Holy crap, did it ruffle my feathers to see the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s proposal for migratory bird hunting for the next two years—they’re hoping to open up hunting earlier in the year, and even mentioned Santa Maria as a region in the report!
I’m not a migratory bird, but jeez, I could easily get mistaken for one, especially when I fly over the Santa Maria Riverbed when going to and from the office every day.
But, I guess that’s just how I feel because it affects me. I wasn’t torn up after reading the cover story this week, about all the coyotes that local Fish and Wildlife “advise” local ranchers on killing.
Birds don’t generally hate dogs as much as we hate cats, but coyotes are different. They eat whatever they can get their teeth on, and that includes birds, rats, mice, gophers, squirrels, cats, and even small dogs! Why don’t we just kill them all and get it over with?
Oh wait, they tried that already?
The USDA’s Wildlife Services kills coyotes on the daily. We’re talking tens of thousands every year, close to a million across a decade.
Now, shooting the coyote that ate your cat is one thing, but a wiping them out by the thousands? Sounds a bit excessive, even by tax-funded government program standards.
Actively trying to kill that many coyotes might seem like a good idea to the more bloodthirsty among us. They’re predators, right? We don’t want them around, right?
Well, it turns out wholesale slaughter of coyotes is a bad idea. According to Dan Flores’ book, the U.S. Government killed tens of millions of coyotes across several decades in a ruthless extermination campaign. The U.S. Biological Survey, which morphed into other agencies like Fish and Wildlife or Wildlife Services, literally invented poisons with which to kill coyotes.
But it didn’t work. Instead, coyotes spread farther across the United States and in more plentiful numbers than ever before. That’s wildlife management backfiring in a big way.
It’s also a clear example of human arrogance. You primates always think you know better. Why is that?
It’s kind of like the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors’ recent ban on recreational marijuana cultivation. I know, I know, they’re trying to work out regulations for when it is legal, but they’ve instituted the ban for 22 months, but it will be legal statewide in less than 12 months.
If you didn’t already know this, marijuana is a weed, and it grows just as quickly and plentifully as a pack of coyote that have survived an eradication campaign. There are locals growing it, en masse, right now! You can’t stop it, but you can regulate it.
And the supervisors do know this—they want that oddly scented tax money, I’m sure. But again, resisting the legalization of the plant kind of flies in the face of the natural order. It also flies in the face of human nature, which doesn’t like being told what to do, especially when there’s money to be made.
It’s not like Santa Barbara County has never had a new, inebriating industry come to the area. Wine country has done a lot to keep local agriculture alive, but even winemakers have complaints about county regulations.
We’ll see how local marijuana farmers fare with whatever regulation and taxation the county comes up with. In the meantime, all I can think about is a pack of coyotes sneaking into a patch of weed plants, chowing down, and getting stoned out of their snouts.
The Canary has mixed feelings about wildlife management. Send your thoughts to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Feb 23 – Mar 2, 2017.