Controlling wily coyotes? Still no easy answers

updated 9:01 p.m. ET July 12, 2009

MILLVILLE, Utah - Coyotes are often unwelcome guests, whether they're prowling city parks, stalking the prairies or roaming the modern American suburb. Usually they forage for food, snarf down a rodent or two and disappear into the night.

Each year, U.S. government agents shoot, trap and poison about 90,000 of the ones suspected of killing livestock or causing other problems. But they're still trying to figure out how to turn the less troublesome coyotes back from neighborhoods and ranches — without killing them.

Researchers in Utah, Chicago and elsewhere have tried a number of methods — from startling noises and lights to the whiff of wolf urine and electrified fencing. They have discovered a stubborn truism about coyotes: Unlike the bumbling cartoon character, they are wily.

"We're really interested in how they outsmart us," said John Shivik, who runs the nation's only large-scale coyote research center near Utah State University.

Coyotes are fast-learners. They share information with each other and can overcome fears quickly when they realize that something that looks or sounds dangerous actually isn't. They're also fiercely individualistic, so a technique that works on one coyote might not work on another.

"There is no single solution for coyotes," said Stan Gehrt, an assistant professor at Ohio State University who has been studying urban coyotes in Chicago since 2000.

Nonlethal approaches
Wildlife Services — the federal agency that's spending about $16 million this year to protect livestock from wild animals — is transitioning toward a more nonlethal approach with coyotes, said Gail Keirn, an agency spokeswoman in Fort Collins, Colorado.

No one's talking about eliminating programs to kill coyotes. But over the years, there's been an acknowledgment of the importance of keeping some of the predators on the landscape and dealing primarily with those causing damage.

"We're not out there to eradicate the coyotes. They're an important part of the ecosystem," Keirn said.

For generations, coyotes were viewed as vermin — four-legged thieves that showed up in the night to steal livestock and howl eerily in the darkness. Coyotes remain the top culprit in predator-caused deaths — though far from the overall leading cause of death — among sheep and cattle.

More than 135,000 sheep valued at more than $10 million were killed by coyotes in the U.S. in 2004, the latest figures available from the National Agricultural Statistics Service. Coyotes killed about 97,000 in 2005, a loss estimated at $44 million, according to the agency.

Of the coyotes targeted last year by Wildlife Services, more than 11,000 died from M-44s, a tube-shape capsule with a pellet of sodium cyanide inside. Conservation groups have petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to have it banned.

"I just think the whole system of predator control needs enormous rethinking," said Wendy Keefover-Ring of WildEarth Guardians.

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