LassChance
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- Joined
- Apr 11, 2009
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Budders Keeper said:sorry for the sidetrack Effen...
Spearchucker, when I was about 10 my dad shot a coyote that was killing our chickens..pointed the barrel of his black powder rifle out the back door and boom..felt like the roof rose up like a cartoon, talk about your ears ringing
I bet that black powder rifle would take care of them!
Man's war against coyotes is a never-ending debacle of death. Yes, a coyote will eat chickens or the occassional calf, no doubt. But the main food source of the coyote is moles and voles and prarie dogs.
Interestingly, more cattle break legs stepping into mole or prarie dog holes every year and are "put down" than are killed by coyotes, by far.
In nature, coyotes live in family groups with one Alpha female and only she mates and breeds. Normally, an Alpha female coyote bears two pups once a year. However, when the coyote population is threatened , such as by the annual widescale shoot-a-thons held in the Southwest, ALL the females will breed and often have litters of four or more. Furthermore, when the coyote population is low, females will breed twice yearly.
In other words, the more coyotes humans kill, the more coyotes are bred and born.
Due to the annual slaughter of Southwestern couotes, they have migrated to the northeastern US as far as New York state and as far southeast as Florida.
The only way to control the coyote population is to leave them the hell alone.
Lassie