****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History, by Dan Flores, is a thoughtful, lyrical and at times tragic look at coyotes and our relationship with them. I was raised on a ranch in Montana and, as youngster, was taught coyotes were the enemy and even shot a few before realizing the error of my ways. This book digs into that lie, examining the myths, perceptions and misperceptions fueling the misplaced and almost genocidal fury of farmers and ranchers. Along the way, Flores examines the biology and evolutionary history of coyotes, as well as the spiritual nature of this trickster god and social significance that continues today.Long before Wile E. Coyote joined the Acme Corporation platinum buyer’s club, coyotes were a familiar and powerful presence in Native American myths. “Coyote or sometimes Old Man Coyote — and rarely about Old Woman Coyote, although they are present in the canon — are the oldest preserved human stories from North America. The truth is that Coyote (capitalized to distinguish the deity from the ordinary coyote trotting by while you read) is the most ancient god figure of which we have record on this continent.”Coyote was always a little self-absorbed and too cunning for his own good, blurring the lines between good and evil, seemingly always both in on and the punchline of the joke. The author credits these stories with capturing the human condition well and preserving lessons on how to survive and navigate an ambiguous world. In fact, he claims “the stories themselves look to predator-prey relationships for the birth of cunning.”A huge section of the book is what happens when humans on this continent stopped respecting and learning from Coyote and instead turned to dominating resources and trying to eliminate coyotes. It’s a hard read.Led by government agents, a scorched earth war was waged on coyotes and wolves to ostensibly protect livestock. From guns to poison, millions of dollars were deployed and millions of lives lost.“…each bait station was commonly one of America’s surplus horses, which could be led to the selected spot and shot and whose carcass was then laced with strychnine tablets and surrounded by poisoned fat and meat cubes—went in next.”And “…by the mid-1920s bureau hunters reached the rather phenomenal milestone of having set out 3.567 million poison bait stations across the West. This scorched-earth policy against coyotes yielded some 35,000 dead coyote bodies a year, although the bureau publicly estimated that its hunters never found another 100,000 poisoned annually.”The war against wolves was successful, the war against coyotes was not, for two reasons. First, when wolves were removed from the equation, coyotes lost their only natural predator. And second, coyotes are unique in that when their population is under threat, they produce bigger litters, and faster. Despite the best efforts of coyote killers — and they were VERY persistent — coyote populations basically were never seriously impacted. It’s a testament to their trickster nature and their natural resilience.As the co-author of three alt-history books about Bonnie and Clyde made this section especially stand out for me:“In the mid-1930s, newspapers around the country, among them even the Washington Post, ran an illustrated, canned bureau article that, in the age of John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd, offered up coyotes and other predators as the “gangsters of the animal kingdom” and characterized bureau hunters as the heroic G-men who would protect society, “man and beast, against the animal underworld.” It was a clever set piece, and it worked. Despite the Murie brothers’ findings, in the public mind coyotes deserved the same fate as Bonnie and Clyde.”Coyote America paints a sometimes grim but always compelling picture of a true American original. This small, smart, beautiful wolf dog has made itself at home from sea to sea and border to border, despite the misplaced fury of federal and private assassins, thriving even in unlikely urban environments — San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and my current hometown, Portland, Oregon.I mentioned that as a youngster in Montana, I killed (more than) my share of coyotes. I regret that now. I quickly came to appreciate, like the author, that coyotes are smart, curious, beautiful creatures who “delight in being alive in a world of wondrous possibilities.” I’m charmed by them now and excited any time I happen to see one (unlike, for example cat owners, I suppose). I want to live in a world with coyotes and learn to co-exist more effectively. And after finishing the book, the first thing I did was make a donation to Project Coyote.
