Culling Coyotes Doesn't Pay Off
Coyotes with winter kill. Photo by Irene F. Greenben
Berger, K.M. 2006. Carnivore-livestock conflicts: Effects of subsidized predator control
and economic correlates on the sheep industry
Conservation Biology, 20(3):7B 1-761.
P
eople have been killing ptedators to protect livestock for
thousands of yeats, and today
many countties atound the world have
government programs to control predators. But any henefits to the livestock
industry are assumed rather than proven. Nevi' research raises questions about
this assumption by showing that U.S.
coyote control programs do little—if
anything—fot the sheep industry that
they supposedly boost.
hinder conservation of threatened
species through direct persecution or
resistance to reintroduction efforts."
Furthermore, predator control programs have threatened other species,
including African v^-ild dogs and gray
and red wolves.
The U.S. sheep industry has declined by more than 85 percent
since peaking in 1942, and
coyotes are widely blamed.
They are the primary targets of
federally subsidized programs
to protect sheep from predation and comprise about 95
percent ofthe large carnivores
killed in the last 20 years. During this period, coyotes have been killed
at an annual rate of roughly 80,000 and
at an annual cost of USS20.
and effort, not to mention all those
coyote deaths. She modeled how the
U.S. sheep industry is affected both
by predator control and by economic
factors, including lamb prices and hay
and labor costs. She used the number
of sheep as a measure of the industry's viability and the amount spent
on predator control as a measure of
that effort.
The results showed that we aren't
getting what we thought by killing
coyotes. Rather, predator control has
had little impact on the sheep industry, accounting for only six percent
ofthe trends in sheep numbers. This
finding is further supported by the
fact that sheep trends have been much
the same in western and eastern states,
even though the latter were colonized
by coyotes relatively recently and lack
federal predator controls. "Berger's results are long overdue and should help
shape policy in the U.S. and elsewhere,"
says Paul Beier of Northern Arizona
University in Flagstaff. "It's amazing
that U.S. citizens have supported these
programs for decades in the absence of
a rigorous assessment."
So what is acttially behind the
decline ofthe sheep industry? Berger's
model implicates economic factors. For
example, hay prices rose 44 percent and
sheep numbers dropped
44 percent between 1966
and 1976. Moreover, lamb
prices dropped by nearly
25 percent whereas real
wages more than doubled
between 1939 and 1998.
"Taxpayer dollars might
be better spent to support
sheep producers through direct cash
payments or some other form of subsidy if the goal is to increase sheep and
wool production and not merely to kill
carnivores," says Berger. ^»
Although coyotes are hardly threatened, this predator control program
still has a major conservation downside.
"Taxpayer-subsidized control programs
Berger is the first to assess what
help perpetuate the public perception we are really getting for all that money
of carnivores as widespread livestock
killers," says Kim Murray Berger of
the Wildlife Conservation Society JOURNALWATCH is written by Robin Meadows, a freelance science writer
in Conservation Biology. "[This] may specializing in conservation.
Vol. 7 No. 3 \ jufy-Sepi2006 * Conservation In Practice 11