Dan Flores

Old world folk wisdom had long since said predators had to go.

So with little evidence to send its coyotes to eradication, that's what had to happen.

First with strychnine, then with newer, more effective poisons like thallium sulfate, sodium fluoroacetate, better known as 1080, and sodium cyanide, federal hunters between 1915 and 1972 killed an incredible 8.5 million coyotes.

In the wake of Rachel Carson's historic anti-poisons book, Silent Spring, though, of all the unlikely politicians, it was Richard Nixon who finally ended blanket coyote genocide.

The old notion that the only good predator is a dead one is no longer acceptable, he told the American public in 1972.

Nixon went on, "'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.'"

I am today issuing an executive order banning the use of poisons for predator control on all public lands.

Looking back on this history, it seems clear that persecuting coyotes without any scientific basis was purely and simply an act of myopic ideology.

The nations of Western Europe had long before destroyed their own wild predators, and making America into the image of Europe obviously meant we should do the same.

That European template was in place prior to Darwin, though, and preceded the emergence of the new 20th century science of ecology to issue a corrective.

But starting in the 1920s, ecologists like Joseph Grinnell

who with his student E. Raymond Hall did foundational work on ecological niches, and eventually Aldo Leopold, who combined first-rate science with a literary gift for reaching the public, became opponents of the reflexive war on coyotes.

So were the Murie brothers, who did basic foundational science on coyotes and Jackson Hole and Yellowstone coyotes.

in the late 1930s.

Since Ernest Thompson Seton had written Tito at the start of the 20th century, policymakers had just assumed that tripling down on the coyote of war eventually would work.

According to a story in Sports Afield, by the late 1950s, withdrawn $500 million of taxpayer money at coyote killing.

no one was prepared for the actual, entirely unexpected outcome.

Millions of individual coyotes died, to be sure, but somehow coyotes not only were undiminished in the West, the war began to spread them out of their original range and into states in the Midwest, South, and East where predator eradication had successfully wiped out wolves.

And with towns and cities of every size setting up dog catchers and pounds to eliminate stray town dogs, now new possibilities open for coyotes in cities.

Coyotes, after all, have lived in our midst forever.