Dan Flores

a ranching subsidy that grew so large during the territorial stage that it devoured two-thirds of the government's budgets.

As a state, Montana outdid mere bounties.

In 1905, its legislature passed a law requiring veterinarians to introduce sarcoptic mange into the wild canid population, an early form of state-sanctioned biological warfare.

A century later, coyotes and wolves in the northern west still haven't recovered from that disease.

When the forerunner of the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S.

Biological Survey, began to cast about for more reliable congressional funding in the early 20th century, Director C. Hart Merriam hit on the idea of making the Bureau the answer to the so-called predator problem.

Faithful to a fault to their packs, mates, and pups, wolves were relatively easy marks for government hunters armed with poison bait.

As Ernest Thompson Seton wrote in perhaps the most famous of his wildlife stories, Lobo, King of Karumpaw, with the scent of a dispatched pack member, a hunter could proceed to lure and kill every additional member of a wolf pack.

In Montana, 23,575 wolves had died in 1899.

By 1926,

The number had fallen to 17.

So by the mid-20s, the Bureau reset its focus on coyotes, an animal that Bureau scientist E.A.

Goldman now labeled the arch-predator of our time.

Typical of American wildlife decisions of the age, the most vicious war of extermination we ever attempted against a native animal took place entirely absent of any scientific research into how coyotes functioned in ecosystems or indeed in human economies.

When government finally did dispatch ecologists with the charge of proving coyote villainy and justifying their eradication, only to have studies by Olas and Adolph Murray determine that in fact coyotes were ancient curators of ecologies whose actions were overwhelmingly beneficial to humans, the Bureau doubled down on coyote eradication.

Its public relations arm even sent canned articles to newspapers that brainwashed whole generations about predators, positioning coyotes in the minds of many as the most contemptible of American animals.

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.