The first species I featured under the Creatures links were coyotes (Canis latrans). While most of my work on canids has been with wolves, I have been fascinated by coyotes for some time. Known to William Thomas Seton as the American jackal (they fill the same niche) and Audubon as the prairie wolf, coyotes present many of the same ethics and policy issues as do their larger kin.

There are a host of websites for coyotes. I have linked two that I believe are the most interesting. The first link is to Project Coyote, http://projectcoyote.org/, a wonderful organization teaching people how to coexist with coyotes in rural and urban landscapes. The second is to The Daily Coyote, http://www.dailycoyote.net/, a photoblog about an orphaned coyote pup and the woman who adopted him.

I chose these sites because they are especially informative, moving, and thought provoking.

Project Coyote focuses on coyotes as a species, with an emphasis on science and environmental policy. It helps communities implement the “Marin model” of using non-lethal methods to control human-coyote conflicts. This is an excellent model for living with other kinds of predators as well. Founded by Camilla Fox, a well known animal activist, Project Coyote is simply the best organization out there advocating for coyotes and what she terms compassionate conservation. In the words of its mission statement:

Project Coyote promotes educated coexistence between people and coyotes; we do this by championing progressive management policies that reduce human-coyote conflict, supporting innovative scientific research, and by fostering respect for and understanding of Americas native wild song dog.

We believe coyotes are a vital component of rural and urban communities, deserving of respect for their adaptability, resilience, and intelligence. We aim to create a shift in attitudes toward coyotes and other native carnivores by replacing ignorance and fear with understanding and appreciation.

The Daily Coyote focuses on a coyote individual, emphasizing his interpersonal relationships with humans and other animals. Chairlie was orphaned as a ten day old pup, and thence adopted by Shreve Stockton. Here is how she describes their relationship.

Charlie is a wild-born coyote who was unexpectedly delivered to my doorstep in April 2007 after both his parents were shot for killing sheep. Whatever reservations I had about raising a wild animal simply didn’t matter – couldn’t matter – when I realized his survival, at least in the short term, depended on me.

Charlie rides in my truck, walks on a leash, and adores the cat and his hound-dog sister. Though we’ve been together for three years, I don’t call him my pet. He’s more like my co-pilot. I don’t wish to own him, just to live together in harmony. And that we do.

Both websites are fascinating in their own right. It is their juxtaposition, however, that is especially enriching.

Charlies relationship with humans troubles Project Coyote. Coyotes are wild creatures, not pets, and they should be treated and respected as such. Despite her efforts to acknowledge Charlies wildness, Stockton cannot stop others from misinterpreting the relationship and thinking of Charlie as simply another beautiful dog. The trouble then begins when folks extend this misinterpretation to coyotes in general. Some people are careless and treat coyotes as if they were a family pet. This increases the risk of coyote-human conflict, and when a coyote bites an adult or a child, the work of Project Coyote is made much harder.

In one sense it doesnt matter that coyote aggression is an incredibly rare event, and virtually always the fault of adult humans who feed coyotes and/or leave their children unattended in their midst. Still, every nip or bite feeds the discourse that coyotes are dangerous, and only hunting, trapping, and poisoning can control their depredations. Project Coyote works incredibly hard to correct this misperception, and so I can well understand their worry about a photoblog like The Daily Coyote.

And yet, when we stop thinking of coyotes in the abstract or in aggregate, and instead experience them as individuals, another aspect comes to light. They are aware, self-aware, emotional and social beings. While not the same as us, they share enough similarities to be able to bond and sustain caring relationships within and across the species divide. Charlie runs in a blended pack that includes a human, feline and hound dog. He demonstrates at an immediate, visceral level that coyotes are not the vermin, varmints and villains that anti-coyote interest groups claim them to be. I suspect that for every bite setting back the work of Project Coyote, viewing Charlie on the web opens peoples hearts and minds to learning to live with wildlife.

At a personal level, I am torn. Project Coyotes is right; dont try this at home! Yet Stockton does right by Charlie too. There is nothing wrong per se with those relationships that corp up now and again between humans and wild animals. Indeed, this was one of the means wild animals became domestic in the first place.

I will admit I also have empathy for Stockton and Charlie. Their story mirrors a similar experience of my own with a wildcat named Delilah, rest her soul. See Delilah: In From the Wild (http://www.williamlynn.net/blog/delilah-in-from-the-wild) and Delilah and Cow Tag (http://www.williamlynn.net/blog/delilah-cow-tag/). So too, I have experienced those with reservations about people and wild or feral cats. The cats are demonized by some, including many in the environmental movement who believe killing them is an answer to the loss of biodiversity. They consequently condemn animal advocates working in feral cat programs, or resisting the establishing of public hunting seasons for so called “ditch lions”.

At the level of ethics and policy, these differing scales of analysis — species and individual — present an opportunity to explore human-animal relations in new and surprising ways. Is the dichotomy between wild and domestic as hard and fast as some like to think? What is the place of wild animals in the landscape, especially those rural and urban landscapes so dominated by humans? Can people learn to live with wild individuals in closer proximity than a gulag of zoos, wildlife refuges and wilderness preserves? How we live with coyotes exemplifies these questions, and has implications for many other issues of environmental policy and human-animal relations.

The continued growth of human populations and sprawling development is not good for the planet. Yet it is a fact of life that will not be arrested and reversed in the near future. Whether we like it or not, then, contact between people and wildlife will occur with increasing frequency. Given the ubiquity of coyotes as the largest non-human predator to inhabit both our cities, suburbs and farms, they embody this ongoing trend. We can seek to relegate coyotes and other wildlife to a gulag of refuges, parks and wildlands. Or we can begin to find ways to coexist with them whenever we can. Thinking about the work of Project Coyote and The Daily Coyote together provides us an opportunity to imagine new possibilities for wildlife to flourish alongside human civilization.

Image: Fangyou, http://www.dailycoyote.net/.