Coyotes- A Letter to the Minister

Minister of Natural Resources
John MacDonell
min-dnr@gov.ns.ca

It is my belief that the minister has reacted to panic and to those who do not love our wildlife or the diversity of nature, and to those humans who may have caused the problem in the first place by feeding coyotes.
Leg hold traps are cruel and unusual punishment to a whole species of animal that is normally shy and withdrawing. IS the minister reacting to extinguish a whole species because of rare unfortunate encounters?
Coyotes deal with the rodent population. Does the minister want us to be overrun with rodents? Coyotes deal with the sick and dying and the dead animals.
Leg hold traps are banned in most other places. Why? Because of the dreadful suffering it causes anything that’s living that gets caught in one. The serrated steel jaws penetrate with an awful force causing severe and utter pain. Animals sometimes try to end this excruciating pain by biting their own legs off. That’s how bad it is.
The trapper on the t.v. the other night said that (in my words) they are using leg hold traps to cause this terrific pain so the animal will associate humans with a horrific ordeal or the sounds of it.
1) trappers eliminate the scent of a human on the trap by wearing gloves and covering with sand so the animal will step into the trap. A coyote otherwise would avoid humans and their scent. So trapping will not cause a coyote to associate this awful experience with humans. Other coyotes may hear the trapped animals painful howls and its whimpering in distress. This also will not create a negative association about humans. The trapper walks in, sees this helpless, hurting animal (that he has caused) and kills it. The trapped animal may see a negative association there, but only for an instant. Another animal hearing the agony will have no knowledge that a human did it.
2) The program indicated that the trappers were going to only kill the aggressive coyote. A trapper who is receiving money for killing coyotes is going to make no distinction on what he thinks is an aggressive coyote or one that’s just going to bring him 20 bucks for his hide. Leg hold traps do not know an aggressive coyote from the normal shy one. Leg hold traps also don’t discriminate about what steps in them. Maybe it would be a coyote. Maybe it would be a deer who has caused no problem but to exist. But maybe it would be your own kid.

This land, this earth was “owned” by animals before humans came in. It is *US* who are in *their* territory. And we didn’t always kill them. We were vegetarians, first, before we became predators. We and the other animals always found ways of living together, before the human turned to killing.

Trapping coyotes is not only a barbaric form of cruelty, killing coyotes does not reduce their numbers. They just have a bigger litter later. The fact that the minister’s own employees stood up against him should tell you something big time. You could imagine that most government employees would fear for their jobs. Yet they had the guts to stand against something that was wrong.

Do you have the guts? *Stop this barbarism! We are better humans than this! Stop the leghold traps and the bounty, Minister, and start to deal with the matter on a higher level. We need to stop killing off or trying to kill off species in our world. We need diversity. We need to find ways of living together instead of the primitive first reaction of “kill it”.* Readers: copy and paste this paragraph, if you feel the same, and email it to the minister. Add your own thoughts or other phrases from this page. E-address is at top and elsewhere on this page.

Educate the humans who are causing the problem in the first place. Educate humans on how to deal with coyotes. Educate humans that not all coyotes are bad. Educate humans that everything in this world is interrelated and interdependent. And that we’ve got to stop messing with it.

The rule of law says that you don’t make laws for the extraordinary situations. And the practice of governance says that you don’t react to a panic over an unfortunate but extremely rare occurrence with barbarity and unjustified cruelty and attempt to exterminate a species in this world.