Rethinking Our Relationship With Large Predators

In his classic work “The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species,” wildlife biologist L. David Mech writes, “Unfortunately, there still exists in certain segments of human society an attitude that any animal (except man) that kills another is a murderer. To these people, the wolf is a most undesirable creature.”

This sentiment was crucial to the establishment of the “bounty system,” what Peter Matthiessen describes as our earliest game laws that promoted destruction rather than protection of wildlife species. This was essentially a government-sponsored program to control populations of “undesirable creatures,” with the goal in some areas to completely eradicate them, by offering payment of some sort for killing them to anyone who desired to undertake the task.

Some sort of bounty has been offered on wolves for over 2,700 years in parts of Europe and Asia, and here in North America in what was then the Massachusetts colony beginning in 1630.

Townships on Long Island soon followed suit. New York State Museum and Science Service scientist Paul Connor writes: “In the 1600s and beginning of the 1700s, bounty payments for wolves killed were made by towns throughout Long Island from Brooklyn to East Hampton. Often it was required that the heads of wolves be displayed in public, such as having them nailed to the door of the constabulary.”

Townships in New Jersey established bounties on wolves in 1697, with payments of “ten shillings to Negroes and Indians and twenty to Christians.”

Due to its social structure of large family units, or “packs,” relatively low reproductive rate, and low population densities stemming from their large territories, wolf populations were very susceptible to eradication by bounty systems. The last wolf in New England was killed in 1860 (Maine). New York paid six wolf bounties in 1897, and the last wolf in the state was shot in 1899.

The wolf was not the only “undesirable creature” subjected to bounties. At one time in the United States, carcasses of cougars, bobcats, coyotes, seals and eagles — including our national symbol, the bald eagle — could be turned in to state and federal agencies for bounty payments.

What makes all these species “undesirable”? They are either competitors for food resources that Homo sapiens wants to secure for itself, such as deer and fish, or they prey on livestock, or, in some cases, a combination of the two.

Wolves, coyotes, bobcats and cougars were often targeted as the cause for the decline in various species of deer (e.g. white-tailed, caribou, elk) in North America, when in most cases it was Homo sapiens that prompted those declines by way of hunting and habitat destruction.

Seal and eagle bounties were justified due to their respective appetites for fish: marine fisheries in the case of the former; and mainly the salmon fishery in the case of eagles. Ironically, large populations of these piscivores coexisted for many years with mind-boggling populations of fish, as was the case of the northwestern Atlantic cod fishery, where seals numbering in the millions could be found. It was overfishing by Homo sapiens that brought about the collapse of one of the most productive fisheries in the world, not seals.

Here on Long Island, bounties for bobcats were approved and paid into the early 1800s, up until a point at which they had been completely exterminated from the region. We have no verified records of cougars on Long Island, but they once roamed much of the Northeast.

Although, unlike the wolf, this is a very solitary creature, cougars share several behavioral characteristics that also make it quite vulnerable to eradication: large territories, low population densities and low reproductive rate. By 1900, the cougar had been eliminated from the Northeast; the last record was one killed in the Adirondacks in 1903.

In the late 1800s, the war on large predators moved west. In 1896, a new federal agency called the Division of Biological Survey was established. One of their goals was to control populations of large predators, and a chief target of the agency was the wolf. By 1915, it had succeeded in eliminating the wolf from most of the lower 48 states, and its control efforts shifted to the coyote.

Trapping, shooting and poison were employed as control measures. The routine for many years included injecting the poison strychnine into every carcass — cattle, bison and even ground squirrels — encountered on western rangeland. From 1915 to 1947, nearly two million coyotes were killed, along with many other carrion eaters: eagles, ravens, crows, weasels, foxes, vultures and bears.

Millions of wildlife species perished in the campaign, and millions of dollars were spent on the war against the coyote. But the coyote not only survived, learning to avoid poison baits and adjusting its litter size upward to have as many as 10 pups, but thrived in an environment where the larger predators such as bears and wolves were removed.

And it moved east, and recently made its way onto Long Island. Although Mech’s quote at the top of this story was written in 1970, a half century ago, it seems that not much has changed in the attitudes of certain segments of human society toward wildlife. This is based on some comments posted on social media regarding the coyote on Long Island.

It is clear that, to some people, the coyote is a most undesirable creature.