leopold Report’s predator recommendations in quite the same way as its account of the state of the national parks, but they were part of a string of events that were leading in a surprising and in fact revolutionary direction. The report’s comments about the federal predator-control program were entirely damning, although in 1964 they fell short of calling on the government to end poisoning. Still, the board was willing to tell Udall that “the program of animal control… has become an end in itself and no longer is a balanced component of an overall scheme of wildlife husbandry and management.” The report continued, “In the opinion of this Board, far more animals are being killed than would be required for effective protection of livestock… [and] wildlands resources.”

  While the Leopold Report’s criticism of federal predator policy was important, it was not enough. As the age of ecology began to take off, it was becoming clear to scientists and the ever-growing legions of environmentalists that nothing would change unless change was forced. The agency’s victims continued to pile up alarmingly. Within months of the Leopold Report, PARC’s field agents had poisoned off, in Arkansas, one of the last remaining red wolf populations in the country. They treated the occasional Mexican wolves straggling across the border in the Southwest like scouts for terrorist revolutionaries and promptly poisoned them too. In 1965 one of the last populations of black-footed ferrets on the Great Plains disappeared when PARC operatives poisoned into utter oblivion the huge South Dakota prairie dog town they inhabited. Meanwhile, in California, agency use of Compound 1080 against coyotes produced a classic poison overreach, almost wiping the giant California condors off the planet. One condor carcass was so toxic with 1080, it killed all the beetles a museum used to try to strip away the flesh!

  Starker Leopold’s father, Aldo, had argued fifteen years earlier for a revolutionary principle in human affairs: a recognition that other species in this world possess an innate right to existence. “Biocentrism” 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. In Western civilization, steps in that direction had included
the Magna Carta of 1215, the constitutions produced by the American and French revolutions, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the vote, and civil rights legislation in the 1960s. The step Leopold’s followers pressed for in the late 1960s, however, struck many as the biggest step in extending ethics in human history. It advanced the radical idea that we offer ethical treatment—at least by guaranteeing their right to coexist on the planet with us—to other species.

  The sea change underway in so many aspects of American culture was in full roar by the mid-1960s. Environmentalism would embrace a host of primarily human-centered issues: air and water pollution, toxic wastes, nuclear power, a search for renewable energy. But the ten years after 1964, following Congress’s passage of the Wilderness Act, were truly the age of ecology, the most biocentric decade in American history. Leopold’s and Carson’s books and Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf initiated it, pop culture coyotes contributed in a kind of TV-land Rorschach suggestion, and an emerging sense of local uncoupling from the designs of the nation and a suspicion of authority carried it forward.

  Accidental eradication of creatures it had taken North America millions of years to produce because we were too self-absorbed to notice was not a new thing under the sun. Maybe condors and black-footed ferrets and eagles were collateral damage in the same way that ivory-billed woodpeckers once were. Adapted to life in old-growth forests, ivory-bills ended up occupying too narrow a niche in the modern world. They disappeared not because of direct attack but because their habitat got logged. Of the eighteen mammal, thirty-four bird, and nine fish extinctions in America since 1600, some were “accidental”; species with small populations or very specialized niches, like ivory-bills, had simply died out. Most were victims of crass greed: market hunting destroyed the Labrador duck, the great auk, and, against all odds, the passenger pigeon, and the capitalist market wiped nearly 30 million bison and 15 million pronghorn antelope off the face of continent. But many other species fell into the same category as wolves and coyotes: they were coldly marked for outright extermination. We successfully eradicated the bright green and yellow Carolina parakeet, our only native parrot and one of America’s most beautiful birds (look at Audubon’s painting of them sometime) because, as with coyotes, agriculturalists thought they were pests whose lives weren’t worth the space the creatures were taking up.

  During this unique and special period, a wave of ecological mindedness was building to a crest. In 1964 Secretary Udall’s office had compiled a list of sixty-three American bird and animal species that scientists believed were “rare” or “endangered,” a number that grew to eighty-three by 1966. Udall called the bill drawn up by the Lyndon B. Johnson administration to redress fears of extinction for these creatures the Endangered Species Preservation Act. Introduced into Congress by Representative John Dingell of Michigan, the act represented a couple of small first steps. It established the legal category of “endangered species,” a list of which a group of international scientists was already compiling in a so-called Red Data Book. But the 1966 law made killing such species a crime only in a very circumscribed area: the US National Wildlife Refuges. Congress passed the act with little fanfare in 1966. The same blasé approach characterized 1969’s Endangered Species Conservation Act, which also came out of the Johnson administration and made fish, crustaceans, and invertebrates—not just birds and mammals—eligible for “endangered” classification.

  By 1969 Richard Nixon was president of the United States, but remarkably that did not mean environmentalism’s moment in the sun had passed. Difficult as it might be to imagine from the perspective of the twenty-first century, environmentalism in the late 1960s was a bipartisan issue that at least some Republicans endorsed. When Nixon took office, the first Earth Day was only a year away. Anyway, saving the planet hardly seemed controversial in an age of inner-city riots and massive student protests against the war in Vietnam. Nixon himself, of course, had not the slightest interest in nature. On a spectrum of nature-loving American presidents, with Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson occupying one end, Nixon pretty much bookends the other. But he recognized a political bellwether, and even if he privately thought environmentalist interest in animals was pathetic sentimentalism, Nixon believed that if he and his administration publicly endorsed environmental causes, he might be able to swing the student and youth vote toward the Republicans. If, that is—as one of the president’s advisors put it—he could “identify the Republican Party with concern for environmental quality.” How controversial could environmentalism be anyway?

  So, counterintuitively, the Nixon Republicans actually created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970, although this did not fool many Americans. When the first Earth Day in history was celebrated in April of that year, CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite reported that the crowds were “predominantly anti-Nixon.” In his pursuit of youthful environmentalists, the president clearly needed another issue. And for someone with so little animal magnetism himself, he came up with a most unlikely one. With magazines from Field & Stream to Sports Illustrated to the New Yorker then running exposé articles on the government’s poisoning campaigns against coyotes and eagles, in a Coyote trick as delicious as Elvis joining Nixon’s antidrug war as a snitch, the president suddenly determined that embracing the well-being of coyotes could improve his political fortunes!

  In the wake of the early 1970s media firestorm, the Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Humane Society joined to sue Nixon’s Interior Department. Their antipoisoning lawsuit argued, among other things, that since the federal poisoning program was taking place without meeting the new legal requirement to conduct an environmental impact study, it clearly violated the administration’s own National Environmental Policy Act. Seeking an immediate injunction to stop the predator-control program in its tracks, environmental groups eventually agreed to drop the lawsuit if the Nixon administration ended poisoning on public lands by 1972.

  So Nixon appointed a committee to look once again at a federal agency that critics claimed was going way overboard in poisoning scores of thousands of coyotes, eagles, and even bears. While this committee included A. Starker Leopold, this time it was headed by Stanley Cain, a former undersecretary of Interior, and this time the outcome was different. Across less than a decade, there had been a seismic shift in the country’s worldview. The Cain Committee’s report, submitted to the White House in October 1971, did not equivocate: the administration should at once ban Animal Damage Control from using poisons to control coyotes and other predators. A practice that had been routine since the early century and viewed askance by only a handful of scientists suddenly began to seem, in the bright light of the new worldview, not just inappropriate but downright repulsive.

  In the case of coyotes, the “silent majority” Nixon always invoked in his political speeches actually did include the president himself, or at least it appeared to if you take at face value the text of a policy speech he delivered to Congress. Nixon’s February 1972 address probably reflected more the nuanced sentiments of its author, Republican environmentalist Russell Train, than any values deeply held by Nixon. Nixon almost certainly had never read Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, but this early 1972 environmental address nonetheless invoked Leopold’s biocentric thinking in explaining the sharp new detour in the administration’s policies.

  America had reached a new stage of civilization, our president told us. “This is the environmental awakening. It marks a new sensitivity of the American spirit and a new maturity of American public life. It is working a revolution in values.” He went on to explain what this meant. “Wild places and wild things constitute a treasure to be protected and cherished for all time.… [T]he wonder, beauty, and elemental force in which the least of them share suggest a higher right to exist—not granted to them by man, and not his to take away.”

  Nixon had not flinched from a line about other species’ “right to exist,” and he didn’t flin
ch from the predator question either. “The old notion that ‘the only good predator is a dead one’ is no longer acceptable as we understand that even the animals and birds which sometimes prey on domesticated animals have their own value in maintaining the balance of nature.” The president did acknowledge that the administration was, in effect, joining this concern—“The widespread use of highly toxic poisons to kill coyotes and other predatory animals and birds is a practice which has been a source of increasing concern to the American public”—but he was now prepared to make it his own: “I am today issuing an Executive Order barring the use of poisons for predator control on all public lands.”

  Banning poisons in the coyote war and acknowledging wild animals’ “higher right to exist” were not platform planks that Nixon would campaign on for reelection in 1972. Indeed, when he discovered, despite his professed embrace of the Age of Ecology, that young people and environmentalists still supported Democrat George McGovern, Nixon’s environmentalism faded as magically as it had appeared. To his credit, however, he did follow through on the policy promises he made in early 1972. Two presidential executive orders followed on the heels of the address, one banning federal agents from using poisons against mammalian and aviary predators and scavengers, the other outlawing the use of poisons on US public lands.

  It was enough of a break from history to stun anyone. Strychnine baits that had produced lightning-struck coyote corpses in America for 120 years—banned. Thallium sulfate that had resulted in blind, hairless coyotes shivering to freezing deaths—banned. Cyanide coyote-getters—banned. Compound 1080, amazingly, banned. There would be no more 1080-poisoned coyotes running frantically, uncontrollably, until they dropped. In 1972, those kinds of things at least seemed to be at an end.