June1981 RAIN Page 5 Home On The Range? will always remember sitting on a Sierra peak in the full moonlight listening to coyotes explode a neighboring ridge with their searching screams while the short hairs along my spine bristled. In any debate over the relative merits of coyote and sheep, I knew whose side I was on. At that time, I lived with a group of people on, of all places, a sheep ranch in the rough coastal hills of northern California . We operated a small homestead amidst thousands of sheep belonging to a neighbor who held the grazing lease on the ranch. Though he was considered one of the foremost sheepranchers of the region, his approach to land and wildlife management did little to alter my feelings regarding sheep or sheepranchers. The ranch was overgrazed brush and trees were bulldozed from lush hillside flats and pockets; and "pests" (feral pigs) and predators were routinely killed. When this neighbor retired, we decided to take over the grazing lease on the ranch in order to control how the land was used. The ranch was under an Agricultural Preserve contract which required the owner or lessee to produce a specified agricultural income off it each year. Sheep were the most feasible means of producing this income, so we became sheepranchers. While none of us had a strong desire to raise sheep, we decided that if we were going to do it, we would do it right-commercially raise sheep in a manner that enhanced the health of our land. Our first year was quite successful despite many errors and oversights. We produced a lamb crop of 90% (90 lambs for every 100 breeding ewes) in an area where anything above 70% is considered good. During our second year, coyotes moved into the area. That second year our lamb crop dropped to 50% plus we lost 10-15% more ewes than the previous year. This is our third year, and the lambing season is now in progress. So far, we have lost 10-20% of our ewes plus an as yet undetermined number of lambs. Of the seven carcasses I have found this year where some determination of death could be made, all had been killed by coyotes. These sheep were our responsibility and we had expended much time, energy, and care on them. Impotently watching them die made me regard coyotes differently. "What to do about coyotes" became a personal problem rather than an " issue". Sensing that the typical rancher's solution of killing the coyotes at any expense and the environmentalist contention that coyotes are not a serious problem were equally in error, I was left in limbo. One moment I felt like taking my gun and scou ring the hills for a coyote, the next I felt it was the coyote who belonged here and not us and our sheep. The solution, if there was one, seemed to lie in findi ng out as much as possible about coyotes in general, and specifically in this time and place. It was necessary to move beyond the gut feelings that swung me to and fro like a pendulum and do some thinking, some research; this corrspondence relates some of that exercise. One moment I felt like taking my gun and scouring the hills for a coyote, the next I felt it was the coyote who belonged here and not us and our sheep. The record on the rancher's side is totally indefensible-two million coyote killed by government agents between 1915 (when the Federal government became actively involved in "predator control") and 1946. After 1946 the slaughter got worse due to the introduction of 1080, the new"superpoison" so potent that one ounce can kill 20,000 coyotes. Theoretically, the poison was strictly controlled regarding who could use it, how it could be used, and how much could be put out in a given area. The controls were meant to insure that the primary target of 1080 would be coyotes and not "innocent" species. However, the abuses were so gross and widecont.-
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