![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() You write that coyotes were “the victims of a crusade … that surpassed any other in terms of the range of killing techniques and cruelty.” Give us some of the gruesome details.Ī government agency called the Bureau of Biological Survey, which became the federal solution to the so-called predator question, began by focusing mostly on wolves, because that was the animal that the livestock industry wanted to eliminate. He writes, “The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede.” By the 1920s, even Scientific American calls the coyote “the original Bolshevik.” Mark Twain comes along and, in a three-to-four-page comic rant about the animal, gives us a way to think of it as a cowardly, despicable little wretch that lives off carrion. Up until that time, Americans arriving from Europe did not know what to think of it. Twain’s classic 1870s book, Roughing It, gave Americans a way to think about the coyote. One of the chief culprits for the coyote’s negative image was Mark Twain. That’s how we ended up with two different pronunciations. Over time, most people began to replace the name prairie wolf with coyote or as some people pronounced it, in vernacular speech, kie-ote. When Anglo Americans began arriving in the Southwest in the 1820s-1840s, they began encountering people who called the animal coyote. It had been taken into the American Southwest with Spanish settlers, who brought Native Americans with them. They named it a prairie wolf and for a lot of the 19th century that’s what the animal was known as in American natural history.Ī coyote takes a nighttime walk through a city neighborhoodĬoyote is an old Aztec name that goes back at least a thousand years. But once they shot one and looked at it up close, they realized this was no fox but some kind of wolf. They wrote in their journals that they were seeing some new kind of fox. ![]() As a result, Lewis and Clark had never seen one until they got to the middle Missouri River in present-day South Dakota in the fall of 1804. In the early 19th century, the coyote was not found east of the Great Plains. Lewis and Clark were the first white Americans to encounter the coyote. He certainly can sometimes play tricks, but what the bulk of the stories are about is exposing various elements of human nature and instructing people in the proper way to behave toward one another in a social setting. I argue that the coyote serves in Native American folk tales more as a deity, who instructs humans about human nature. We’ve traditionally thought of the coyote as a classic trickster figure, which is found among Paleolithic peoples around the world. The coyote featured prominently in Native American mythology. There’s only about a 4 percent genetic difference. They’re about the same size as golden jackals, from which coyotes only separated about 800,000 years ago, so they’re fairly close relatives. Physically, they resemble jackals, especially the golden jackal. But coyotes never left and evolved as a distinctive species about a million years ago. Many of the other species of canids, like jackals, wolves, and wild dogs, spread around the globe via the land bridges connecting America to Europe and Asia. It comes out of the canid family, which evolved in North America 5.3 million years ago. Tell us a bit about the history of the coyote. Coyote helped change public attitudes and why the coyote’s howl plays a unique role in maintaining populations. When National Geographic caught up with Flores by phone from his home in New Mexico, he explained how misunderstanding and prejudice have dogged the coyote’s history how the cartoon character Wile E. Yet the coyote has survived all attempts to eradicate it, spreading from its original territory west of the Rockies to the East Coast, where it has now found a safe, new refuge in cities like Chicago and New York. But since the early 19th-century, when Lewis and Clark first encountered them, coyotes have been subject to a pitiless war of extermination by ranchers and government agencies alike.Įven today, some 500,000 coyotes are killed each year, many shot to death from small planes and helicopters. A totemic animal in Native American mythology, the coyote has lived in North America for more than a million years. The howl of the coyote is America’s “original national anthem,” says Dan Flores, author of Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History. ![]()
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