When my sister got home from Christmas, she found that coyotes had slaughtered one of her ewes. A pile of warm guts was in the nearby yard, and out along the pasture fence line was the rest.
“They ripped her apart,” she said, her voice steady but no doubt belying her feelings. “I had to walk a ways to find the ear with the tag so I knew which one it was.”
She has had a rough few years on her little farm. The death of dogs, cats, pigs, and sheep has been more than it ought to have been, I think, even in regular farming life-death cycles.
“I know you don’t want to hear it,” she said, knowing I don’t like to see animals killed, “but we’re going to have to really get aggressive about those coyotes.”
Surprising both her and myself, I didn’t even pause. “Kill them. Kill them all. Kill those bastards. Find their dens and wipe them out.”
Her old dog had recently died, and even though the last months of limping and blindness might not have posed much of a threat to the coyotes, his presence had been enough to keep them away. But now, they were bold. They were wiping out her cats, had taken out a guinea hen, and now an expensive ewe.
I remembered an article I’d written about a few times in the past, one about ranchers dealing with wolves killing their sheep. From an August 19, 2013 blog post, I’d written this:
Several years ago, I read a short newspaper article that depicted the struggle western ranchers (particularly those with sheep) were having with the reintroduction of wolves.
At a townhall-type meeting, several government wildlife officials were presenting their plan to solve the problem of wolf attacks on livestock to a packed house of ranchers. They outlined how they were tagging wolves, and then selectively sterilizing them to reduce the population.
At the end of the presentation, the officials opened the floor to questions, and an elderly rancher stood up in the back. The wildlife official at the podium motioned for him to speak.
The rancher paused for a moment in the silent room, and then said, with a hint of confusion in his voice, “Son, you don’t understand. The wolves ain’t breedin’ the sheep. They’re eating ‘em.”
The balance between livestock and wild animals is always hammered at by ranchers, the government, and environmentalists.
But I like my sister’s California Red sheep very much and I am angry about the nighttime darkness filled with the constant yipping of those encroaching coyotes. They could eat rodents, Canadian geese, but no. They go for livestock.
Sheep are very passive, letting themselves be killed, once they decide there’s no hope. I learned from a sheep shearer that this is why he held the sheep a certain way. They wouldn’t fight him anymore.
“You’re going to have to get a dog,” I said when she mentioned her various options. “You need a working dog out there.”
Enter Roger, the Maremma sheepdog who, though still a puppy, is ridiculously large. Full-grown, he’s going to be huge with a head that looks a bit like a bear. He’ll have strong jaws that cut down like a scissor. His undercoat is going to be thick. He will defend his property from anything or anyone who shouldn’t be there. He’ll take control over the flock of sheep he’s been entrusted to. He can slay wolves if he needed to, and in Patagonia, would take down pumas.
But my sister has her work cut out to get Roger into working shape. She may need to get a second one for him to partner with.
For now, he just makes a puppy mess.
Coyotes are seen as a trickster in Native American mythology for a lot of reasons, but right now, I just want to see them dead. Roger?