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Coyotes... Shoot or pass?
- Thread starter DB4x4
- Start date
Ridiculous. We are comparing pets to wild animals here. Does it make you guys feel like a big man to kill some 8 year old's pet cat? That really gives hunter's a good image in the public eye. I have to admit I am a cat lover here for full disclosure. Probably should have put that in the no-shame thread
Invasive? You have probably killed more songbirds with your Ford pickup than my cat has.
This thread needs closure. Now guys are chiming for the helluva it. Admitting you're cat lover. What's this coming to? :^)
My FIL was the same way. I actually saw him stick a stray cat to his front porch with an arrow
One of my friends back to backed 2 cats one night after the other just a couple weeks ago. They were pretty hefty, must've been eating their Meow Mix. I think he's planning on full body mounts for both.
I used to hunt a farm, rule was see a cat shoot a cat. Tore me up for the first year. Doe tags need to be filled so I complied. So did the other guy.
When I first started hunting there was zero small game. After a couple years I'd get to annoyed by the sqirrels and saw a few pheasants.
Cats are incredible killers. Kill for fun murders....
I have a indoor/outdoor cat. Most of the time I finish the job, he likes to play with his food... I can only stand the scream of a bunny for so long...
When I first started hunting there was zero small game. After a couple years I'd get to annoyed by the sqirrels and saw a few pheasants.
Cats are incredible killers. Kill for fun murders....
I have a indoor/outdoor cat. Most of the time I finish the job, he likes to play with his food... I can only stand the scream of a bunny for so long...
Haha I didn't realize the can of worms I was opening when I started this thread.
I was just curious if yinz shot coyotes when you saw them or not... Now we got guys arguing about Garfield and Friends...
I was just curious if yinz shot coyotes when you saw them or not... Now we got guys arguing about Garfield and Friends...
I shoot coyotes if I see them and if they are in season. In NY, coyotes are a legit regulated game animal and have a definite season. This year it started October 1st and ends March 28th. I love coyote trapping and hunting and consider them among the smartest creatures in the wild. Calling coyotes is incredibly difficult and many people develop the illusion that they are easy to hunt because you see them whilst bowhunting or whatever. Try going after them on purpose out here in the east where there is cover and topography and a lot of food all year 'round for them. They are very humbling to hunt. There are some excellent eastern coyote hunters and trappers around and basically, it comes down to a numbers game. Like anything else, you have to put in your time or set a lot of traps and cover a lot of ground to get any in numbers. You also have to play the wind and have decent set ups. Unfortunately, the dark bellies of most Eastern Coyotes have little to no fur value presently. My favorite coyote was a jet black one I trapped several years ago.... it just had a white throat patch. I sold it to a taxidermist for a competition mount jumping at a flushing grouse. It had no value as a pelt in the fur trade. The western yotes' with the clear or white bellies are what command the most $$$$. I've studied them informally for a long time and other posts on here about hunting them is true. The more you hunt them the more they reproduce. In areas where you leave them alone for the most part, they're litter sizes are smaller on average. Areas where there is a lot of hunting or trapping on them their litter sizes increase incredibly. Some scientists believe they have taken over as the niche predator to replace the eastern brush wolf or timber wolf which is still in Canada and the northern extremes of some US states from the mid-west easterly. On average, eastern coyotes are roughly one-third larger than their western relatives and the science du jour credits their breeding with the timber wolves as a reason for this increased size difference. In a study the NYS DEC was conducting, they surprisingly found a lot of beaver and deer hair in their digestive tracts and in their scat analyses but they could not determine if the taking of deer or beaver was purposeful (they hunted and killed them) or the result of finding carrion. I do remember researches being very surprised at the amount of beaver fur they identified in coyote scat. Lastly, I believe you should shoot them when in season as some of the science suggests that they do become more brazen if they are not hunted or trapped. Couple that with the cat lovers who feel the need to feed all the feral cats all over the place and you can understand why they become attracted to more residential areas. Coyotes do kill cats and so do fisher and foxes but a big cat would give a fox a tough go at it. I know this doesn't sound nice but I also think feral cats are a huge problem and disease vector and I think we need to start culling them like the hogs in the south. Sorry cat lovers... we have a cat and a dog and even our housecat hates the feral cats!!! We had two guys in our community have to get the rabies series because they were feeding feral cats and many of them developed rabies.
Just north of you I believe, did you participate in the Cornell survey when they wanted coyote heads to study wolf/coyote genetics in our coyotes, we did, never heard anything back.
Cool mount! I like the variety of different poses and options with predator mounts compared to deer.
I don't care if you guys are shooting them or not, I have coyote hunted before and had a blast. But for those saying that removing them can't possibly create more coyotes:
While you can temporally reduce their numbers by trapping they come back to pre-trapping levels within 8 months:
digitalcommons.unl.edu
And although you can reduce breeding by hunting and trapping, you open up that area to increased immigration from other dispersing coyotes in surrounding areas as well as increase the amount prey on the landscape which can lead to larger litter sizes (some studies have shown they could double or triple):
From my reading, it sounds like whatever individuals you kill will be at least replaced within a year unless you are trapping/shooting them all year long every year. Meaning from the "shoot them while im deer hunting" standpoint we are all doing basically nothing except collecting some sweet furs to swaddle our infants
While you can temporally reduce their numbers by trapping they come back to pre-trapping levels within 8 months:
Demographic and Spatial Responses of Coyotes to Changes in Food and Exploitation
Lethal control for reducing carnivore populations is a contentious issue throughout the world. While computer simulations have been developed modeling the effects of population reduction on coyote (Canis latrans) population parameters, testing these hypotheses with empirical data from the field...
And although you can reduce breeding by hunting and trapping, you open up that area to increased immigration from other dispersing coyotes in surrounding areas as well as increase the amount prey on the landscape which can lead to larger litter sizes (some studies have shown they could double or triple):
From my reading, it sounds like whatever individuals you kill will be at least replaced within a year unless you are trapping/shooting them all year long every year. Meaning from the "shoot them while im deer hunting" standpoint we are all doing basically nothing except collecting some sweet furs to swaddle our infants
A few years ago, we were running a big cat and somebody said it was headed down the creek on the ice, well I was on that creek but I had one problem, there was fresh snowshoe tracks in front of me and I knew it was my buddy who is a killer, so I raced down his tracks and caught up with him, he had a nice watch looking down the frozen creek bed, I said slide over, after some choice words he moved over, 15 minutes later here comes the big tom right down the ice headed right for us, I mumbled don’t shoot yet wait he isn’t close enough, then I pulled up and shot, he shot next which I think hit the clouds lol, cat ripped right towards us and we ended up getting him, in the end both of us were blazing, big tom, we still laugh about that.
That's common to a lot of things. The trap is you had success accidentally killing a coyote doing X so you start trying to force X more times thinking it will payoff on more kills since you scaled yo and trying to do it intentionally. You have to understand why X worked and whether it was a fluke and do other locations fit the mold of how X worked.
Had to learn this the hard way trapping and see it all the time when I teach other trappers