Editor's note: The following review was written by John C. Miles, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies at Western Washington University. He is author of Guardians of the Parks: A History of the National Parks and Conservation Association (1995) and Wilderness in National Parks: Playground or Preserve (2009) among other books. He lives and writes about parks and wilderness in Taos, New Mexico.

Coyotes are everywhere in the continental United States despite nearly a century-and-a-half of determined efforts to destroy them. The more concerted the effort to trap, shoot, and poison them, the greater their range and their numbers. Next to the wolf, environmental historian Dan Flores writes, the coyote has been and is the most hated, persecuted, and misunderstood member of America’s wildlife community. It has not always been so.

In this wide-ranging, engaging, informative, sometimes humorous, and often infuriating “natural and supernatural history” of Canis latrans, Flores explains how this creature evolved in North America over a five-million-year span. First he became Coyote Man, a semi-deity revered by Native Americans, possessed of Coyote Power. Then in the late-19th century he came to be regarded by many in the American West as “a vile species of vermin that should not be allowed to breath up good air.”

At a distance, the hatred seems hard to square with anything rational. It certainly wasn’t based on science and sometimes looked suspiciously like the collateral damage of a puritanical loathing of our own animal natures. But from the 1880s to the 1930s, the received wisdom in America, very rarely questioned, was that the only good American prairie wolf was a dead one. The only real question was how to kill as many coyotes as possible. 

Flores’ explanation of this irrationality is that the coyote is an avatar, so much like us in many ways that we humans have had a very difficult time viewing it rationally.

One of the most intriguing ways in which coyote is like us, he argues, is that we are both “fission-fusion” creatures. This theory has it that coyotes, like we humans, developed evolutionarily a “unique kind of social life” that has made them unusually flexible and “either gregarious or solitary as conditions warrant.” Thus we and they have benefited from “tremendous survival and colonizing advantages during disease outbreaks and other intense mortality events.” Of course, a century long “mortality event” for coyotes has been our effort to eradicate them, but as Flores well documents, the more we try to kill them, the more of them there seem to be and the greater their range. He notes that wolves have not enjoyed this fission-fusion adaptation, and their social ties and lack of flexibility have allowed us to “use their social instincts to trap and poison them.”

Historian Flores describes the “war on wild things” launched by ranchers and farmers and then the federal government, principally the Division of Predatory Animal and Rodent Control (PARC) in the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey and the current Division of Wildlife Services in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He recounts the skepticism of much of the scientific community about the wisdom of killing predators. Elliott Coues, Aldo Leopold, Joseph Grinnell, and Olaus and Adolph Murie among other scientists, were critics. As ecological science progressed, so did the understanding of the role predators play in natural communities, yet scientists were not able to stop the war on coyotes and other wild things that continues to the present.

Yellowstone National Park was “one of the laboratories where the bureau’s E.A. Goldman (a wolf specialist and bureau scientist) believed science would convict coyotes of high crimes against nature.” Predators had been killed in national parks for decades when, in the late 1920s, scientists like Grinnell criticized the policy, arguing that science should guide policy and the predators should be left alone. In 1931 National Park Service Director Horace Albright had announced that predators were to be considered “an integral part of the wild life protected with national parks, and no widespread campaigns of destruction are to be countenanced.” But Albright “had done all he could to squash any sympathy for coyotes.” Ironically, according to Flores, Adolph Murie’s research on coyote predation had been approved by his NPS superiors who thought it would result in a return to poisoning and trapping of coyotes. But Murie’s research did not result in the conclusions Goldman and some in the NPS thought it would.

Adolph Murie no doubt went to press in 1940 with the kind of expectations that wary climate scientists anticipate in our own time. For nearly a decade a powerful government agency, seconded by the Park Service he worked for, had moved heaven and earth for the extinction of coyotes in part because they were supposedly “archpredators” of valuable game animals. Now, in the first comprehensive study of the matter, a government-employed scientist said flatly, without any equivocation, “The facts show that in the case of elk [coyote predation] is negligible, and that no appreciable inroads on the populations of deer, antelope, and bighorn are taking place.”

Greater tolerance of predators in national parks helped the coyote survive, providing refuge from PARC traps and poisons, but the coyotes had also been “saving themselves.” Research over the next two decades revealed that coyotes' evolutionary colonizing mechanisms, such as fission-fusion, had much to do with their remarkable defiance of massive efforts to destroy them.

In his chapter titled “Morning in America” Flores recounts how an “environmental awakening” occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, an “ecological mindedness” that raised awareness and understanding and resulted in passage of much environmental legislation, including the Endangered Species Act. This remarkable law, however, did little to help the coyote. “Despite all the technology, chemistry, and Dr. Evil pathological inventiveness we had thrown at them – and more was to come, for sure – coyotes were the extremely rare American mammal species still beyond our ability to push to the edge of extinction.” Through these decades and up to the present, coyotes expanded their range, moved into growing urban areas, and continued to be killed in many ways, perhaps most shockingly in coyote hunting contests. The government’s Wildlife Services continues its campaign.

Flores concludes this excellent book with the observation that, “Since almost everyone in America is now living out modern life in a sea of coyotes and coywolves, coyote stories continue accumulating at a dizzying pace.” He documents some of these stories, suggesting that Old Man Coyote of ancient belief thrives as persecuted generations of coyotes in the West and elsewhere in America outwit their adversaries.

In modern Coyote America, coexistence with coyotes is an essential lesson, something we need to make second nature as quickly as we can. Coyotes have been in North America far longer than we, they are not going anywhere, and history demonstrates all too graphically that eradicating them is an impossibility. This is truly an instance in which any desire on our part to control nature is perfectly countered by a profound inability to do so. It’s a misunderstanding that is a short road to madness in the classic fashion of Moby Dick. Because with coyotes, as with the great whale, resistance is futile.

This book came at a good time for me. Down here in Taos the town has just asked Wildlife Services to come and help control their coyote problem even as folks are complaining of an outbreak of other varmints like prairie dogs. I think I’ll send a copy of the book to the town fathers. If they read it, they will enjoy it despite themselves because Flores is both a fine scholar and a most engaging writer. He argues most persuasively that we need to learn to live with coyote and the other beings with which we share this earth.