I don’t know what they are supposed to eat guys, if they can’t eat a rotting carcass. I live in cattle country of that singular use, when it had been used at all, well preceding statehood. Coyotes were here, I don’t know, give or take maybe 100,000 years before cattle? Coyotes are native to the North American habitat.
Across 500 acre pastures, with only one being watched closely with the first calf heifers, calf losses to coyotes are rare, and because total losses from any cause are very low, exactly how rare is good question, maybe actually none some years, and that’s with ~1,000 momma cows. I can say predation is no more frequent since the passing away maybe 8 years ago, of a snowbird trapper that would come down from Maine annually and kill a few dozen over a couple of weeks.
Would I shoot a coyote(s) attacking a calf? Yes, certainly, (haven’t seen that in 20+ years) and I have shot several in the past just for being a coyote that I happened to see, in the act of running away, because I could, but as with a number of things I’ve shot, I wish I hadn’t. So I’m no game angel, myself, but “all this” is going to remain after we are dead, let’s remember, and I have a hard time envisioning that very many guys are solving a coyote problem, let alone going after a “problem” coyote, because I’m around these as much as anyone, and they simply are, shall we say it, canines, going about their natural, justified lives. Baiting brings in animals far exceeding one’s property lines, and what happens when everyone does it.
It’s legal to shoot animals in the country typically right up until it’s too late. Later day buffalo hunters probably sat around the fire - like this, asking each other why bison don’t seem to like the grass in the Great Plains, as much as they used to. Not any one reading this is so young they can’t recall wolves and bald eagles nearly being wiped out, by being shot. I have watched liberal javelina bag limits decimate their numbers, here, and they prey on nothing and are practically inedible. I won’t name one species after another because this is well known. We aren’t all shooting matches just because it’s so darn fun to wreck our guns at a very fast clip, some of us are doing it to save the environment from ourselves, because we would wreak absolute havoc on mother nature, - by the way also shooting up all the animals that “seem” so plentiful right now, but the good thing is there’s plenty of room at the ranges for a quite a few more, for matches, or if you can’t stand missing church, weekday plinking.
