so let me make sure you can hear me okay is that that sound good yes okay thank you very much for coming thanks to the red centre for inviting me to come speak at BYU I've never had the pleasure of getting to to do a talk or a lecture here I have worked in the archives here so I've been on this beautiful campus at least a couple of times previously I still have a vivid memory of the first time I was here I had a National Endowment for the Humanities summer grant to do work in Western archives and libraries and sometime in the early 1980s I think and I must have parked off campus it's my memory of it and walked maybe a hundred yards onto campus and I had this very polite couple come up to me and say so can we guide you to where you would like to go and I said well sure I'd be happy to have you do that and so they took me to the library to start and when we got there I thanked them and I said so why I'm just curious did you think I needed to be guided across campus and they said well we took one look at you and said to ourselves he's not from here and they were right I had not been here before but I was working on at the time the environmental history of Utah and the LDS Church and its environmental history and obviously found a lot of great material here what I want to talk to you about today though is an animal that my guess is you haven't really considered much because most Americans haven't although in the 21st century we're all beginning to grapple with the fact that we're living amongst coyotes and by all I mean not just those of us who in the West I live outside Santa Fe New Mexico now but people in places like Boston and Washington DC and the Coyotes most recent frontier downtown New York City Manhattan and queens in the Bronx and Staten Island this animal that we've long thought of as a creature of the American West in the last 75 years has made a remarkable expansion across North America from west to east a kind of a reverse manifest destiny really to become present in not only every single state in the Union with the exception of Hawaii there are no coyotes in Hawaii yet although that's probably only a matter of time once our parent probably is going to stow away on a vessel going there pretty soon and if they do my guess is those endangered Nene's on the Big Island are not long for this world but coyotes colonized their 49th state Delaware in 2010 so lacking only Hawaii they are now in every single state in the Union and what I'm going to try to try to convince you of in the next 35 or 40 minutes or so is that in coyotes we're engaged with an animal living amongst us now that not only has a biography that is practically as rich is our own but it's an animal that in my view I'm going to try to convince you of the same more than likely is our best natural totem animal for life in North America that we've ever found now of course as you all know the bald eagle selected early in American history is our official totem and mascot animal but of course that animal was selected the the bald eagle was selected by people who were on the Atlantic seaboard and who were not yet familiar with the American West people who were familiar with the American West the native people who had been in place for 15,000 years in fact had long known and had long designated the coyote not just as sort of their official semi deity figure responsible for the creation of North America and for the creation of the rivers the mountain ranges really for placing people on the continent but they had also long regarded it as a kind of an avatar a stand-in for human beings in their imaginations in their literature and coyote stories by the way are our oldest literature from North America going back more than 10,000 years but they thought of coyotes as the animals that most clearly represented humans in the natural world and so one of the arguments I make in this book coyote America and natural and supernatural history is that coyotes have functioned as as avatars as stand-ins for us across a large part of their history and much of their interaction with us in North America by avatar by the way I should explain I'm not talking about the Far Eastern religious conception of avatars I'm talking about the use of avatar in modern computing where the avatar is a stand-in in the cyber world for the person at the keyboard and so I want you to keep this in mind as I go through this story and tell you the biography of this animal because I'm convinced at least that we have for so long so regarded these animals as stand-ins for us in the world that in fact much of their story and our story has become a kind of a parallel track and that's true in ecological terms and it's also true in some of the ways that both our species evolved we have many of the same adapt ations it's a survival and success in the world that coyotes do and so that that becomes a mirror really of our own story and much of my book I will confess is not just about coyotes it's essentially about our relationship with them and this kind of mirror that they reflect back on us so let me proceed through the story here and try to give you a kind of a quick fix on how coyotes have played this unique and really kind of marvelous role in American history to start with one of the things I want you to recognize about coyotes is that they come out of an evolutionary line the canid family that had its origins in north america 5.3 million years ago all of the candids of the world and that includes your dogs at home all come out of this evolutionary line that seemed to have sprung from the American Southwest as I said more than five million years ago and produced all of these animals that you see in this only partial image of canid evolution and it's the spread of candids around the world and so golden jackals and gray wolves and delays and african wild dogs and dingoes and as I mentioned obviously all of our dogs at home which are basically the legacy of wolf domestication some fourteen to fifteen thousand years ago all come out of this line just as we originally come out of an African or origin these animals come from North America and one of the fascinating facts about coyotes is that whereas many of these other creatures including our gray wolves who are here now ended up evolving here and then spreading across the world crossing the land bridges particularly the the bering land bridge Beringia into asia and eventually into Europe and Africa and elsewhere in the world coyotes represented a line of these canids that never left North America so when you talk about indigenous creatures that have evolved specifically to a North American context it's hard to come up with an animal that is any more American than coyotes are now grey wolves for their part ended up actually crossing into Europe and Asia and evolving for more than two million years before coming back to North America about 30,000 years ago so all of our native gray wolves today the gray wolves that we're recovering in the northern Rocky Mountains for example in the Mexican gray wolves that were recovering and returning to the southwest all came from a line of animals that spent a couple of years a million years of evolution elsewhere in the world and then came back to North America and what I've got on the screen for you now is an image of how these animals Co evolved alongside one another so what you're seeing here of course is a grizzly bear the dominant creature in this image surrounded by Ravens and of course the bear is over a kill but to the far left of that image is a gray wolf and on either side of that bear flanking the bear are two coyotes I wanted to show you this particular image because I wanted to make a point with it which is that coyotes began to develop their personal characteristics as species the characteristics that we would eventually come to think of as really remarkable ones they're remarkable intelligence they're remarkable resilience their ability to survive all kinds of persecutions and harassment not by evolving alongside humans but by evolving alongside wolves larger candids like the gray wolf much of their intelligence and their ability to survive persecution and harassment came from this evolutionary story we haven't been persecuting them for long enough to have really produced a huge effect on their evolution yet and I'm about to tell you that story but wolves have for a long time and so this particular relationship is central to the Coyotes story as I mentioned the gray wolf in this particular instance of blackface this by the way is a very famous wolf in Alaska his name was Romeo Romeo represented a line of animals that came out of America and as I said went to other parts of the world and then returned here about 25 or 30 thousand years ago and once again began interacting with coyotes in North America so let's proceed in the story down to about 800,000 to a million years ago at about that time in the coyotes story it became our modern animal the animal that our naturalist in the 19th century gave the Linnaean named canis latrans to but at about the time that coyotes emerged into their modern form and there had been several other actually larger species of coyotes farther back in time coyotes became smaller and adopted their present sort of middle size 35 40 pound about four feet long including the tail that size about 800,000 to a million years ago and about that same time a closely related animal ended up also leaving North America and going elsewhere in the world and that animal was the one you see on the screen here it's called the golden jackal the golden jackal is a resident now of Africa the Middle East and it's beginning actually to colonize into southern Europe but it is a very closely related animal to coyotes in fact it's been separated from coyotes long enough that its genetic separation consists of only about a 4% difference and so here you have the modern coyote which as I said assumed its present form about 800,000 years ago there's a golden jackal I was cheering Yellowstone Park a few years ago with a couple of naturalist including a fellow from Africa who was really there not to see wolves he wanted to see coyotes and as soon as he saw coyote he said that's a jackal but there's actually a 4% difference and I want to point out to you that that happens to be about the same genetic difference between us and orangutangs and it's occurred to me that if we have difficulty discerning a four percent genetic difference between these two animals that it could be that other animals when they look at us and our quite similar primates in the world have difficulty discerning which is which that's not a very large genetic difference in other words so let me get to the part of the story where humans enter and the coyote biography is going to become a real roller coaster at this point in the game because when humans began arriving in North America North America was the last part of the world that we colonized we arrived here about 15,000 years ago maybe longer we began to ascertain among all the animals that were present at that time which is known as the Late Pleistocene is this this was a particular time in American history when there were still elif there were mastodons and mammoths there were lions there were gigantic bears there were all kinds of really impressive charismatic species in the world but for some reason which I obviously have to grapple with in the book I try to come up with an explanation for it of all those animals that were available to these early Americans looking at the American bestiary the one they picked out as their deity figure and who represented a kind of an avatar stand-in for humans in the stories they began creating was the coyote one of the suspicions I have about this selection is that while many of these larger animals became extinct ten thousand years ago humans in America observed that coyotes survive this massive extinction scenario it's called the Pleistocene extinctions we lost 32 general of our large animals in North America most of our Africa like animals disappeared but what they observed was the coyote survived all of this and I think what they observed was that the Coyotes survived this by its wits by being intelligent and that became kind of a marker I believe for their selection of this animal to function as a deity for them so what emerged then as I mentioned a few minutes ago is the oldest literature in North America I mean if you seek to know something about what North American history is really like the place to start with a recorded story of North America is with these coyotes stories that became oral traditions for native peoples in the American West starting probably at least 10,000 years ago at least some of the stories seem to have elements that go back that far and it's a very very large body of stories by the way I've not done a count I read quite a number of them in writing the first chapter of the book which is called old man America that's really who coyote functioned as as this deity figure but there are thousands of them and when the American folklore Association began collecting them in the early 20th century they were literally swamped with these oral tradition stories from more than thirty five Western tribes what I'm showing you on the screen right now is actually a pictograph in West Texas of a coyote story and I wanted to show it to you because it includes something important about how coyote was regarded in these stories coyote is the figure on the far left of this petroglyph the next figure to the right of him I believe is probably a beaver and there are other animal characters to the right of those none of which I've really been able to quite identify but what I want you to notice about the coyote figure in this this particular representation of a coyote story is that he's standing on his hind legs he's standing upright commonly coyote in these Indians stories is a part human figure he stands on its hind legs he has hands with opposable thumbs you can't really see them in this particular image although I think they're sort of down here towards the bottom towards the middle section you can see one hand extending you can see the coyote head the pointed nose a little bit of a representation of the ears and usually the coyote deity is represented with a tail but he's part human and part animal this is a deity that goes back to Paleolithic times this is older for example than most of our deities that we honor around the world which come from hurting and farming cultures of many thousands of years later and so this is a deity that goes back into the dimness of antiquity into the the human past in North America coyote became such a prominent figure among Native people that even the Aztecs far to the south in Mexico not only created a series of coyote deities they had about four or five of them including a particular coyote deity who was the deity of song and poetry and knowing what we know about coyotes with the song that you hear from them that's a logical extrapolation of the animal into human culture but they created the SX created all kinds of figurines of coyotes here you see an Aztec figurine they created various kinds of glyphs and Stella in the walls of their temples the Temple of the Sun in Mexico City is where this particular one comes from in Tenochtitlan D the Aztec capital there were was actually a suburb named as the place of coyotes and that offers a hint about something that we are noticing with coyotes today which of course is that they are urban animals they are perfectly at home living among us in urban settings and a thousand years ago and Tenochtitlan they were also living inside the city and became urban animals for the aztecs the other thing about the Aztec configuration of the Coyotes story that you should know is this they're the ones who gave us the name for the animal in the know what language the Aztec language which they imposed on scores of defeated tribes that they conquered as part of their empire this animal was known as Toyota spelled when the Spaniards arrived and began inscribing these Aztec stories Co y ou T L with a silent L on the end and the pronunciation in that language was coy out the Spaniards when they arrived he spanis eyes dit and added an extra syllable on the end and called it coyote but as I'm about to tell you that's not what we America that's called these animals for a very long time in Mexico by the way they still honor coyotes this is in fact seen in the suburb of Mexico City that was once named as the place of coyotes and I've had about three or four friends since coyote America came out who have sent me various versions of this particular scene so we get down to the early 19th century the early 1800s Americans have been on the coast of the Atlantic seaboard for a couple of hundred years they've never encountered a coyote yet in fact Europeans out of Northern Europe and Western Europe had no inkling at all of an animal like a coyote we were familiar from our European experiences with bears with foxes we had all sorts of folklore and stories about those animals we knew about wolves obviously we had no experience whatsoever with coyotes before not just arriving in North America but finally beginning to penetrate west of the Mississippi River into the Coyotes original range and it's Lewis and Clark in the fall of 1804 who give us our first description and first reaction to coyotes they began observing and about the same three week span by the way that they encountered their first bison their first prong horns their first mule deer their first prey dogs all the animals of this transformation into the American West they began talking about seeing some kind of new box that is trotting around our camps and they went for a couple of weeks before one of the members of the party finally shot one and when they laid it out in the grass in front of them Meriwether Lewis and William Clark took a look at this animal and said this is not a fox in fact it's some kind of new wolf we've never seen before and that night as they sat around talking about it all of the members of the party decided that the best name for it would be the prairie wolf because this is where they had encountered it and so what I want to tell you is that for most of the 19th century and I've found references to pre wolves as late as 1916 for nearly a century in American history English speakers called coyotes prairie Wolf's it was only when we got into the American Southwest particularly in the vicinity of Santa Fe and began encountering people who had a different name for it that we resolved on adopting this old continental name for the animal and prairie wolf gradually began to fade away but for literally most of the 19th century this is what we call them we still were confused by them we found them ambiguous we didn't exactly know what they were this first painting by an American artist Titian Ramsey Peale from the long expedition of 1819 1820 is in the American Philosophical Society and the title of it is fox western fox but of course what it actually is is a coyote the man who is credited with introducing the coyote to enlightenment science using Linnaean scientific nomenclature is this fellow Thomas say from the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences who was on the long expedition of 1819 1820 and he gave us one of our first really good descriptions of how intelligent these animals were and he gave them as I mentioned the scientific name canis latrans and you will see behind that and the scientific literature say crediting Thomas say as the discoverer of the coyote although obviously Indian people had known about this animal for a very very long time what you see here is a representation of as you can tell from the inscription a prairie wolf from the Missouri River in 1833 this was done by Karl Bodmer who was with Prince Maximilian of vide ascending the Missouri River in 1833 and did this really remarkable portrait of the animal while maxmillian and Barbour were on their journey they began encountering native people who were telling them stories about the coyote deity who was responsible for the creation of the world and one of the things that kind of glimmers at you when you read the accounts of some of these early Americans and Europeans in the West is that what the coyote stories they were hearing were really telling them was the secrets of human nature that's kind of what I want you to understand about coyotes stories that staff use the American West up until the early 20th century we've tended to label them trickster stories and when you go to the library that's where you'll find the books on coyote stories but what Bodmer and Prince maxmillian and other travelers who heard these stories began to realize was that it's not the trick that's important in these coyotes stories it was why the trick worked and the reason the trick works in these stories is because these stories amplified and laid bare human nature all the things about us that cause us to act the way we do without really being very aware of it and if you've ever read these stories one of the things you'll notice about them is that the coyote figure who is the primary character in them is often a comic figure and he's often a kind of a narcissistic selfish buffoon character everybody listening to those stories including the early Europeans who heard them when they heard the translations they laughed because these stories struck so close to home they recognized who these stories were about they were about us and our own frailties so in other words what we were encountering in the West were a series of stories about this animal used to exemplify human nature but pointing out not just all of our good traits but also all of the quite interesting bad traits that we carry as a species and that's really kind of what these stories were all about as I said I read hundreds of these when I was working on the book and had to finally come up with a decision in this first chapter about what I was going to do about trying to summarize hundreds of stories I ended up picking four stories that I told in the chapter called old man America to try to demonstrate the range of what these coyotes stories attempted to tell people about human nature and one of the stories the last one I use in fact is the story of how coyote introduced death to the world and why he did so why we have to die and why we can't return from death so these early Western travelers were not only doing this scientific kind of assessment of the animal and trying to figure it out because we didn't know anything about it but they were also report these the first glimmerings of this literature from the ancient west so in the middle of the 19th century we're calling coyotes Prairie wolves as I said until about 1850 or so when we began to get down into the American Southwest and encounter people using another name for it but we still don't really know exactly what to think about them along comes Mark Twain with his bestseller roughing it in 1873 and Mark Twain finally gives us a way to think about coyotes and I'm going to put a page it's only a piece of a page and I want to point out to you that in roughing it if you go to this section and read it you will find out that as Mark Twain went on he began to warm up and he goes for three pages in the vein that you see in front of you talking about coyotes now wants you to notice that in the very first thing he does in that first couple of sentences he tells the reading American public that this animal is rightly called a coyote and he even gives us a pronunciation for the name it's a three syllable name but then look how this passage goes on I mean as I said I'm not gonna read it for you you can read it yourself but a general slinking expression all over a despairing expression of forsaken as' and misery a furtive and evil eye and look at this next paragraph the meanest creatures despise him and even the fleas were deserting for a velocipede when the american reading public starts reading roughing it we finally have a way to think about these animals and as much as I love Mark Twain I have to say that what he really does is to launch us on more than a century in fact almost exactly a century of a determination that coyotes are basically just breathing good air and the best thing we can do is to get rid of them as fast as possible I mean as I track the literature in America in the next 30 or 40 years after Twain wrote roughing it it looked as if American writers were competing with one another to see who could come up with the most horrific description of coyotes and the best explanation for why they ought to be shot on sight it finally reached a point in 1920 where a writer for Scientific American said this he said the coyote you understand is not worth the price of the ammunition that it takes to shoot one but you should shoot them anyway as soon as you see them because after all the coyote is the original Bolshevik and so it's a patriotic American act to kill Bolsheviks on sight whenever they're encountered this was in 1920 Mark Twain set something in motion that for the story of coyotes and their biography in North America was going to be a long steep descent down the roller coaster they had been riding high for 10,000 years as this sacred animal in North America and suddenly we decide that that roller coaster ride at the heights is over and it's time for the roller coaster to plummet to the depths and so then of course sets in motion the next part of the story which is if anything as fascinating as the old coyote stories of 10,000 years in the past starting in the 1880s and lasting through about the middle of the 1920s we managed in America in the American West particularly to engage in in the other book that you mentioned that I wrote a couple of years ago Americans Serengeti I concluded that we engaged in the largest destruction of animal life discoverable anywhere in modern world history in the space of about really about a hundred years 1820 to 1920 or so and the the end is reached starting in about 1880 through about 1920 or 1925 we managed to take out probably a half million gray wolves in the American West mostly by poisoning them but by all kinds of strategies as you can see in this image from Wyoming we obliterate somewhere between 20 and 30 million bison in this period by 1886 there were only about 1,100 of them left in North America there had been as many as 2 to 3 million horses that had gone wild in the American West after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 by the 1920s we had wiped all of them out the last many thousands were caught by Mustang hers in places like Wyoming and Montana and shipped on boxcars East to the mid to the Midwest where the DeKalb dog food company was beginning to use horse meat in pet food we wiped out something like a hundred thousand grizzly bears in North America in this stretch of time driving them off the Great Plains and into the Rocky Mountains and again leaving only about a thousand or 1500 hundred of them left by the end of this period 15 million pronghorns we shrank down to 13 thousand animals by about 1905 from 15 million to 13 thousand but this animal to the consternation of two-thirds of the people living in the American West somehow didn't seem to be disappearing I'll give you one statistic that will demonstrate this in 1899 Montana where I lived for more than two decades bountied twenty six thousand gray wolves and thirty thousand coyotes 21 years later in 1920 Montana bountied 17 gray wolves and thirty thousand coyotes so at the turn of the century as coyotes once again seemed to have done the same thing they had done back in the Pleistocene somehow had survived this event that had taken out all these other other animals Americans began trying to figure out why this had happened and one of those who did in scribblers magazine was the famous nature writer ernest thompson seton who wrote the article that you see here in 1900 and using an allegory tried to explain why coyotes somehow had survived while all these other animals had disappeared and here's the story he told he tells a story of a little female coyote named Tito who is caught and chained up in a ranchers yard the ranchers discovered as many people have sensed coyotes don't make good pets unlike wolves coyotes didn't choose to be domesticated and so they just left her chained in the yard and through her scraps for a couple of years and she sat out in the yard as Seaton tells a story and observed all the ways that this ranching family was trying to wipe out coyotes she saw them break out poison and she saw them with their dogs and she saw them with guns and she saw them with traps when she's about two and a half years old in this story she gets away she escapes she flees to the while finds a mate has a litter of coyote pups and then as Seaton says she proceeds to teach all of her pups and all the generations of coyotes after all the stratagems that human beings use to try to kill her kind and as he gets to the end of the story he says you understand who Tito is dear reader she is the coyote version of Moses raised among the Egyptians learning all their tricks and then with that knowledge leading his people the Israelites to freedom from bondage Tito he says is the animal that's responsible for the fact that coyotes have survived while no other animals have well obviously that's a great story that's not exactly the scientific reason for why it worked and I'll tell you how we discover it in the 1950s and 1960s but to get there I have to enter into a really pretty brutal part of the coyotes story which is the period from 1915 to 1972 when a federal Bureau called the u.s. biological survey presents itself to Congress and to the American public as the solution to the predator problem and their solution of course is mass killing of predators not just coyotes but wolves and bears and mountain lions and others using strychnine poison by the middle of the 1920s the US Bureau of biological survey is putting out three and a half million poisoned baits a year in the American West and that's what takes out all the Wolves and most of the bears and most of the lions and as you can see after 1925 when all these other animals are gone the Bureau decides actually it was the coyote that was the worst of all these animals the coyote is the arch predator of our time of course they have to go to Congress for renewed funding and they say we were wrong about all these other animals it looks like the coyote was the one that was doing all the damage and so they actually get Congress in 1931 to pass an act called the animal damage Control Act that gives them ten million dollars for ten years to exterminate coyotes from North America and they create a laboratory called the extermination methods laboratory I wish I was making this up I'm not it sounds like a Frankenstein story but the extermination methods laboratory began working on new poisons to kill coyotes and then they launched a public relations campaign with these canned newspaper stories that they published in newspapers all over the American West in fact even if this article even appeared in the Washington Post on the eastern seaboard and I argue in the book this public relations campaign with stories like this went a long way towards kind of brainwashing whole generations of Americans about predators in the world but one of the things that was happening at the same time that this was going on was that American scientists like Aldo Leopold were beginning to discover the role that Predators play in the natural world and these mammalogists at their annual meetings began adopting an idea that finally in the late 1930s the National Park Service would adopt which is that at least in the national parks we need to leave predators in place so we have the original ecological relationships between all these animals so while this campaign is going on for the hearts and minds of the American public these mammalogist are slowly and their journal articles trying to make us appreciate the role that predators play in the world it's the livestock industry of course that's the primary advocate for killing coyotes particularly the sheep industry and in the 1930s and 1940s there was something like 55 million sheep in America and so the sheep industry was a pretty large part of the story but and this may be a particularly American trait one of the things that's kind of shocking about this coyote story is that and of course I didn't know it until I began to do the research for the book is that we were doing all this we were vowed to white coyotes off the face of the earth before we had ever done any scientific evaluation at all about the role that coyotes play in the world even what they ate and so in the late 1930s the biological survey and the Park Service are going to send two brothers out into the field to finally do scientific Natural History work to try to figure out what coyotes eat and basically to prove that coyotes are the arts predator of our time and need to be wiped out and one of the ones one of the brothers Adolph Murie spent four years working in Yellowstone National Park studying the Coyotes in Yellowstone and in 1940 published this pamphlet the ecology of the coyote and the Yellowstone what does he discover he says well after four years I have to conclude that coyotes don't harm bighorn sheep they don't harm pronghorn antelope they have no impact on the population dynamics of mule deer they have no impact on the population dynamics of ill in fact what coyotes eat rats mice and rabbits and he said as for occasionally taking the fawn of a mule deer or a pronghorn he said you have to understand long before we Europeans came to North America coyotes pronghorns and mule deer had co-evolved for hundreds of thousands of years they long ago developed the ability to absorb some small amount of coyote predation on fawns pronghorns do it by having twins the idea being you have an heir and a spare and the spare is likely to be the one that the Coyotes get but what Murie attempted to convince his superiors off was that this is an evolutionary dynamic that goes deeply back in the past our arrival doesn't mean that we're going to somehow fix the world and make it right this is an old world one of the things that he wrote I actually wrote an op-ed for the New York Times the summer coyote America came out about this particular story was a really powerful kind of observation he made he said one morning he was standing by a game trail in Yellowstone Park and he saw a coyote trotting down game trail about a hundred yards away and as he watched it he said he could see its head making a sort of a strange motion up and down up and down and as it got closer to him he realized as he stood motionless watching this coyote trot by that it has sprig of sagebrush that it was every few feet tossing up into the air and catching in its mouth and then trotting along again and tossing it up in the air and catching it again and as he watched this animal disappear down this trail he said what I realized I was observing was an animal that was in love with being alive it was a beautiful morning in Yellowstone the Sun was just coming up over the Lamar Valley this animal was in love with life and he went back and questioned his superiors as to why we want to wipe out an animal like this what is the purpose of doing this well as happens with scientific studies that don't jibe with what we think we want to know Adolph Murie superiors suppressed this particular evaluation of coyotes in the world and as World War two dawned they used our technological and Kim experimentation in World War two to come up with a suite of three new poisons because what the bureau had decided by this point they had already killed more than they believe two and a half million coyotes poisoning them strychnine in the 30s and they still weren't wiping them out and they decided that coyotes were so smart strychnine killed them too quickly what we need are poisons that take several hours or maybe even a day or two to kill them so that other coyotes in the vicinity don't do this cause effect relationship between seeing one of their mates bite a poison bait and dying and go into convulsions and so in World War two they invent the bureau invents its lab invents three new poisons one is called thallium sulfate another is called sodium fluoroacetate sodium fluoroacetate became better known by the name 1080 compound 1080 because it took the lab 1,080 tries to perfect it and the other one the third poison was called sodium cyanide which is known today as m-44 x' which is a little device you stick in the ground and it has a tuft of cotton on the top of it and it's scented and when a coyote plucks the cotton the little cartridge fires a cyanide mist into its face all three of those poisons killed coyotes over hours or a couple of days they liam sulfate made their fur fall out made the pads fall off their feet there were people who found hairless coyotes with no pads on their feet huddled in their barns and killed them with pitchforks I mean it's a really kind of a horrific story but the biological survey makes it seem logical because they say okay we managed to defeat Hitler we managed to defeat Hirohito and the Japanese the third war were engaged in as the war against these damn coyotes and we're going to win it well with these new poisons suddenly signs like this went up all over the American West we were putting out millions of poison baits a year and killing of course not just coyotes but every kind of animal that happened to encounter one of these baits and ingested and yet the Coyotes not only didn't seem to be falling in numbers suddenly they seemed to be expanding out of the West into other parts of America what you see here is a photograph I shot as a teenager in my home parish of Louisiana Caddo Parish when as a 13 year old I first saw coyotes in Louisiana and realized this animal that supposed to be a desert animal the American West is now in the bayous and swamps of Louisiana and within two or three years of course Louisiana trappers the Caddo Parish trapper in this case is hanging coyote carcasses up and down the fences in Louisiana I mean that's what really kind of got me started on the coyotes story as being 12 13 14 years old and encountering these animals and as I show you in a minute I encountered coyotes in another way too so we're trying to wipe them out with a whole host of new poisons in the West and this is the result suddenly they're not just in the West anymore but they're expanding across the south they're expanding into the Great Lakes country and entering New England and the northern states they're expanding west of the Rockies to the Pacific coast they expand all the way up to the beyond the Arctic Circle and in Central America all the way down to Costa Rica so biologists finally decide maybe we should study what happens with coyotes when we try to wipe them out and two biologists named Fred Knowlton and guy condoling finally publish an article that explains what Ernest Thompson Seton tried to explain with Tito 60 years earlier they said it looks as if when you try to wipe coyotes out it only has the effect of increasing their litter size to compensate for the numbers of coyotes that are on the landscape and by the way when you hear coyotes howl one of the things they're doing is they're taking a census of coyotes in a landscape and when they don't hear house from other packs coming back that seems to trigger some sort of hormonal reaction in them that causes their litter sizes to go from four or five pups to as much as 13 14 and one instance 19 pumps and when they're persecuted it also triggers an evolutionary adaptation they evidently had come up with probably back at the time when they were cool evolving alongside larger wolves that were harassing them it's called the fish and fusion strategy and what fish and fusion refers to is a small number of animals around the world they're only about 19 of them that we know of who do this that can function not only as a fusion group as a pack in the case of coyotes but when circumstances require it as singles in pairs in the fishing mode they break off into singles in pairs and when they do that they colonize they scatter out across the landscape one of the other animals that also is a fish and fusion animal us we humans we commonly are thought of as a social species this is how we usually carry out our lives as members of groups as members of groups were able to accomplish larger aims and goals than we can as individuals but at various times in our long evolutionary history we've had to engage the fishing part of our ability and that's often happened at times when we've been beset by disease epidemics against which we had no immunities and the way to survive those in the past was to scatter across the landscape and singles in pairs so that you weren't subject to a contagion so coyote fish and fusion strategies their ability to amplify the size of their litters and as biologists have discovered when coyotes are reduced in the landscape it makes it easier for them to raise all the pups that they have up to adulthood and so that plays a role too produces this kind of map in the 20th century our effort to wipe them out in the West basically scatters them across the entire United States Knowlton concluded Knowlton and Connolly concluded in their article I get this figure they said you can our studies indicate reduce the coyote population by 70% in a given range year after year after year that's seven out of every ten you kill without reducing the overall population one iota take seven out of ten out of them the next spring and summer the population is back up to where it was and what we've also discovered is that when you don't harass them as we have as a great laboratory in Yellowstone National Park from the 20s to the 90s when there were no wolves harassing them and of course humans didn't harass them and also coyotes their populations rise to the carrying capacity of the landscape and they stabilized but when you persecute them and harass them and try to kill them and wipe them out it increases their numbers and scatters them across the world and so coyote manifest destiny basically okay to the for now I'm gonna finish this up by telling you a little bit about how popular culture played a role in transforming how we thought about coyotes when I was 12 years old 1961 Walt Disney's wonderful world of color produced what became the first of six Pro coyote films that Walt Disney did in the 60s and 70s that first film was an hour-long animated film called the coyotes lament you can go on youtube and watch it right now Walt Disney himself introduced it as 12 year old I sat in front of screen I never miss Disney's wonderful world of color I sat in front of screen and was absolutely mesmerized by this because Walt Disney said and I'd never heard of anybody saying this before he said we already know starting with Mark Twain what we think about coyotes now I'm going to do a film that tells the coyote side of the story my film is called the coyotes lament and this film takes on the whole coyote story I mean it engages in poisoning trapping aerial gunning the whole thing for aimed at a 12 13 14 year old audience and the Coyotes at intervals all gather and howl at the moon this song the coyotes lament as twelve-year-old when I got through watching that film I was a decided coyote aficionado from that point on and I realized when I was working on the book I must have been part of the first generation of Americans to have my nature sensibilities shaped by programming on television in the form of Walt Disney films but this is one I encourage you to watch and of course at the same time this was happening Rachel Carson published her famous book Silent Spring which was a diatribe against the use of poisons in the natural world Silent Spring referred to DDT that was thinning eggshells that was wiping out our songbirds and eventually she said spring is going to come there's no longer going to be any birdsong it inculcate 'add a kind of a generational reaction almost a gut reaction to poisoning in the world especially in nature and so amazingly enough in 1972 President Richard Nixon issued a presidential proclamation ending the use of poisons against coyotes on the American public lands he followed that up by signing into law the next year the Endangered Species Act of 1973 which man of course that coyotes were never going to be wiped out or exterminated we couldn't use poisons against them because the use of poisons would probably kill all kinds of animals that were endangered not that coyotes were but it was a watershed I mean I the chapter title I used for this particular chapter was mourning in America which I took of course from Ronald Reagan's campaign slogan but it seemed to me that the Endangered Species Act was really mourning in America because it meant that we had accepted the premise that other species had the right to exist on the planet alongside us now I'm showing you Richard Nixon and I'm telling you about this just to make the point that not that Richard Nixon was a Sierra clover on a bookshelf of presidents who love nature and who didn't you would have Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt at one end and Nixon probably would be at the other end but Nixon was a political animal and he realized the tide of public opinion was so strong in favor of environmentalism this is the age of the first Earth Day it's the age of the ecology movement the youth movement the counterculture that the only way he could get on top of it and fit was to make it his own and so he suddenly appears to emerge for at least two or three years as an environmentalist and of course this is back at a time when environmentalism is bipartisan issue people on both sides of the aisle Democrats and Republicans nobody thinks environmentalism is a bad idea that's something that awaits another 20 years or so so Richard Nixon environmental hero you heard it from me the other thing I want to to tell you about is the sudden discovery on the west coast in the 1950s and 1960s of the old California coyote stories from the native tribes there a bohemian anthropologist named Jaime D'Angelo published the first book of transcribed coyote stories in about 1950 and people like Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac and many of the authors at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco suddenly became great devotees of not just the coyote stories but old man coyote the figure as this kind of antihero that to them personified their rebellion against mainstream American culture in the 50s and 60s and so out of this emerges a kind of coyote consciousness I mean these guys even published a journal called coyotes Journal and poetry and short stories in all and so coyote is this ancient American literary figure is resurrected by this group of people in the 50s and 60s and then the other aspect of popular culture and changing the way we thought about coyotes you all recognize of course wily coyote was the creation of a man named Chuck Jones and a writer named Michael Maltese in 1948 they sat down and using Mark Twain's description of the coyote as being always hungry they created this coyote cartoon figure who first has just called the coyote and then by about 1953 they give him the name wile e and of course the object of his obsession is the roadrunner I wish I could tell you about all of this but I'm gonna have to hurry through to get done but I'll simply say that from 1948 through 1997 when the last of these cartoons was done Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese made a cartoon character coyote into a sympathetic figure for a whole generation of Americans what we learned from wily coyote for instance was that obsession and humiliation were not only parts of human nature and the American character I mean Chuck Jones has a wonderful line about wily and if you think about the cartoons you'll remember this he says humiliation was such a major part of Wylie's personality and he was so so torn up about this that as he's falling off the cliff he is always more concerned about the the opinion that the audience has of him than he is about what's going to happen when he hits the ground and if you look back at those cartoons one of the things you observe is that as he's falling he's looking at the camera looking at the audience with all these expressions you know how could this have gone wrong by the 1960s Wiley has not only acquired a voice Mel Blanc voices him and now he becomes Wile E Coyote a super genius but he sort of mirrors the America of the 60s with its fascination with technological fixes by suddenly discovering the Acme corporation and all of its objects of pursuit these corporate is bang technologies that he's going to use to catch the roadrunner in fact there's so many other than that a Chicago artists Rob Lucca did this poster that you can find online of all the devices that Wiley bought from the Acme corporation in order to enable him using technology to finally figure I mean nothing is more American than something like this and of course if it comes from an American corporation it's always going to work right well it never does obviously it always has some fatal flaw in it which many of us have found to our disgust in the 1970s Wiley becomes a modern sophisticated and he lawyers up and in one of the funniest New Yorker stories ever the writer Ian Frazer pins this piece called coyote V Acme wear coyote hires a lawyer and brings a product liability lawsuit against the Acme corporation he says that this is not only these these devices that he's acquired that have always failed have not only caused him personal anguish but they've interfered with his ability to carry on his occupation as a predator and so he hires a lawyer and produces a lawsuit and then the last thing I want to tell you about is this the Chuck Jones gallery was in a couple of places when I was working on the book one was in Los Angeles and the other one was in Santa Fe where I lived and so I would go down to the Chuck Jones gallery introduce myself told people I was working on a book on coyotes and I got sort of a tour of the inner recesses so back at the curate in the curators office the first time I went back I was standing there in front of his desk talking to him and he was telling me about all the things they had from Chuck Chuck Jones had died by this point but he was telling me about the things they had in their archive from Chuck and his fascination with coyotes and all this and I kept noticing looking up from conversation couldn't help myself and noticing this painting that was on the wall over the guy's head and I kept looking at this pay anything there's well there's something really oddly familiar about that penny I mean these really deep slashing brushstrokes and the paint layered on like 1/4 to 3/8 of an inch thick and then I realized while he only has one ear in this he's got a bandage around his head he only has one ear and I looked down at the title this was painted by Chuck Jones by the way the title of the painting while a van Gogh yet another way that Wiley obviously was kind of serving an avatar function like the old man coyote had in his stories so just really quickly a couple of the things I want to show you there was an artist in New Mexico Harry Fonseca was his name who did a whole series of paintings that he should be on the lookout for them because they're in a lot of airports where he did these coyote paintings in a basically the closest analogue I could come up with is they were like the way Forrest Gump in the movie about him sort of kept appearing at these propitious moments in American history I mean he would be in the White House when Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley are shaking hands and there's Forrest Gump standing there with them and so this guy Harry Fonseca does these coyote paintings where coyote appears in Forrest Gump mode and all these great moments in American history he's Rudolph Valentino in this particular one the film star the silent film star of the 1920s I just want to show you other ways that we've sort of made coyote come alive in popular culture with sculptures like this with images like this this is in a famous bar called a coyote cafe where not only the patrons but the bartender everybody is a coyote basically and then this final batch of images coyotes spreading across the country suddenly of course become part of the urban setting two coyotes trotting through the streets of Los Angeles a coyote on a bus from the Portland Airport to downtown a coyote in a Quiznos sandwich shop in Chicago it was a heat wave he wandered in and hopped up on the cooler everybody in the Quiznos sandwich shop headed for the door but they all gathered around at the windows and all looked in at this coyote who's obviously evaluating the offerings of what he might want to drink here patrons of a bar in Queens two Springs ago walk out one beautiful spring evening traffic is going by on the streets horns are honking they hear a commotion on the roof look up there's coyotes standing on the roof of the bar and they quickly get on their phones and snap pictures and then somebody calls animal control and about five minutes later an animal control truck rounds the corner down at the end of the block the coyote has just kind of been standing there looking at them takes one look at that van with the animal control insignia on the side of it turns and hops through a broken window of the building behind the bar and like some sort of Hollywood action figure just disappears into the building never to be seen again and then I have to tell you that unfortunately our war against coyotes still goes on the bureau of biological survey now has a new name it's called wildlife service's seems like the sort of place you would call you know if you wanted some deer for a garden party or something but Wildlife Services actually kills millions of animals every year largely for the livestock industry and they kill something like 80,000 coyotes a year and then people who staged these coyote hunts also are out there on the scene this is the aftermath of one of those hunts I mean you basically invite a bunch of people somewhere for a weekend hunt sometimes on public lands even and this is regarded as a way to bring young kids into the hunting sport and you give prizes for the biggest coyote the littlest coyote the most coyotes and then at the end of the hunt you take them throw them out just get rid of them that's by the way the new front for activists in trying to end this particular practice in the West California has done it my state of New Mexico seems to be the next one that's poised to do it but meanwhile guys what I call in my book the original national anthem the coyote howl continues and it's not just in the American West down you can be anywhere in the United States and walk out at night and you can hear coyotes howling they have done exactly what we've done despite all the obstacles despite everything that the world has thrown against them they've survived and so once again they've replicated us as our avatars in the natural world thanks for listening I appreciate it that's all I have [Applause]
