SongDoghunter
12-20-2009, 10:30 PM
Many of you have read my comments about the population of coyotes and the problems they are causing in North Carolina as being exaggerated hype! The following is a recent excerpt from the biologist with the NCWRC.
Perry Sumner, furbearer biologist for the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, is hearing similar complaints. The state stopped tracking the spread of coyotes in 2000, the year in which they were first reported in all 100 NC counties. “There don’t seem to be a lot of coyotes anywhere [in North Carolina], but they’re everywhere,” Sumner says. “Some are causing problems, killing and eating livestock and pets. We’re probably getting more reported incidents from urban areas—where pets disappear, or people report that they’ve seen a coyote snatch a cat or dog—than from livestock owners now. We have sporadic problems with livestock depradations, mostly sheep and goats. Sheep are easy for coyotes to kill. Every aggressive instinct has been bred out of them. We get some reports that they’ve killed cattle, but that’s hard to document.” Coyotes sometimes feed on carrion, among many other things; food habit studies show they subsist primarily on wild rodents. A coyote feeding at the carcass of a large animal may have killed it, or merely happened upon it.
Coyotes “aren’t a big problem in North Carolina and they probably never will be, because we don’t have that much livestock out there. They would be a huge problem, if things were the way they were 30 years ago, when lots of families had a few animals out on the back lot. But that’s not the way it is now,” Sumner says.
Perry Sumner, furbearer biologist for the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, is hearing similar complaints. The state stopped tracking the spread of coyotes in 2000, the year in which they were first reported in all 100 NC counties. “There don’t seem to be a lot of coyotes anywhere [in North Carolina], but they’re everywhere,” Sumner says. “Some are causing problems, killing and eating livestock and pets. We’re probably getting more reported incidents from urban areas—where pets disappear, or people report that they’ve seen a coyote snatch a cat or dog—than from livestock owners now. We have sporadic problems with livestock depradations, mostly sheep and goats. Sheep are easy for coyotes to kill. Every aggressive instinct has been bred out of them. We get some reports that they’ve killed cattle, but that’s hard to document.” Coyotes sometimes feed on carrion, among many other things; food habit studies show they subsist primarily on wild rodents. A coyote feeding at the carcass of a large animal may have killed it, or merely happened upon it.
Coyotes “aren’t a big problem in North Carolina and they probably never will be, because we don’t have that much livestock out there. They would be a huge problem, if things were the way they were 30 years ago, when lots of families had a few animals out on the back lot. But that’s not the way it is now,” Sumner says.