Coyote on the shoreline of the frozen Great Salt Lake

Media outlets (TV stations and newspapers) jump on stories where a Coyote kills a cat or a dog and sometimes even when a hiker and their dogs are surrounded by Coyotes.

Two fairly recent news cast and one newspaper article come to my mind easily, the articles on the TV were played each time the news came on:

Hiker encounters pack of coyotes in North Salt Lake

Dog snatched by coyote during hike, woman says

Salt Lake City woman says coyote snatched, killed her dog

I feel really bad for the woman who lost her dog. I love dogs but I certainly wouldn’t be walking a small dog off leash in an area that the DWR says is an on leash area. That is pretty much a no-brainer.

 Alert Coyote pup

But those news articles made me wonder why it is we don’t see articles about the senseless slaughter on Coyotes, is it too gory for prime time news? Does it offend the viewers to see a Coyote’s guts fly into the air after it has been shot? Or is it considered insensitive by the news agencies to show a Coyote suffering when it is being mangled by a steel trap? Why is it that these news agencies rush right out to interview people who lost a dog or were in involved in a close encounter with Coyotes but I haven’t seen the news agencies rush out to follow around a Coyote hunter killing the Coyotes?

The news agencies can demonize Coyotes but don’t write a thing about their deaths? That hardly seems fair or right.

Last year I wrote a post about people in North Salt Lake complaining about the vole irruption they had titled Farmington Utah’s Voles – Just My Opinion and in that post I wrote about some of the suggestions that people had made in the comment section to a) get an outdoor cat and b) use poison to control the voles, both suggestions are not wise at all. And as I suspected the vole population decreased; I might even call it crashed, around fall.  I wrote about natural predators, about getting a Kestrel nest box because those little falcons love to catch and eat voles. I also wrote about Coyotes and how many voles they can eat in just five minutes.

Coyotes are predators but they hunt to find enough food to survive.

They aren’t out hunting just to senselessly kill, they aren’t killing for the fun of it and they aren’t killing out of some uneducated or unreasonable fear of their prey.

They aren’t doing it to be famous on YouTube. Last night I was doing some research on Google and came across a link to a video there that made me angry, disgusted and yes, it made me cry towards the end. The title of the video is “110 Coyote Kills in 220 Seconds!!”

If you have a weak stomach, please don’t watch it because it is gory and very disturbing but I think that reputable news agencies ought to report on the senseless slaughter that videos like this one shows. Why haven’t they if they can write articles and show news stories when Fido goes missing?

By the way, at 1:51 seconds into the video the animal that is shot isn’t a Coyote, it is a Bobcat.

I forced myself to watch the whole horrible video and at the end I was very disturbed that some humans; we who are supposed to be the most intelligent beings on earth, find this amusing or entertaining.

I don’t, I find it revolting because I am a compassionate person. I am a humane person. I’m someone who gives a damn about nature, our planet and all of the animals it holds.

 Adult Coyote

I dare news agencies to write factual articles about the inhumane practice of slaughtering Coyotes which has been proven by science to be largely ineffective in controlling their population, to observe the Coyotes being blowing up in their dens and to witness the suffering of these animals when they are caught in traps. I dare them to watch these intelligent creatures have their ears cut off for a bounty and see them skinned. I dare them to shadow a Coyote hunter for a few days and show the public just how sickening it is.

An estimated 400,000 Coyotes a year are being killed and you have to dig to find that information in the news, but one dog gets killed by them here in Utah and it was on the 4, 5, and 10 o’clock news, probably the noon news the next day and in the newspapers. Seems a bit skewed to me.

I dare them.

But I won’t hold my breath waiting for them to report on it because they know that many of their viewers will be repulsed by their articles or news reports and will change the channel or skip the article.

Mia

PS, nasty comments by Coyote haters will not be approved by me. This is my blog and I won’t tolerate rudeness here.