Cecil the Lion

It's a tough thing Rog. You spend a ton of time out in the wild. You know how it is. Nature is both beautiful and incredibly cruel. It's all about predator and prey.

Old Cecil had a pretty good run. No doubt he ripped the hearts from many a baby antelope in his day. Then came the unfortunate day that he ran up against the most deadly predator ever developed by mother nature. That predator walked on two legs, hunted in packs, and carried a long rifle.

If you accept nature for what it truly is they you come to realize that natural law prevails and is unbreakable. If there's some kind of grand design it's entirely possible that the lion was meant to go extinct just as the Sabre Tooth Tiger & Wooly Mammoth did.

It's disconcerting to think this way but man is just as much a part of the natural order as any other creature on the planet. It may be arrogant to assume that we should presume to manage something so much greater than ourselves.

We're kinda conceited that way sometimes. ;)

Rog - I believe you are correct about the red wolf, their numbers will never be restablish in the wild again. The fact that they will exist in the future, will be as a species maintained in captivity as a zoo animal. The breeding program and release in designated management zones has had mixed results. First off in the mid 60's wildlife manager found only 17 wild animal, 3 of those were of mixed breed (coyotes). So the captive breeding program started with a very limited gene pool of 14 animal. As I understand it most of the reintroduced wolves, have again cross breeded with cyotes. I do hope the program of trying to reestablish the red wolves in areas of N.C./TN. is continued.

Rog you seem to be up on the state of our wildlife. What is your thought on the coyotes spreading to all 48 states now and even established in a lot of major cities (LA, NYC)? My thought a animal species that is out of control, thriving, becoming a problem. Very common here to see them hunting for food in my suburbia city and getting too comfortable with people.

A correction from my last post. It was not the Zulu who had to kill a lion as a rite of manhood passage with just their spear and club (not shield) but the Masai. The Zulus may have had a lion ritual as well to be a warrior/enter manhood. May have to check it out.

Burt- I don't know if coyotes would be considered "out of control" but they are certainly a generalist that does well not only in their "native" habitat but in highly altered human landscapes as well, from cropland edges to big cities. Raccoons are another generalist who have massively expanded their range over North America, although the long cold in much of Canada limit them. "Canada" geese as well. What the PETA and "just leave them alone" folks don't get is that ecosystems are dynamic and voids don't stay empty for long unless degradation is just so overwhelming that almost nothing can live there. We may not like the new ecosystem but that doesn't mean its not functional. I have a book in my head about my home region and the changes incurred over the last 150 years but that might have to wait until I retire. It may not follow the "company" line but if I manage to piss off both the hard left and and hard right, I'll probably have done my job ;)

As for wiley 'yote and being a pest and potential danger in urbanized areas, local and state govs may have to do what some suburban ones have done in Megalopolis out east when it comes to WT deer. In some areas where the deer are thriving and being pests (traffic accident dangers, eating down highly manicured gardens--they're just living in another modified ecosystem) and can't be controlled in a traditional hunting method, contract deer "hit squads" operate at night. They find where the deer are gathering or can be attracted and use night vision equipment and suppressed weapons to kill them and transport the carcasses out of the area after they are done. Mr. and Mrs. suburbanite wakes up in the morning and never knows that 5 deer were whacked a block or two away from their house. And no one basically talks about it...

I am in no way against hunting as long as you eat it, I doubt he ate an ounce of that lion , I am personally disgusted with these types of hunts , it would be different if there was a need to thin the herd so to speak as we do this here in Maine at times , hunting for food equals good to me hunting just to kill is wrong

IMO, how could the dentist not have known the lion was lured off sacred land? WHY should HE not be held accountable yet the guides should be?

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Originally Posted by DakotaRog

As for wiley 'yote and being a pest and potential danger in urbanized areas, local and state govs may have to do what some suburban ones have done in Megalopolis out east when it comes to WT deer. In some areas where the deer are thriving and being pests (traffic accident dangers, eating down highly manicured gardens--they're just living in another modified ecosystem) and can't be controlled in a traditional hunting method, contract deer "hit squads" operate at night. They find where the deer are gathering or can be attracted and use night vision equipment and suppressed weapons to kill them and transport the carcasses out of the area after they are done. Mr. and Mrs. suburbanite wakes up in the morning and never knows that 5 deer were whacked a block or two away from their house. And no one basically talks about it...

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It's a little disconcerting. The ecosystem here was pretty badly damaged by the 1970's and with careful management it's rebounded. A certain amount of repair is not a bad thing but it's playing around with a natural balance that can behave in unpredictable ways. You don't always get the result you were expecting.

Up until six or seven years ago the coyote population here on the island was non-existent. They had been wiped out as pests decades ago.

Whether they found their way back in -or- were reintroduced i don't know. They are back with a vengeance though. The darn things have come within five feet of my bedroom window and started howling in the middle of the night. Apparently they could smell my dog and were calling for him to come out and play ? (mate)

It's not the best situation. The yoties have cross bred with domestic dogs in other parts of the country to create coy-dogs. This is a much larger wild predator that sometimes views small humans as a prey item when their hungry. Additionally ... rabies sometimes gets into the pack and that creates another problem.

It's not easy to eradicate them once their established. When a night hunter goes up against a pack in the wild the advantage is to the coyote because the human is on their turf.

Best guess as to why they were decimated here in the past was because human hunters all but destroyed their food source. (deer,squirrel,rabbit,etc.)

Coy-dogs are certainly a newer twist to things, most don't look like a classic coyote. The "eastern" yote that still has the classical coyote look and has a certain amount of red wolf genes in it can become much larger than the western or centrals. A 40+ pound yote from these regions is uncommon but this weight can be frequent for an eastern. Critters hanging on the scale of over 50 pounds have been verified. For those who have never held a dead coyote and look at their dog, and say, "big deal, my dog is 50 pounds" (as is mine and stands much lower than a yote), dog bone structure is denser/heavier than a coyote's. Another difference in eastern yotes is that can have a wide range of colors, ranging from black to classic German shepherd. We have some variations in the classic coyote colors that I've seen in SD but nothing like the range of colors that I've seen in pixs from guys in the East and South.

Scrappah- If you can use snares or "cable restraints" in ME and want to thin some of those yotes on your island, I'd say go for it. They're very effective once a person gets the hang of putting them up and work all winter.

Living on the very edge of national forest, the man vs nature is a daily issue.
There a quite a few local hunters who have been pushing the coy dog and coyote population back out of the towns and surrounding rural ares and back into the forest, dogs are the most common use.
While this puts many at ease as a potential threat to children pets/livestock and in groups even adults, but it also opens up these areas to the prey. Skunks, woodchucks, mice, raccoon, moles, deer ext ext now overrun these areas as their main predator is gone, since wolfs who suffered the same fate are no longer around.
seems other scavengers seem to be doing well in population as well..
I'm with scrappah natural balance should be controlled by nature, man should control....man

< Gentle laughter > Don't mind me guys .... i'm a bit different.

I've got no problem at all with hunting & trapping but i prefer to sit back and observe the cycles of the seasons with all of the different critters coming through. Got to admit that it's a little unnerving to be working outside just after the sun sets some days. That Coyote pack migrates around the island and if they happen to be in your area they let you know about it. You can hear them calling back & forth to one another as the group is moving steadily in your direction.

It's not that they're hunting human .... they're tracking the scent of the deer that travel through here to feed as they're migrating through. It would be awfully easy to take it personally though. Those yoties do tend to leave scent markers around the property. There's obviously a little bit of disagreement on what territory belongs to whom.

Call me crazy, but i'd rather not get into a pi$$ing contest with the neighbors. They don't seem to be causing any real problems at the moment so i'm just as well content to leave em' be.

I live 40 miles east of downtown LA, in a city that for the most part has become just like all the rest of southern Cal., one huge metropolitan city (mostly concrete connecting each city to the next). I moved here from a beach city 30+ years ago, to get out of the city and to live in a more "country type" lifestyle. I choose to buy a home in Chino, because there were homes on very large lots (1 to 3 acres), more than half of the city was in a agriculture zone, Santa Anna river and unincorporated land on the cities south boarder, Chino Hills state park and it's 38 mile wild life corridor on cities west boarder, the north side of city is bordered by a narrow (1 mile wide) unincorporated land as well. So in short, it had lots of open space that had not been developed yet!

My first week I lived here, every morning before leaving home and my 1 1/2 hour commute to work, I would need to pickup the trash at the side of my house. Some "idiot prankster", would knock over the can and spread the trash all over. This went on until the first weekend, I decided to stay up all night to catch the "idiot". About three AM, I heard the first can getting turned over, I carefully sneak to the side of the house and peer around the corner to spot the prankster. My surprise three raccoons, one working the can already on it's side and the other two working to knock another one over. It was then that I remembered from growing up in rural Arkansas, just how smart and opportunist a raccoon can be, the "idiot" was me. Wasn't long after that, we had to cleanup a dog after it encountered a skunk. Rabbits and possums introduced me to the neighborhood as well, I wanted country lifestyle, and they were giving it to me Southern Cal. style!

I don't mind people hunting for food, even if its a North Korean eating a dog, people have to eat. I don't like trophy hunters with high powered weapons and local guides killing protected animals for a thrill and then bragging about it on social media.

Anybody remember that huge pig that was shot with a huge handgun a while back. It was somebodies pet its whole life, loved human interaction but got too big so he gave it to a farm. It ended up getting "hunted". At least a lion in the wild has a chance to make you his dinner.

The human population has pretty much made pets of a few animals and is driving the rest to extinction, which will cause us to suffer in the long run. There had to be a balance in nature between all the animals or things go very badly (extinction for the losers and starvation for the winners).