‘Fixing’ pests and predators
The renewed chorus of complaints to “do something” about “the coyote problem” in Corrales would be laughable if it were not part of a nationwide campaign with tragic consequences—as we saw in the coyote-shooting contests here last summer. Homeowners who don’t wince to dispatch mice or gophers react quite differently when it comes to a predator that looks a lot like the family dog. Talk of “exterminating” them gets some animal-lovers very heated, while others set to work feeding or “rescuing” them—all of which greatly hampers the agenda of shoot ’em all and be done with it.
It is said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and so it is with the coyote, whose current numbers result largely from the “do something” plan that exterminated its predator, the wolf. Reactive attempts to institute some new form of management on nature remind me of what organic gardeners have been telling me about trying to manage the life cycle of plants.
“Do nothing” is not a policy that sits well with Americans in either case. Organic gardening is all about creating natural conditions in the garden mostly by not interfering with the process by which predators and prey duke it out. Likewise, the 2001 Corrales Coyote Management Plan sought to monitor much and manage little, and for more than a decade it has resulted in fairly stable coyote populations in the Village, matched to available food supply. Nationwide, study after study has shown similar results: It is nearly impossible to permanently alter the coyote population, because nature abhors a vacuum. People certainly have tried. But the coyotes are with us, like pigeons, mice, gophers, and crows. All we can manage to do is drive ourselves crazy pretending otherwise.
Part of the problem seems to be a lack of perspective. We as a society have been so conditioned to expect an in¬stant remedy for every inconvenience, we tend to treat citizenship the very same way—with a consumer’s demand that a product, gadget, neighborhood association, or government agency provide a solution. It does not occur to the dissatisfied customer that it is, in fact, his own responsibility as a human being to figure out how nature works, and work with her or perish—something his great-grandparents took for granted.
Gardeners quickly discover that rushing to “do something” about every new calamity in the flower bed only seeds the next crisis. The very products that promise instant remedies today create problems tomorrow, because they throw the garden out of whack. Likewise, dieters who try one new fad after another eventually come to realize that all this tinkering basically has destroyed the body’s natural tendency to achieve balance (which it solves, in many cases, with obesity).
Nature gets the last word, always. Balance is achieved in the end—it’s a law. No matter how violent a natural disaster may appear to us, it is just the expression of energy reaching equilibrium. Most of us are too caught up in “doing something” about all the little inconveniences of daily life to notice how nature is responding to all our management solutions. But we will notice. And then the coyotes won’t seem like such an urgent problem anymore.
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