Bad Dog

Most of my 50 minute commute to work each day is on Interstate 10.  The drive goes fast. Everyone's driving about 75 miles an hour.  The last part of my drive is on back country roads.  It is sparsely populated, wide open land - mostly farmland. A lot of the farmland hasn't been planted in crops for a while and is largely pastureland being grazed by cattle.

The cattle walk around the pastures, eating grass throughout the spring and summer and round bales of hay that farmers bring them during the fall and winter. As I drove by today I saw many new baby calves following after their mommas. They were Angus/Brahman cross calves and their long ears flopped against the side of their heads as they tried to keep up.

I saw a big old crow standing on top of a fence post, checking out his surroundings.

But on this stretch of road, crows aren't the only thing hanging out on fence posts:

Coyote!

A coyote carcass hung from a t-post, his sightless eyes staring out to passersby.

Another mummified Coyote 

Just 20 yards down the road and on the same fence line, another coyote dangled from the fence. Why?  Why are these coyote corpses on the fence?  You'll see this a lot out in the country.  There are several reasons for it.  Before I get to it, I have to say, I feel little sympathy for the coyotes.  They are predators that hunt in packs and kill just-born, defenseless baby calves.  For whatever reason, the coyote population is growing around here.  As subdivisions move out to the country, I've heard that people's pet dogs are going missing and coyotes are blamed for killing the pet dogs.

Farmers and ranchers armed with rifles do their best to keep the population controlled, but is an on-going battle.  The tradition of hanging coyotes from fences is an old one and there are several theories behind it.  First, ranchers paid hunters a bounty for killing coyotes and hanging them is proof of the kill.  That makes sense. Next, I read that ranchers are just bragging and showing their neighbors that they are doing something about the coyote problem.  That makes sense, too.  Finally I read that after killing the coyotes, they are hung on fences to warn other coyotes that if they come around, this will happen to you!  A warning!  However, I'm not sure that coyotes are smart enough to heed the warning.

Image Credit

For sure that coyote wasn't very smart.  Beep. Beep.  Wile E. Coyote kept coming back after being blown up and falling off of a cliff into a deep canyon.  The two coyotes I saw on the fence post ain't coming back - that's for sure.