Hunters killed this very pregnant coyote bitch:
As you know, I am far more interested in zoology than animal rights, and if pictures of human fetuses weren’t going to make me “pro-life,” then these coyote fetuses aren’t going to make me opposed to coyote hunting.
In my high school biology class, there was a jar of dog fetuses that were preserved in formaldehyde. I was really fascinated by it. It didn’t disgust me. It had come from a local veterinarian who had spayed a pregnant bitch.
It is still pretty interesting to me that a coyote bitch would have that many puppies. It’s doubtful that all would have survive to maturity or even weaning had she lived to give birth to them.
Wow that’s a huge litter! I wonder if they all would have at least survived to term? No way they’d all have made it to their first year, of course.
Breeders do ultrasound, usually before ~35 days. If you use a good ultrasound technician with good equipment, the number of pups at 30 to 35 days generally indicates how many live births you will have. Ie, a pup who is going to die in the womb usually does so early. These pups all look about the same size, and they are not tiny, compared to newborns in a large Labrador litter. So I’d say there’s a good chance all would have been born alive. If mama coyote had a good mate and they had good hunting and lacked heavy disease, predator, or parasite pressure, it’s possible that many of the litter would have survived.
So much for the notion that dogs (broadly speaking) are K strategists.
I think dogs and wolves are actually r selection strategists, though not as extreme as many others.
This is the challenge of population models, to have application value researchers are obliged to make generalizations/assumptions about the natural world (ex hardy-weinberg null hypothesis). Most species fall into a spectrum of k-r, it seems to me that there is an advantage in not leaning too far to the side of extreme specialist or extreme generalist. That’s something worth looking at, fitness advantages gained when a species doesn’t fit a type I or type III growth curve.
Coyotes are impressive, they’re prolific colonizers that still invest in rearing young and are at least smart enough to not get killed and eat anything. Could they be the next humans? Or does that require opposable thumbs.
I don’t know why, but fetuses (human or animal) just really gross me out. I can’t stand looking at them. Thankfully that pic was not a closeup
There is a certain horror to seeing a foetus outside the womb before it’s time to be born.
Makes me think – breeders always try to keep every puppy in a large litter survive, but why not let the less vigorous pups die? Mom would. Nature would. The whole point of a litter that large is allowing more rigorous selection from a larger lot, not wasting resources on less vigorous pups.
*raises hand*
I think a lot of breeders feel responsible and see a death as a personal tragedy or defeat. Or money down the drain in some cases. Culling is taboo to a lot of breeders. I’m not judging as that’s at the breeder’s discretion. Obviously, someone breeding sled dogs in Alaska or Kangals in Turkey is going to have different criteria to someone breeding a litter of companion dogs in an urban setting.
If a bitch rejects a puppy out of a litter and cares for the others, there’s usually a good reason for it and that pup rarely makes it whatever you do – mum knows best. However, some of the non rejected “runts” are the most incredibly determined to survive even when they fall behind and it’s hard not to help them. My first bearcoat was one of those and was worth the first 4 weeks of hand rearing I did the day shift for. Mum cared for her in between meals and she’d caught up with her siblings by 8 weeks.
No, they don’t. It’s hard to let nature take it’s course, but the more experienced breeders generally do.
It doesn’t bother me at all. I have 3 runts in my home called goldens. They the really red one howls like coyote. He is just a hound dog at heart :) I love microsoft for a very good reason. :)
I have to admit the picture bothers me a bit. Not the hunting aspect or the fact that he killed a coyote that was pregnant it’s more something about lining up the fetus’s to make the number 14. But I’ve always been a little soft hearted. Other than that 14 pups just seems incredible to me!
I recently found your blog and have greatly enjoyed going back through and reading your old posts. They seem well written, I enjoy how straight forward and no nonsense you are in your opinions.
Of course there is always the chance they came from more than one animal, I try to keep my mind open when viewing such things. There is something disturbing about the fact someone wanted to play around with the unborn of an animal they have killed.
i agree – there is something sick in arranging the entrails of your kill to form patterns. Didn`t Jack the Ripper indulge in this kind of art?
Elizabeth
Indeed Elizabeth ..as an ex soldier and hunter I would never have tolerated this type of behaviour from anyone traveling with me and would have deemed such behaviour worthy of suspicion. The only exception would have been say opening up a fish to see what it had been feeding on but that is significantly different to what was done here.
I also find the placement of the knife next to the trophies to be disturbing as the parent already provides scale. There are elements of ritual in this image involving the placement of the knife and the fetuses that are not healthy IMHO.
There’s a difference between killing animals and killing people (how we treat the bodies of humans, even of our enemies). It could be they just wanted to see how many puppies there were. Chances are she looked rather large. Arranging them in the ’14’ is to tell us how many there are. Not that we couldn’t count. It was just… efficient.
Then again, they could be bloodthirsty creeps too for all I know, but not because of the picture.
Whoever did this has no Empathy or Human Compassion. This is a very
sick and dangerous individual/
Whoever did this was most likely a fur trapper, collecting an organically produce, low carbon footprint fabric for commercial use.
I actually care about ecology, not animal rights. Ecology never cared about animal rights in the first place.
It’s just because this animal looks like a dog and is related to a dog that you get all worked up about it.
Simple black and white view of the world, no different than evangelical assholes or the Taliban.
I hope you know that, unless you prove that real animal welfare laws were violated here, it’s most likely that nothing illegal was done.
In my state, they allow you to shoot coyotes at any time. It hasn’t made them go extinct either. We’ve been shooting, trapping, and poisoning them since we came into their range, and they’ve just laughed at us and expanded East.
Worry about real endangered species and climate change. Those are real issues to get worked up over.
It is interesting to see peoples reaction to this image on other sites going back to 2011. “Skinny Moose” is a site that used this photo back then and I find this passage taken from the same site to sum up a lot of my thoughts on the image. I quote one of three sporting ethics that this pro hunting site presents to hunters as a code for ethical behaviour:
“1. Honor game, other wildlife and the land
Adhere to the tenets of fair chase. Know the limits of your firearm and ability, and only take shots that you are confident will result in a certain and quick kill. Treat quarry with respect before and after the shot. Make every effort to retrieve and use all edible game. Take only as much as you can use. Be proud of the long tradition and continuing role that hunters play in conserving the wildlife and wild places enjoyed by all Americans.”
I am sure most reasonable people would agree that this image reflects zero respect for prey after death. Regardless of ones personal feelings about the image and what motivated its capture and distribution the fact remains that by the ethical hunting code I just quoted the person who did this could not be deemed an ethical hunter. Keep in mind these are not my ethics that I am forcing on hunters but are hunting ethics presented by hunters for hunters.
It’s just a matter of opinion.
I just disagree.
You choose to take this as an opposition to hunting. It is of course nothing of the sort. I have no problem with shooting coyotes. I don`t care how much they look like dogs.
But rearranging the entrails in this way rings alarm bells for lots of people..
Could you see yourself, after shooting a stag and gralloching it, rearranging the intestines to spell your initials, or perhaps a cheery message?
(Warning – your answer to this question will tell your readers quite a lot about you….)
Elizabeth
To me it’s more of a scientific piece.
14 fetuses out of one bitch coyote is something that would be awesome to see.
When I was a child, my dad killed a copperhead, a type of mildly venomous viper, which gives birth to live young. He wanted me to see the developing young copperheads.
I still don’t get all the fuss. 14 is just an illustration of how many there are.
No one’s being disrespectful. It’s just people trying to make mountains out of molehills.
I don’t see it.
If someone were to write a name using deer instestines that would be disturbing.
But this is more like, “A look what I found!”
I do think it’s rather strange for someone to go digging around inside the guts of a coyote they’ve shot, personally.
It is really common if someone shot a cow or a doe to see if they were pregnant since lots of time, it is difficult to tell if they are carrying offspring before they were shot.
With coyotes, they are very commonly skinned and people often open them up to see if they are attacking livestock or not.
When my grandpa would shoot a turkey or grouse, the first thing he’d do is empty the contents of its crop into a bucket. Allegedly, the only gold nugget ever found in West Virginia was in a turkey’s crop.
I doubt the person who took the photo is someone who would treat the coyote the same way they would treat a deer or a bison. Most hunters I know preach about ethics when it comes to ungulates; but when it comes to wolves and coyotes, they don’t really give a shit.
I don’t think there is any malice about this. I just think some guy killed a coyote, and he found 14 fetuses inside, and he decided he wanted to document it.
And this is a clever way of showing all 14.
People are nuts. There are far worse things that are happening to wildlife every day.
It’s really just people jumping on high horses and trumpeting.
You still don`t get it.
It`s not about things happening to wildlife.
it`s about what`s happening inside this guy`s head – and our instinct about these things, developed over many generations, makes us feel distinctly uneasy.
It`s a poor analogy, but if I found that someone I allowed to shoot here made a similar tasteful and educational arrangement of the insides of a fox (nearest thing to a coyote here), I would send him on his way, and would have a quiet word with the local police (to whom he would be known, as he would have been vetted by them before he was allowed to have a gun), as to his mental health. I would have to explain to them anyway, why I had revoked the permit.
(And all you will take out of this is that you will not get 14 foetuses out of a fox, no doubt.)
Elizabeth
Maybe we’re from entirely different cultures, and I just can’t figure this out.
I think this is one of those things where only ranch-hands and cow-boys understands.
Or other predator hunters.
Will have to agree to disagree. I find this a disrespectful way to treat an animal you have just killed and the images contain elements of ritual that would flag the artist as not quite right in the head. You find the image to be educational/entertaining and find nothing disturbing about it…correct me if I am reading you wrong as that is not my intent.
In my opinion saying that “There are far worse things that are happening to wildlife every day.” doesn’t cut it for me…..Its a bit like the catholic church saying there are a lot worse things than pedophile priests in this world for us to worry about. Indeed there are Scotty but that does not mean that the actions of those priests should be deemed as not worthy of investigation, analysis and condemnation.
Any scientific merit in the image doesn’t work for me because the pups could easily have come from two coyote bitches. The fact that prior to your use of the image it was used in stories titled “How To Take Out 15 Wolves With One Shot” suggests to me that the arrangement was more about bragging than any genuine sense of wonder or scientific inquiry.
Again these are opinions based on my Inquiries into this image and I am not here to tell anyone how they should feel about the image but I would encourage all to dig deeper than their original reaction to the image, whether that reaction was admiration, outrage or something in between.
I just find that there are enough ecological problems to worry about than to bring animal rights sympathies into the mix.
I don’t have time for it.
Not when we’re about to see a mass extinction due to climate change.
Perhaps in a few thousand years, Australian foxes will grow big enough to attack people’s dogs in their backyards.
Only then you can understand how people feel about medium-to-large predators.
Thanks for your thoughts Dave. Dave you might not know this but in Australia we already have a canid big enough that it does exactly what you suggest those imaginary super foxes could do right now so I don’t have to wait a few thousand years…it’s called a dingo and yes I have shot dingoes though I have no need to these days. I regularly kayak and fish in areas containing 13 foot plus estuarine crocodiles so am well aware of what its like to live amongst very large predators that unlike your coyotes consider me and our species to be prey animals. You are well off the mark insinuating i have no knowledge re living with medium to large predators.
I am certainly not approaching this from an animal rights position and you will see this if you re examine my posts. I am approaching this from a hunting ethics position and believe that the display and circulation of these images is not in alignment with the ethical treatment of prey animals “after the shot” and does not honour the life that was taken. If you feel that playing around with the fetuses of an animal you have killed during a hunt and circulating images taken is an honourable way to treat your prey then than that is your opinion and you are welcome to it. I see things differently.
Actually, I can insinuate how Australians feel about medium-to-large predators because most of them never had to deal with a cougar, bobcat or lynx jumping the fence and consuming their dogs. Or urban coyotes digging under the fence to get at their little foo-foos or their cat. From what is described to me about Australian dog-keeping is keeping them in the yard all their lives and sweeping the yard every morning to ensure it is clear of venomous snakes and pythons. The reality of the dingo seems to be largely limited to livestock owners, and the reality of the crocodiles is mostly limited to the waterways and coastlines.
I realize you are approaching the subject from a professional hunting point-of-view, but very few people actually hunt coyotes or wolves for the thrill of the hunt. Most of the time it is because they have nothing but contempt for predators.
I think that`s it.
Elizabeth
I wouldn’t call these people mentally unstable. There is something you have to understand about the world outside of British sphere, which includes Australia and New Zealand, that wolves and coyotes are seen as enemies of livestock.
You often see photos of predators being opened up to see if they are guilty of attacking local livestock or fawns and moose calves.
It is not a question of their mental state, but how large wild canids are perceived as nuisance by farmers, ranchers and hunters.
And it is not exactly a North American thing either.
You will see people in Nordic countries and Russia opening up lynxes or wolves to see if they were guilty of eating dogs. Or people in southeastern Europe and central Asia to see if goats and sheep were victims. So, naturally, if someone shot a pregnant bitch, they would like to show the world how many they were carrying.
It would be different story altogether if someone beheaded the coyote and stuck it on a pike or other displays of disrespect.
Very interesting story here: http://retrieverman.net/2010/09/25/the-wolf-of-ansbach/
The livestock-checking thing makes sense, I guess.
Yeah, I still don’t get it, because if someone was trying to do a biology lesson such as dissection they would do exactly that. In this case, that seems to be what they were doing.
I once shot a rabbit and boiled it to get all the skin and tissue off to see if I could reassemble the skeleton. My family thought something was wrong with me. But I had read about it in a book about Eugenie Clark when I was younger, how she’d boiled a rat for the same reason. Her family thought she was goofy too. She is now a marine biologist.
Again thank you for your comments Dave and others. Indeed most Australians don’t face the threat of large/mid sized predators taking their dogs but to be fair most Americans don’t face that problem either. From what is described to me most Americans keep their dogs in exactly the same way you suggested Australians keep their dogs so your comments fall a bit flat there. My dog lives on 100 acres and is rarely penned or tied up.
Lets try and bring comments back in line with the trend of discussion re the original post. Do you believe this is an ethical way to treat an animal you have hunted and killed….does the action honour the animal or degrade it? I am not judging the killing of this animal, whether it was necessary or not is not my concern. What I am saying is there is within American hunting culture an ethic regarding how an animal is treated “after the shot”. This ethic also extends to many other cultures.
I do not agree that taking images of an animal fetuses arranges in patterns and people writing about killing 15 coyotes (or wolves) with one shot and using these images is ethical. Dave as you have questioned the ethics of killing denning animals (wolverines) to protect livestock I believe it is reasonable to suspect you have an interest in hunting ethics. Hunting ethics are not restricted to “professional” hunters and I never inferred or stated this within my comments.
Generally I can find little scientific merit in the image as there is no proof that the fetuses came from one bitch and I rarely take such images at face value. The coyote bitch would have been obviously pregnant so assertions re opening the animal up to see stomach contents and bumping into the pups don’t quite cut it for me either. The intent of the person opening up the dead bitch would had more to do with its unborn pups than stomach contents I would suggest. All these are factors I have considered when forming my opinion of the photograph and its intent.
The big predator in Australia is the feral Western dog/dingo hybrid, which are larger than normal dingoes, and they are much more destructive.
I am beginning to wonder if the initial ban on GSD in Australia was actually as stupid as it sounds.
Maybe it actually did make a lot of sense!
In the wet tropics lost pig hunting dogs often form packs and cause a lot more damage than dingoes. These dogs have little sense of self preservation when attacking prey compared to dingoes and therefor are a real nightmare. Our local community destroyed a pack of 8+ of these dogs and finally had to resort to the use of 1080 as the damage inflicted on native fauna was unsustainable. Straight dingoes (I refer to animals that are true to type rather than 100% genetically pure) do perform an ecological function in line with the animal they replaced (the thylacine).
“Do you believe this is an ethical way to treat an animal you have hunted and killed….does the action honour the animal or degrade it?”
I don’t see anything wrong with it. I hunt all the time. Haven’t hunted coyotes yet.
The guy probably wasn’t going to be believed that there were 14 puppies in there, so he wanted to prove it. Until he turns up doing other weird stuff, this is meaningless. Next thing you know those of us who want to kill our own food and (GASP) post pictures with our harvest will be thought of as mentally ill.
Keep in mind… animals aren’t people. If he was doing snuff photography of human beings, or going around torturing animals, yes, by all means, freak out. It’s just a wild dog. He still treated it far better than any animal treats the other animals it kills.