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If there's just one fact I could beat into the skulls of the inevitable "kill it before we can't hunt any more deer!!" crowd, it would be easy to choose. Coyotes, which den in vacant subdivision houses in places like Glendale and whose urban diet includes up to 50% house cats and small dogs like Miley Cyrus's little ankle shark, DO NOT like wolves and will move out of a wolf-impacted area if they can. If not, they tend to be under more stress and less likely to have a damaging impact on human interests.
Fun little hunting-related fact I found out about Montana not long ago: there's a fella here who's been checking out and documenting road-kill deer for a lot of years. He's up to over 60% of young road-kill bucks showing obvious physical defects, many of them related to dental malformations and failure of testes to drop even in mature males. I've been watching nature documentaries since Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and the Jacques Cousteau specials were hot news, and reading books about natural history almost as long. Predation doesn't cause increasingly prevalent dental, jaw, and gonad deformities, inbreeding and poor nutrition do. All those "wolves eetz EVERYTING I wanna shoot" hunters, in an ideal world, could be taught that wolves improve the overall health of the forest ecosystems, while coyotes are a legitimate danger to small pets and there are places with serious concerns about small children.
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08-22-2015, 08:01 AM
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