Coyotes
I’m catching up on my back issues of Acres, U.S.A. and read an interesting article about something called Conditioned Taste Avoidance (CTA) that can be applied to predators, including coyotes. The idea of CTA has been around for quite some time – it was apparently first investigated by Carl Gustavson in 1974. Because coyotes are territorial, if you “teach” the coyotes whose territory overlaps yours, they will not attack your livestock and will prevent other coyotes from coming into their hunting grounds. For those interested in learning more about CTA, please visit this website. It has everything you need to know, and then some!
At the end of the article in the magazine, there was an interesting link to a researcher who studies the Eastern Coyote. I don’t have the time right now to pursue this, but perhaps one day …. Jonathan Way studies coyotes and coywolves in urban and suburban areas and has written a book, Suburban Howls, that documents his research and adventures. From the little that I read, it seems a fascinating field of research. Some might complain that Dr. Way is engaging in an enterprise that romanticizes wolves and coyotes, but I disagree. If we are to live more in balance with nature, as we must, we need to learn that we can adapt to coyotes as they have to us, instead of labeling them as “predators” that must be exterminated.
Permaculture, after all, is all about learning from nature and applying the lessons learned so that we live a more ecologically sensitive life. The mindset in this video needs to be changed through education:
We definitely need to live in balance with nature. I know people who kill black snakes for no reason, just because it’s a snake. I have a friend who suffocated a bat for no reason other than because she heard they carry rabies. Not only did I feel bad for the animals, but black snakes eat the rodents and bats eat bugs, keeping everything in balance. We need to have more respect for nature.
http://www.GreenerPastures–ACityGirlGoesCountry.blogspot.com
Reminds me of this article on predator/rancher interactions I read a few years back while working at the Conservation Management Institute at VA Tech.
If one is dealing with complex, adaptive systems like ecology or economics, one needs to develop a subtle touch…
Mark,
That’s a really great article about the economics of wolves and how the objections of the ranchers are being addressed. I wonder if anyone in Defenders of Wildlife knows about CTA? I’m sure they do, but there may be difficulties in getting ranchers to give some consideration to this radical idea. In one of the articles that I read about CTA, the man who first discovered that he could “train” coyotes to not kill his livestock went out one day to find that a neighbor had shot and killed “his” coyote. Lots of emotional issues to overcome, it appears.
Thanks for your comment and for including the link to that article – I had never heard of the organization before. There are billions of things that I’ve never heard of before!! 🙂
Interesting stuff, Jeff. I’d never heard of CTA, but it certainly makes sense. We have quite a lot of coyotes that come on our property–we hear them frequently and find their droppings. In our case, I think they probably just keep our bunny population in check, but I should think that the farmers around us would find this information quite valuable. The one thing I do wonder about is how you could insure that ALL the coyotes in a pack would have this conditioning since they reproduce on a regular basis. Would you just regularly put out meat containing the substance that made them sick?
This actually made me think of why my son Benjamin no longer likes chocolate cake. When he was younger, he got a terrible bout with a stomach virus that lasted for a week. He had consumed chocolate cake, which he previously loved, at about the time he got the virus. So even though the cake had nothing to do with his virus, he associates it so strongly with the illness that he’ll no longer eat it.