Ep. 20: Coyote - America’s Jackal and Its Roller-Coaster Ride Through History | The American West

Like no other western animal the coyote has been a central character in the Pleistocene West, the Native West, and the Frontier. One of the epic stories of the Modern West is how coyotes are transferring their own brand of western survivalism to the entire country. Despite a $500 million-dollar war to exterminate them, the coyote is in fact The Dude, and The Dude absolutely abides. Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck https://www.instagram.com/velvetbuckwine. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/, Pandora https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272, Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west. MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 1:07Speaker 02

  As a poster animal of the West, the coyote has a roller coaster biography. Seen as a sacred deity in one phase, and a varmint meriting eradication in another. The ultimate outcome is not what anyone would predict. I'm Dan Florries, and this is The American West. Brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at velvetbuckvineyards.com. Enjoy responsibly.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  Coyote, America's jackal and its roller coaster ride through history.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  In the year 1900, the Canadian-American nature writer Ernest Thompson Seton wrote one of the more intriguing stories ever penned about coyotes. Since coyotes have been inspiring human storytellers for more than 10,000 years, that's not faint praise. Among early American writers, even Lewis and Clark, who introduced Americans to the animal and named it prairie wolf, were late to the game. Way back in 1651, Spanish author Francisco Hernandez had written Concerning the Coyote or Indian Fox, a piece that included a curious take about an intelligent animal who didn't forget.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  "The coyote is a persevering revenger of injuries," the Spaniard wrote, "but by the same token, is grateful to those who do well by it." Closer in time to Seton, there was Mark Twain's several pages of coyote description in his bestselling book, Roughing It. "The proper pronunciation of the name is coyote," Twain told readers, but he didn't stop there. "He is a long, slim, sick, and sorry-looking skeleton with a gray wolf skin stretched over it. He has a general slinking expression all over.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of want." The bar, then, was high. But Seton's Tito, the story of the coyote that learned how, wasn't just the lead piece in Scribner's in the 1900 August issue. Like many of the Indian coyote stories folklorists were just beginning to collect, Tito took a widely observable truth and offered an explanation for it. That truth was a widespread puzzlement about coyotes. Why weren't these wild dogs doing the proper thing and dying off?

• 4:19Speaker 02

  At the turn of the 20th century, the United States was waist-deep in the largest destruction and die-off of wildlife discoverable anywhere in modern world history. Thirty million bison were down to fewer than a thousand. Fifteen million pronghorns were all but gone. We had so devastated elk, bighorn sheep, and grizzly bears that they were surviving only as tiny remnants hiding in the deepest mountains. Five million wild horses were about to end up in pet food cans. And by 1920, we would have poisoned to death a million gray wolves. When Seton wrote "Tito, the most numerous bird species on earth," American passenger

• 5:03Speaker 02

  pigeons had 14 years of existence left. Yet, as the Scribner's article put it, "Despite the fierce war that had for a long time been waged against the coyote kind for some inexplicable reason, coyotes were not following suit." Indeed, the more we shot them, poisoned them, trapped them, ran them with dogs, blew up their dens, the more of them there seemed to be. By way of an explanation, Seton invented the Tito of his story. She is a little female coyote who is captured as a pup and chained in a ranchyard as a

• 5:46Speaker 02

  curiosity, where she shrewdly observes how her human captors use guns, traps, dogs, and poisons against her kin. Ultimately, she escapes, finds a mate, has pups of her own, and then proceeds to teach her pups and their children's children, as Seton phrased it, "all the tricks of coyote extermination." Seton's human analog, Moses, of course, an Israelite who by growing up among the Egyptians was able to learn their plans, which enabled him to save his people from destruction.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Tito is a charming story, belonging to a genre the literati among us would call allegory. If you weren't a sheepman or a predator hunter paid by one of the livestock associations, no doubt it was fun to imagine it might be true. And in any case, it fit well with the kind of Darwinian "animals are our kin" stories writers like Seton and Jack London were writing then. But in 1900, coyotes really were becoming more numerous. And not just that. In arid southwestern cities like Los Angeles, the wild song dogs were already attracting attention as urban dwellers.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  They were also primed for spreading out of the west and over the next 80 years would start showing up in urban jungles as far flung as Denver, Chicago, New York, as well as Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. It turned out, the coyote puzzle Seton tried to resolve with Tito was going to require figuring out a hell of a lot more of the coyote biography than we ever knew. Looking both directions in 1900, what a crazy roller coaster of a biography that has turned out to be. When we humans got to North America 23,000 years ago, coyotes greeted us at the front door.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  The Canada family, it produced not just dire wolves, gray wolves, jackals, and coyotes, but also your pup at home, is a five and a half million year old family of American animals. Jackals, gray wolves, and others did eventually migrate across the land bridges into the Old World. Gray wolf ancestors in particular, colonizing most of the northern hemisphere before returning to America about 30,000 years ago. Coyotes, though, never left. And by 800,000 years ago, were evolving into their modern form as a medium-sized jackal-like wolf.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  If you want to know what it's like to be an American, get to know the Canada that never left. Coyotes have been yipping and howling the original national anthem across the continent for nearly a million years. When humans wandering out of Africa and across Asia finally made it to North America, they confronted a massive die-off oddly similar to the one Seton would one day invoke in Scribner's magazine. Mammoths, camels, horses, lions, all were disappearing. But a particular survivor of that crash caught the attention of these first Americans, and soon they started thinking of it as an avatar, a stand-in for humans in the imagination.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Coyote with a capital C is not only a native deity from the Paleolithic, thus the oldest American god of which we have a record, as Old Man America, coyote was also the chief protagonist in this continent's oldest literature, both hero and fool of stories told around campfires and preserved by native people for ten millennia or more. Europeans arrived in America with experiences with bears, foxes, and wolves, but no prior experiences of any sort with coyotes. Innocent of any knowledge of Indians' ancient familiarity with the animal, even from accounts

• 10:04Speaker 02

  in Mesoamerica, where the Aztecs had long before named the animals coyote, Americans on the eastern seaboard didn't know of coyotes until Lewis and Clark named them prairie wolves. A line in Moby Dick testifies that when Melville was writing his masterpiece, we were still using that name. But by then southwestern travelers like Thomas Nuttall, Frederick Ruxton, Josiah Greg, and Mark Twain were hearing the Hispanicized three-syllable version, coyote, that western locals used. That led Twain to instruct Americans on how to say the name in his book in the early

• 10:49Speaker 02

  1870s, but not before mountain men and trappers unwilling to decorate a dog-like animal that snuck around their camps with three whole syllables took coyote back to the Midwest and the South. With no old-world mythology to call on, and scant interest in Indian religions or fables about a coyote deity, Americans found coyotes ripe for original interpretation. Beginning in the 1870s and for the rest of the 19th century, a new, unflattering impression formed in the American mind. Twain's coyote description and roughing it was intended as comedy,

• 11:33Speaker 02

  but laid the foundation for an assessment that grew worse as time went on. Gone now was the Indian deity who had created the world. Gone was even the perplexing prairie wolf of earlier in the century. Now, a new repetitive trope emerged. To New York journalist Horace Greeley, "The coyote was a sneaking, cowardly little wretch." Ernest Ingosol's 1887 "The Hound of the Plains" in Popular Science Monthly, and Edwin Saban's "The Coyote" in Overland Monthly in 1908,

• 12:14Speaker 02

  described coyotes as contemptible and especially perverse. "Their howls were eerie and blood-stealing, even defiant." "Coyotes lacked higher morals and were cowardly to the last degree," they wrote. Exploring ideas for commercial gain from the killing of coyotes, by 1920, an article in no less than Scientific American asserted that while coyotes weren't worth the price of the ammunition to shoot them, every patriotic American ought to kill coyotes on sight, since the coyote, the writer averred, was the original Bolshevik, the original Communist.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  From the perspective of Western stockmen, the impression the coyote gave of being a small wolf seemed all they needed to know. The first environmental act Old World colonists had implemented in America was to launch a war of extermination against wolves, and the coyote's turn had now come. Both stock associations and governments lavishly funded bounties, to the point of creating a new economic niche in the West: the bounty hunter. Montana was typical. As a territory, it created the first bounties on canid predators in 1883, and proceeded then to prostitute itself to the ranching industry's predator hatred.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Between 1883 and 1928, Montana paid bounties on a staggering 111,545 wolves and 886,367 coyotes. 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.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  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 Miriam 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 poisoned bait.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  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 1920, 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.”

• 15:48Speaker 02

  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 Adolf Muri determine that in fact coyotes were ancient curators of ecologies, whose actions were overwhelmingly beneficial to humans, the Bureau doubled down on coyote eradication.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  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 fluorocitate, better known as 1080, and sodium cyanide, federal hunters between 1915 and 1972 killed an incredible 8.5 million coyotes.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  But starting in the 1920s, ecologists like Joseph Grenell, 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 Mury brothers, who did basic foundational science on coyotes and Jackson Hole and Yellowstone in the late 1930s. Since Ernest Thompson Seton had written Tito at the start of the 20th century,

• 19:29Speaker 02

  policymakers had just assumed that tripling down on the coyote of war eventually would work. According to a story in Sports of Field, by the late 1950s, we'd thrown $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

• 20:13Speaker 02

  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. Archaeological work in ancient American cities like Chaco Canyon indicate as much. So do suburbs named for coyotes in the old Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. Naturalist Thomas Nudall found coyotes running through the streets of Carmel Mission on the central coast of California in the 1830s.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Los Angeles has never been without coyotes since its founding. So as coyotes spread across America in the 20th century, they eyed rats, mice, geese, and fruit trees, in short, all the opportunities where people weren't trapping or poisoning them or calling Wildlife Service hunters on them and moved in with us. Coyotes in Denver, Chicago, and everywhere else, including my parents' little town of 600 people in Louisiana, have been the result. Yet again, we have to learn to coexist because resistance is futile.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  How have coyotes managed to survive what wolves and scores of other species could not? Tito had been an allegorical answer. Another came from folk tradition in the southwest. The only thing smarter than a coyote is God. But a pair of biologists, Guy Connolly and Fred Knowlton, finally came up with the answer. As a result of co-evolution alongside larger wolves, which had long harassed them, coyotes had evolved a remarkable set of survival traits. Under assault, they have larger litters. If coyote numbers go down, more food sources mean they get more pups to adulthood.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  If the breeding alpha female of a pack dies, beta females breed and have more pups. Most remarkably, coyotes had evolved a rare ability we humans share called fission-fusion. Like us, they are normally a social or fusion species. But also like us, when conditions warrant, they can split into floaters and pairs, fission, and scatter and colonize. Connolly and Knowlton showed that you could kill 70% of a coyote population year after year without ultimately reducing its numbers. But you very likely did spread them.

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• 25:28Speaker 02

  Let me share a personal story. In the 21st century West, something resembling this is so common, the experience might not even be mine, although I'm pretty sure this particular one is. My wife Sarah and I are up early, brewing coffee as crimson and gold set off the kitchen of our house in Technicolor southwestern hues. An ordinary autumn dawn, beautiful enough to break your heart, is unfolding in the Galiseo Valley, south of Santa Fe. Then I see Sarah's eyes widen. She's looking past me through the windows, so I track her line of sight. Five coyotes, three of them gangly fall pups looking for all the world like a posse

• 26:12Speaker 02

  of cruising teenagers, are trotting single file past our kitchen. Backlit by the colors of the breaking day, every hair on their sharp muzzles, upright ears, and floating tails is outlined in chromium yellow light. The alpha pair, a robust male and a grassile female, is bringing up the rear, and as they trot that effortless coyote gait past us, I note two more details. Right off, the female is familiar. I know her. She's an unusual coyote, recognizable because she sports a white rather than the more normal black tip at the end of her tail.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  At the same time, I register that two of the yearlings carry that same genetic marker, although in a less pronounced form, their creamed tail tips speckled with black. This distinctive female has raised pups in the canyon below the house for at least the past three years. I've watched her even longer. Second detail, the male seems to be a new consort. Has some accident befallen her mate with the split ear? And his reaction makes me laugh. Gliding past the house as if he's on skates, his golden eyes suddenly narrow as he spots our brawny Alaskan Malamute, Cody, sleepily lounging on the front porch.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Never breaking stride but with a quick lip curl and grimace, no time to hang out, the new male bears a row of lovely white teeth. Cody has been around coyotes all his life, and seeing them in the yard isn't all that novel, so he merely sits up and watches as the parade goes by. So do we. It's a wild, canid show to match the dawn, and we haven't had to go to Yellowstone or Alaska to see it. Our coffee cups steaming the air, we've just stood in the kitchen and looked outside.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  In one of the most intriguing wildlife stories of our time, not just Westerners, but everyone in America is now getting to see small Western wolves out the kitchen windows. The coyote has turned out to be the dude, and the dude absolutely abides. Difficult as it is to expel politics from our minds these days, a coyote in the yard can manage it. Whether those golden eyes, that slender snout, or the insolent swish of a tail charm you or outrage you, the sight of a coyote is never boring. Materializing magically into familiar surroundings we long ago assumed were bled of anything

• 28:51Speaker 02

  wild, a single coyote can evaporate all illusions of our successful transplant of civilization to the continent. No world that has a jackal-like wolf glancing at you as it trots by with houses and highways in the background can ever be said to have banished the wild. I've never had so much fun writing a book as I had writing one I called Coyote America, and one of the reasons was that its narrative arc inverted everything we're used to in environmental stories. In Coyote America, nature wins. Coyotes have taken everything we humans can throw at them, then calmly occupied the very ground we're standing on.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  And they've done it repeatedly. Dire wolves, mammoths, and saber-toothed cats may not have been able to survive the Pleistocene, but coyotes did. America's scorched earth campaigns against the country's wildlife a century ago drove numerous species to extinction or the edge of it. That was not the coyote's fate, who thrived as other creatures, big and small, disappeared on all sides. Targets of wholesale extermination in the 20th century, coyotes have responded to that by spreading across America, making it to Delaware their 49th conquest in 2011. Only Hawaii lacks them.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  No other mammal except humans has ever exhibited such cosmopolitan talents for that kind of successful expansion.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  To do the coyote justice, you have to engage not just with the animal itself, and every field from evolution, biology, ecology, to anthropology, history, and folklore, even literature, art, and film has done so, but also with a rich range of us bipedal animals involved. Obviously, Ernest Thompson Seton is there, and so is everyone from Mark Twain to the Biological Survey Coyote Killers, to Richard Nixon, and to be honest, the psychologist Carl Jung, the poet Gary Snyder, the painter Harry Fonseca, and if you can imagine such

• 31:06Speaker 02

  a person, the genius Paleolithic American who created the first Coyote Avatar story. So far back in time, we can't fathom either the depths of coyote stories or their future. Of course, our resident super genius, Wile E. Coyote, is in the mix, and I can report with some delight about Wile E. that his New Yorker-inspired product liability lawsuit against the Acme Corporation is about to have its day in court with the film Coyote v. Acme coming to movie theaters in late 2026. What I've also learned following coyotes through history is that their story is far from over.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  As one remarkable example of that, right now coyotes are on the cusp of becoming the first North American species in 3 million years to cross from this continent into another one, in this case into South America. Expansion across a continent is one thing, but into another? While the locus of their evolutionary origins seems to have been in the southwest of the present United States, coyotes do seem to have been occasionally on the scene south of Mexico, in Guatemala, Honduras, San Salvador, and Nicaragua, even before Spanish colonization there.

• 32:30Speaker 02

  Fond of open country and most certainly attracted to the sheep and goats Spanish colonizers introduced, coyotes apparently veered away from the cat-filled jungles to the south.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  But as humans steadily cleared the Central American forest, dispersing coyotes began colonizing Costa Rica during the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, they have steadily pushed into Panama and the Grand Isthmus between the continents. They crossed the Panama Canal in 2010 and are colonizing south at a rate of about 40 miles a year, which means that by 2018, they began to approach Darien National Park of Thorthe Isthmus, beyond which lies Colombia and all of South America. The intertwined green density of Darien National Park,

• 33:25Speaker 02

  a jungle of spider monkeys, tapirs, giant anteaters, peccaries, and birds, reptiles, and amphibians almost beyond count, would not strike a fan of wily coyote Roadrunner cartoons as classic coyote habitat. Replete with mountain lions and jaguars that would enjoy taking out a migrating canine, Darien surely looms as a coyote obstacle. But coyotes have confronted unfamiliar settings before without blanching. Their numbers, like ours, possess some individuals who can take on situations like big cities or jungles with a calm conviction of purpose. Adventurous ones may be hit by cars or taken out by a jaguar,

• 34:10Speaker 02

  but just as there are coyotes in Chicago and Manhattan, some are without question pushing through Darien Park to Colombia as I write this. When they succeed, they will almost certainly spread across all of South America. For coyotes, this may well be their version of a planet B, of a Mars, perhaps.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Given their candid version of a human-like self-confidence, coyotes have a certain penchant for making the news. Colonizing another continent is a story that's hard to top, but there are other candidates. Not many other animals are participating in the rescue of fellow mammal from extinction, but a particular coyote population in Texas and Louisiana, which residents and biologists have now named "ghost wolves", has attracted attention from geneticists for doing exactly that. The species they're helping to rescue is the red wolf, the most endangered wolf on the planet. There's a true irony in this particular story, since a half-century ago,

• 35:16Speaker 02

  biologists believed the primary threat to red wolf survival was interbreeding with migrating coyotes, who were swamping red wolf genetics. I was a young teenager in Louisiana, just when these hybridization events were happening. Among the coyotes I was seeing back then, I twice came face-to-face with strapping leggy animals with mesmerizing yellow eyes that sure looked like wolfy coyotes. If these were coyote-red-wolf hybrids, and they almost certainly were, that mixture made for gorgeous animals. But for the next several decades, the recovery program for saving red wolves under the Endangered Species Act

• 36:01Speaker 02

  largely meant destroying hybrid animals and sequestering pure red wolves away from coyotes. So, how delicious is it now that unlike gray wolves in the West, red wolves, having been particularly difficult to pull back from the brink, have a new chance? With a rescued population in 1980 of a mere 14 founding animals, red wolves for half a century have suffered from a sharply constrained genetic diversity. On the pair of North Carolina National Wildlife Refugees, where we've tried to save them, the wild population of red wolves right now

• 36:45Speaker 02

  has dropped to a mere 25.

• 36:49Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, though, local residents in Galveston, Texas have for several years been noticing that some of the coyotes on their island are at the least unusual looking. Starting in 2018, genetic analysis of coyotes there and in nearby Louisiana reveals something that in retrospect shouldn't have surprised us. It turns out there are still canids in that part of the world carrying red wolf ancestry, often 10% or more. Occasionally, an animal is turned up whose red wolf genes approach 75%. Even more startling, some of these wild coyotes possess red wolf alleles entirely distinctive

• 37:33Speaker 02

  from the makeup of the North Carolina red wolf populations, whose complete genome had suffered when we attempted to rebuild their numbers from such a small group of founders. So not only are these mixed coyote-red wolf animals I saw as a teenager still out there, all along they've preserved wolf genetics that, with the assistance of modern science, can diversify red wolves and help save them. Colossal Biosciences, the famed de-extinction company that in 2025 genetically engineered dire wolves, simultaneously announced that it had birthed four cloned red wolf puppies

• 38:17Speaker 02

  from the lost wolf genetics preserved by these deep south hybrid coyotes. Hope, or Nekka Kaida, her Karakawa name, is the sole female of the four. Blaze, Concern, and Cinder are the three males. The odds of saving red wolves and a more healthy and complete version of them have suddenly gone up dramatically. Paying attention to coyotes has taught me one final valuable lesson about them and us. Since the beginnings of wildlife management, we humans, all committed individualists ourselves,

• 38:58Speaker 02

  have thought of other animals almost entirely in terms of species, a lumpen aggregate of like creatures. Naturalists such as Satan tried to redirect that thinking with articles like Tito, only to have no less than a president of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt, castigate him as a nature faker. Yet, when famed ecologist Adolf Muri studied the wolves of Mount McKinley Park 40 years later, he found the gray wolves there to be very distinct individuals. Muri even gave his study animals names: Dandy, Robber Mask, Grandpa, and Wags.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  It strikes me as a myopic disconnect that we humans have no trouble understanding our companion animals as individuals, yet can still insist that Walt Disney was anthropomorphizing deer when he gave one a personality and called him Bambi. That longstanding recourse to a species focus in wildlife management is still there, but the world of 21st century human-wildlife coexistence is shifting despite it. The evidence is everywhere. The New York Times actually ran an obituary of the female Yellowstone wolf biologist

• 40:23Speaker 02

  had named O6 when she was killed by a Montana hunter. Park naturalist Rick McIntyre is even now publishing biographical books about individual wolves in Yellowstone. The Hollywood Hills Griffith Park cougar, known as P22, became a celebrity lion in celebrity-filled Los Angeles. On the opposite side of the country, for several decades now, Manhattanites have recognized Central Park's red-tailed hawks, barred owls, and, yes, coyotes with individual names, like Romeo and Juliet, the mated pair in Central Park in 2025.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  Coyotes are not just their own animals who experience existence differently one from the other, and love their own unique aliveness. As science at the Predator Research Facility in Utah has shown, they are truly remarkably singular. To understand the coyotes we're coexisting with in a way that's good both for you and for the four-legged animal looking back at you, sometimes make an effort to identify a specific individual coyote. To be sure, coyotes tend to look the same to us, and no doubt initially, they return that non-discriminating favor.

• 41:49Speaker 02

  But there are often distinctive markers you can pick out. I can tell you from my experience with the female with the white-tipped tail who dens in the canyon below my house in New Mexico, once I identified her as a particular animal, she quickly did the same with me. Our mutual curiosity has led to an interesting, even intriguing, relationship. We sometimes don't see one another for weeks. Then hiking in the canyon, I'll spot her, often with other coyotes, and before she moves off, she will sometimes direct me with her nose and ears to something of interest to both of us. I'll return from an absence, and she'll be sitting in the front yard like a dog I've

• 42:34Speaker 02

  absentmindedly forgotten to take along, moving off calmly and reluctantly as I park my Jeep. From a respectable distance, she's inspected our new Malamute, Kiska, and she is clearly willing to bring her family, her new pups, past the windows. I don't know why she does these things, and I'm not about to claim I do. She knows she's not in danger, of course, but I certainly don't feed her or otherwise encourage her. But this much I do know: I like it that every so often, a wild coyote apparently thinks of me. So I'll suggest something radical.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  Try meeting a coyote halfway and see how it goes.

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• 45:45Speaker 05

  I think there's a lot of ways we could start this one, but I think, because we can take coyotes anywhere. They go everywhere. But as you point out, this is one story in which the animals win. And so if I were to unpack that a little bit, because it's a fun, it's a fun idea to play with.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, as I, as I said in the, in the episode, Coyote America, what it has been, was, still is, because I'm doing a new version of it that's coming out soon, the most fun book to write I've ever written, and that's really the reason. We're dealing with the coyote, with an animal that has a biography that not only is a roller coaster ride, up and down and around swerving curves, and it's also an animal that, as native people recognize, is very

• 46:51Speaker 02

  much like us. It's an animal that lives by its wits and is successful as a result of that. And it's also the rare, irrepressible animal. So many of our grand species in the past, all the way back to the Pleistocene, I mean, we lose our mammoths, we lose our saber-toothed cats, we lose our lions. And then in the, the more modern historic period, I mean, we lose passenger pigeons, the most numerous bird on earth. We lose Carolina parakeets and ivory-billed woodpeckers. I mean, just on and on. And yet, here is this

• 47:32Speaker 02

  creature that, in fact, we do everything we can possibly think of to wipe them out, and the result is exactly the opposite of what our intentions are. We end up, not only do their numbers remain viable, even in the West, where we're launching such a war against them, but in fact, our efforts spread them out across the rest of the country. And so, and into cities and towns. And it's, it's this kind of remarkable story to me. And one of the things I I wanted to say here, and because I think it is a remarkable thing, is that we can't,

• 48:17Speaker 02

  we can't delude ourselves that we have created a completely tamed, as it were, emasculated country, when you can look out the window of your house in a suburb, anywhere in America, and see a jackal-sized wolf trotting down the street, glancing at you with highways and houses behind it as it goes by. I mean, that's a kind of a rare wildlife victory in America that you don't get to enjoy very much.

• 48:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I think another, another point that's stood out to me here is when you're talking about coyotes moving into South America. And whenever you're reading environmental history and you're thinking about these giant, large-scale movement of animals around the world, you know, without human help, right? To say, you know, ignoring the, the old-new-world exchanges, when you think about animals moving across the Siberian land bridge, or the Bering land bridge, or, you know, like bison moving east and then moving back west, I often find

• 49:38Speaker 05

  myself thinking like, wow, I wonder what that would have looked like. It's almost unimaginable. But in fact, as you point out, we're witnessing what we would think of as like this ancient sort of unimaginable phenomenon right now, and it just looks like, you know, a coyote showing up in someone's backyard.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  That's what it looks like, you know? And I, I mean, I got to experience it as a kid, growing up in Louisiana. I got to experience a little bit of what this was because... When I was younger, uh, and you know, being a kid who grew up in a small town with the woods a hundred yards away, I mean, from the time I was really little, I was going out into the woods and hanging out on creeks and, and, uh, looking at the natural world. But from the time I was, you know, six or seven years old, my parents would let me do that. Um, up until the time I was about 13 or 14, I never saw a coyote or what, uh, when they first started showing up in Louisiana, what people referred, they called them wolves.

• 50:38Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:39Speaker 02

  Uh, I never saw a single one, never even occurred to me that there might be something like that. And all of a sudden, one day, here is this animal that to me, it was like, uh, it was like rounding a corner in New Orleans and having a moose be standing on the street, on the intersection. Suddenly here was an animal that I in no way expected to ever be in Louisiana, and here it was. And as I started paying attention, they were there more and more and more. And what I realized later on, I began to in fact engage with biologists at Louisiana Parks and Wildlife, what's going on? I think I'm seeing these,

• 51:20Speaker 02

  and they, uh, did the, the generosity of writing me back and saying, yes, you have probably seen coyotes because coyotes are beginning to, to colonize in Louisiana. So I think that's what people in Colombia.

• 51:36Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:36Speaker 02

  And the first, the most northerly of the South American countries are going to experience is something like I did in Louisiana. Here is this animal that, what in the hell?

• 51:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:47Speaker 02

  And, and that's kind of the reaction. And you know, maybe it's really magnified when you're 13, 14 years old and are seeing it, but that's what is about to happen in South America, coyotes. And you know, as the biologists who are studying this have pointed out, man, once they get through Darien National Park and cross into Colombia, into more open and clear country, uh, all of South America is in front of them. They're probably going to colonize into our country, continent, I mean.

• 52:17Speaker 05

  Yeah. I, um,

• 52:20Speaker 05

  Another aspect of this story is the, when we think of wildlife politics today, we often imagine rural residents and urban dwellers. And it's sort of a social issue, but you introduce here the role of just institutional inertia and government agencies in sort of steering the course of history, right? With the Bureau of Biological Survey, needing something to hold on to as a sort of organizing mission or organizing principle. And it's coyote eradication, predator eradication more broadly.

• 53:02Speaker 05

  But the role of the government in this story is striking, just in terms of government intervening in the natural world in a way that's unimaginable to us today.

• 53:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is a massive intervention and it happens in part in order to keep a bureau alive. Sehart Miriam, who's the first director of Biological Survey, is finding it difficult to get funding from Congress in like 1904, 1905. And he comes up with the idea, they don't want to fund us because we're doing pure science. Let's become the resolution for the predator problem. And of course, he's right. Once he lays out the bureau as that kind of agency, then the funding does follow. And so I think to your point, Randall, about this is a government agency that needs to

• 54:02Speaker 02

  have something solid to rest its feet on going into the future in the 20th century in America. They come out of, so many of them, come out of this background where they're not ecologists. Ecology is a brand new science they're a little suspicious of. And so they don't know it well. And they just come from this assumption that what we're doing in America... America is we're remaking North America into a kind of a Western European country. And what people in Western Europe did, which we don't even question, is they got rid of all the predators. And so this is something we're going to do.

• 54:44Speaker 02

  And, and what struck me also when I was doing the research on this is the fact that they're willing to do this without ever having any scientific research to back it up. And then when they send people out to come up with the, the information, the scientific research they're convinced is going to, you know, make coyotes the arch predator of our time. And the Murray brothers come back and say, well, wow, that's not what we're finding. And, you know, I mean, it looks like eighty to ninety percent of what coyotes do in the world is actually beneficial to humans. And they also are seem to be, they seem to have this really long-term predatory

• 55:28Speaker 02

  relationship with other creatures out there in the world. And there are all these, these kind of intertwined relationships that seem to balance one another out. That was absolutely not what the Bureau wanted to hear. So, I mean, and this has happened a lot of times in history. Yeah. You get a report that, okay, that's not what I want to hear. You just throw it out the window and double down. And that's what they did. I mean, they just doubled down again and again. And of course, no amount of doubling down or tripling down, inventing a whole host of new poisons to kill coyotes. None of it ended up working.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  All it essentially did, as biologists finally figured out, was to trigger these adaptive responses that coyotes had long ago evolved because they were harassed by wolves. And now, as humans harassed them, they called on these adaptations to keep their populations alive. And it also triggered their expansion. And so, as I said, it's this kind of really, you know, fun story because it's like, you know, like the movie Avatar, where you don't expect that the blue people in the end are gonna win, but they do. And so, in this case, it's the coyotes. Yeah.

• 56:52Speaker 02

  Who win. And that's pretty fun.

• 56:55Speaker 05

  And one final question, speaking of surprises, I'm usually never surprised when I learn something new about Richard Nixon and environmental politics, but his statement about the use of poisons for coyote control was, that was a new one for me.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:13Speaker 05

  I mean, I feel like I'm ready for the unexpected when it comes to Nixon.

• 57:17Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 57:17Speaker 05

  But, uh, yeah, I mean, it's an interesting moment in environmental politics at the federal level.

• 57:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is. And, uh, you know, the truth is, if you have a bookcase of, uh, American presidents and you're looking for the people who are most interested in the natural world, you have like Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt on one end, and on the other end of those least interested, Richard Nixon is one of those who is going to appear as the other bookend. But in this particular instance, Nixon, of course, is a consummate politician, and his idea is the ecology movement is in full swing. We've just had the first Earth Day. The public, uh, after, uh, Silent Spring is really alarmed at the use of poisons.

• 58:07Speaker 02

  I'm gonna get on top of this because it's going to be a political surge on my behalf. It doesn't work out that way, but I mean, he's essentially, uh, attempting to take advantage of a movement that he perceives he might be able to surf.

• 58:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, always calculating.

• 58:25Speaker 02

  Always calculating, yeah.

• 58:26Speaker 05

  Well, Dan, thanks again.

• 58:28Speaker 02

  Oh, Randall, great fun.

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