The human hordes are still at it, roaming the last of
the Big Open with their guns and traps and poisons, trying to wipe
out yet another of their fellow creatures. This time, the target is
the resilient trickster himself, coyote.
Doug
Hawes-Davis frames his latest documentary film, Killing
Coyote, with the Calcutta, a coyote-killing contest held
in Rawlins, Wyo. The film ranges through the blandly demonic
endeavors of the federal Wildlife Services agency (formerly Animal
Damage Control), the problems with dryland livestock production,
and into Hawes-Davis’ most powerful subject – the slowly evolving
relationship of humanity to the rest of
Creation.
As in his 1998 feature film,
Varmints, Hawes-Davis has found a wonderful cast
of human characters – biologists, hunters, ranchers, animal-rights
activists and exterminators. Unlike Varmints, in
which the prairie dog shooters were unredeemable and repulsive,
Killing Coyote brings to light the complicated
nature of hunting
itself.
“It’s so neat, just to
be that close to him,” says one young man after a successful day,
“you almost don’t want to kill him.”
The
hunters’ wind-burned, beer-drinking vitality contrasts so sharply
with the practiced, institutionalized smoothness of the
animal-rights advocates that it is hard to decide whom to root
for.
Less difficult is determining whom to root
against. Hawes-Davis and his crew are the first journalists to film
the research facilities of Wildlife Services and interview the
veterinarians and exterminators who devote their lives to
destroying coyotes. There is no finer example of what writer Hannah
Arendt has called “the banality of evil” than these films of
tightly bound coyotes being injected with the latest experimental
birth control potions, or being dragged from their holding pens by
people who look just like you and
me.
“We fail a lot,” says one
Wildlife Services staffer, “but that doesn’t mean we’re going to
stop.”
Everyone interviewed agrees that there
has been no reduction in coyote numbers despite over a century of
taxpayer-funded persecution. One biologist, explaining why these
efforts have failed, tells a story that rivals any Native American
trickster legend. Perhaps this excellent documentary is merely
another chapter in that legend, one that will be told to our
children in some distant and unimaginable future, while coyotes yip
and howl in the darkness, just beyond the circle of whatever we are
using for light.
Killing
Coyote is available on VHS video for $35 from High Plains
Films, P.O. Box 8796, Missoula, MT 59807, 406/543-6726. Call for a
screening in your area.
Copyright © 2000 HCN and Hal
Herring
Hal Herring lives
and writes in Corvallis, Mont.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Killing Coyote.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
