By Isaac Stein Sentinel Staff SentinelSource.com
If not exactly beloved, the eastern coyote has some powerful attributes.
As compared to their southwestern counterparts — the real-life Wile E. Coyotes — the easterners are about twice the size, and eat pretty much anything. Squirrels, fawns, garbage and house cats are all fair game for this small game, according to a fact sheet from the N.H. Fish & Game Department.
That said, eastern coyotes, which are about 9 percent wolf and typically weigh 30 to 50 pounds, “pose little risk to people” and a “great majority … don’t prey upon livestock” — until they learn that young livestock are easy prey, according to the document. Then, the sheet adds, “depredation can become a problem.”
They’re also common; roughly 50 of them are probably in your town, according to Ted Walski, a veteran Fish & Game biologist. He ballparked the total state count at 10,000, though he added it’s an unofficial tally.
And, at the moment, some of the canids are the choice prey for a local contest.
Through the end of the month, Pelletier’s Sports Shop Inc. of Jaffrey is hosting its third annual coyote-hunting contest. There are three entry categories: heaviest male, heaviest female and most coyotes caught by a single person.
As of Sunday, the largest male caught was 53 pounds, 8 ounces; the largest female was 37 pounds, 7 ounces, and the most caught among the 27 participants was four coyotes.
The rules of the contest, which kicked off on Jan. 1, are simple. As explained by store owner Bruce Pelletier, participants need only hold a valid hunting license, and the carcasses must be weighed on Pelletier’s scales.
By state law, there’s no closed season on coyotes, which means they may be hunted year-round. There’s also no bag limit, meaning hunters can take as many as they like.
Pelletier’s contest has precedents; similar events have been held in New York, Illinois and Virginia. Additionally, Coyote Creek Outfitters, LLC, a Rochester firearms and sporting goods store, is hosting a similar contest through April 1, according to its Facebook page.
Electronic coyote calls are the prizes in Pelletier’s contest.
Calls are species-specific sounds used to attract animals, and can be either manual or electronic; hunters can also use their hands.
The contest, according to Pelletier, is intended as a promotion to “get people in the store.”
But its existence — and the fact that Pelletier’s is giving out prizes — has one Spofford resident angry.
She and others argue that the way coyotes are hunted in the state are inhumane, while supporters of the hunt say hunting and competition is a valuable part of life in New Hampshire.
An objection
On Pelletier’s Facebook page, several commenters responded to pictures of dead coyotes by questioning the contest, which, in turn, drew responses from contest supporters.
On March 11, Cheryl Maibusch of Spofford wrote a letter to the editor of The Sentinel, in which she argued the contest was inhumane, and called on Pelletier’s to end it.
Maibusch described herself as an “animal advocate, seriously, since the 2nd grade.” She said she’s a member of Bikers Against Animal Cruelty, a Connecticut-based nonprofit group comprised of “compassionate motorcycle enthusiasts who advocate against animal cruelty and neglect,” according to its website.
She said she writes letters to her congressional representatives on humanitarian issues, used to run a humane education program for middle-schoolers and transported rescue dogs, among other activities.
In her letter, she objected to the fact that prizes are attached to the contest, and drew a distinction between a “reprehensible and destructive contest” and “responsible hunters … guided by ethics that promote respect for wildlife.”
In a separate interview with The Sentinel, she said she sees an ethical difference between hunting for subsistence and hunting for a contest. The former, she said, is acceptable; the latter encourages a culture of violence.
She also suggested the coyotes’ elusive nature encourages “people (to) do more unorthodox things to try to kill them.”
She referred to similar hunting contests, such as a 2013 frog-gigging (spearing) contest held as a scholarship fundraiser in Tennessee, as similarly objectionable.
“There’s enough violence in this world. Why are we fostering more? ... It’s not a retribution thing, because these animals have done nothing to us. ... It’s just a ‘Hey, this’ll get publicity’ (contest),” she said. “There are other contests you can have that don’t involve killing something at all.”
Ethics and the hunt
In response to part of Maibusch’s letter, in which she wrote that “killing animals for cash and prizes in contests is inconsistent with the values of New Hampshirites (and).... killing contests will not be tolerated by a modern society,” Walski disagreed. Hunting is part of human heritage, he argued, as is competition.
“It’s a typical anti-hunter. Just because there’s some prize involved. Prizes, lotteries and betting, and football games, you name it. People are always contesting with one another. ... You give out prizes for the best (painting) of Mount Monadnock,” he said.
He also refuted Maibusch’s claim that coyotes “have done nothing to us,” saying they are known to kill livestock and pets.
Coyotes are “probably a significant reason why a lot of house cats disappear,” he said, noting he’d heard about a small dog killed this winter in Rindge. The number of dogs coyotes kill simply isn’t recorded by any authority, he said.
Walski, who lives in Langdon, also said he worries about the threat that coyotes pose to his two beagles, and emphasized that hunting is compatible with caring for animals.
“I’ve been a hunter since I was 5 or 6 years old. I try to take care of injured animals; I try to have an open mind. It’s people like (Maibusch) that don’t have the open mind,” he said. “But she would be some upset if that coyote killed all her 12 chickens, or geese, or whatever else she had.”
Chris Schadler of Webster, an environmental science professor at Rivier University in Nashua who has studied coyotes for about 30 years, said coyotes can kill the animals Walski mentioned. But she stressed that the onus is on owners to manage their animals.
“I used to have sheep, and I never lost a sheep to coyotes. ... I managed (them) so they weren’t vulnerable,” she said, adding that fencing in livestock and keeping pets in at night are ways to be responsible.
Schadler is also the New Hampshire/Vermont representative for Project Coyote. The nonprofit organization works to change laws and policies to protect native carnivores from abuse and mismanagement, and advocates for “coexistence” instead of killing, according to its website.
Michael Morrison, a retired biology teacher at Monadnock Regional High School and a Fish & Game volunteer, addressed Maibusch’s concerns about hunting practices by saying there are best hunting practices that mitigate harm to animals.
“(With respect to) trapping … people assume that we have cruel instruments of torture, where these animals are left out for days and weeks and they’re injured, and that’s not the case at all,” he said. “There’s a best management practices for trapping where traps are modified so that the animal’s footpad doesn’t lose circulation, and they have swivels, so if an animal flips and turns, it doesn’t stress its joints.”
However, Schadler said some methods used to hunt and kill coyotes, like electronic calls and trapping, aren’t humane.
It’s “pathetically easy” to lure coyotes by using electronic calls, she said, adding that popular ones sound like wounded rabbits.
She also believes electronic calls violate fair-chase rules, which govern the ethical taking of game animals. Fish and Game also uses fair chase as a justification for why possible hunting tactics, like using drones, are banned in New Hampshire — but using bait and calls for coyote hunting is legal.
And unlike Morrison, Schadler argues trapping isn’t humane, because, while regulations exist, oversight over individuals’ practices is slim. And even if a coyote is trapped and released, she said, the event is potentially traumatizing.
The ecology
Whether hunting coyotes affects local populations or has negative ecological effects also depends on who you ask.
In her letter to the editor, Maibusch said that “killing coyotes disrupts their social structure, which encourages more breeding and migration, and in the end, results in more coyotes.” She added that coyotes balance their ecosystems, so removing them would yield serious negative environmental effects.
Schadler backed Maibusch’s assertion, saying that the number of eastern coyotes is actually artificially high because of hunting. She explained that a coyote pack is comprised of a mating pair and their offspring; if one of the mates dies, through hunting or other means, the youngest pups may face greater risk of death.
Conversely, the older offspring may benefit from the relative abundance of food in the area from the unnatural elimination of other coyotes — which, in turn, enables them to reproduce at a faster rate, she said.
She also said that if hunting coyotes was attempted as a population control measure, as it has been in Arizona and Wyoming, hunters would have to kill 70 percent of the existing population every year to reduce coyote numbers.
That’s never been accomplished — and it would be better to not hunt them at all, she said.
But Walski, who has been with Fish and Game for decades, said Pelletier’s contest is unlikely to have an effect on the local coyote population and the health of the regional ecosystem.
To start, he explained that even with contests, coyotes aren’t prime targets for hunters, for a number of reasons. They’re hard to catch because each individual coyote covers a large territory, and is mostly active at night. Also, the pelts, at least for the eastern coyote, don’t fetch terrific prices in the marketplace.
That’s substantiated by market information from Trapping Today, an online blog: “Coyotes remain the major bright spot in the low fur market, and pale Western coyotes are bringing very good prices. They sold at 100% and averaged $56. Eastern coyotes remained around $25.”
Walski added that the coyote population in southwestern New Hampshire has been stable during his tenure, and the species has actually expanded its territory into the mid-Atlantic states. Numerous media reports corroborate the assessment.
In November, for example, a pack of coyotes appeared at New York City’s LaGuardia Airport, as reported by NBC.
Morrison also said that with hunting and trapping, coyote populations can be kept close to carrying capacity, which is the number of organisms or crops that a region can support without environmental degradation.
Qualifying his statement as a generalization, he said that if animal populations are kept near or slightly below carrying capacity, they are healthier; without such predation they would more likely be affected by “starvation, and disease, and trauma, and overpopulation,” he said.
And he argued that it’s unfair to say that hunters don’t care about animals.
Walski added that conservation is different from pure preservation of a species.
“Conservation means ... the wise use of some of the renewable resource, whether it be trees, oysters, coyotes, deer ... (It’s) not this preservationist attitude ... they don’t have to listen to the weekly complaints about the bear running around the bird feeder, or the coyote killing their housecat,” he said.
Conversely, Schadler faulted Fish and Game for not discussing “whether it is ethical to allow a useful predator to be (hunted) ... to satisfy the desire that many people have to kill something.” And she argued that coyotes are given a bad rap as “varmints,” when they’re really dog-like in play and behavior.
The contest at the Jaffrey store ends Friday.
Feels have been hurt, here is CHERYL MAIBUSCH's letter
http://www.sentinelsource.com/opini...cle_6066a238-b0d5-5b1c-9219-c18937f1f347.html
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