Tootsie the Coyote, a Black Hills Mascot

Fred Borsch holds Tootsie during Deadwood's 1950 "Days of '76" Parade (South Dakota Public Broadcasting).

 

My boyhood in the Black Hills slightly overlapped the life of Tootsie, a famous South Dakota coyote. I must have gone past The Spot liquor store on visits to Deadwood, but I don't remember it. Dad probably never took me inside. (But can I time-travel back and make an offer on the Willys "woody" station wagon in the photograph?)

I could not find any of Tootsie and Fred's vocal duets (see article) on YouTube, but there was a bit of silent home movie from the late 1950s showing Tootsie and, apparently, Fred's tame deer at Galena, S.D.  (The Sheridan Lake footage is from elsewhere in the Black Hills.)

I wonder if she made any parade appearances in Rapid City.

The bounty on coyotes was real. "In 1947 and other years, there was a bounty on coyotes. The State of South Dakota considered them to be a predatory animal and a threat to livestock." 

Dad used to buy eggs from an old trapper named Frank Schmidt, who lived in the northern Hills.  It was not so much about getting organic free-range eggs as it was that Frank was a "character," and Dad collected "characters." 

There were usually skinned coyotes hanging up, because Frank eked out his modest living partly off those bounties. And he must have had a buyer for the pelts.

Sometimes he stopped by our house in Rapid to drop off eggs. His rattly pickup truck apparently stank of predator, because our dogs would bark at it like they barked at no other vehicle.

The Backyard Chicken Craze Is Going Mass-Market

I stopped at the Big R store in Pueblo last week — my first visit in some time — and wow, that chicken thing.

Big R seems to cater mainly to hobby ranchers and rural homeowners. (Now I'll from someone: "I farm 600 acres, and I shop there!") You can get your Carhart and Wrangler jeans, your muck boots, animal feed by the sack, gopher poison, guns and ammo, tools, horse tack, all sorts of stuff.

And chicken coops. Out front where there used to be kit-built storage sheds are now displayed kit-built chicken coops. I will leave it to you to decide whether where these come down on the cute/utilitarian spectrum and whether you could build you own for less. But who can wait? There's a crisis!

In the parking lot, two middle-aged women of SE Asian looks were loading big sacks of chicken feed into a car. Somehow I felt that they might have been in the chicken business for some time.

In Colorado, we have not just avian flu hitting large-scale chicken operations, but a new law just went into effect setting "cage free" space requirements for laying hens. Some people want to blame both for the shortage of eggs in stores. Others insist that only the avian flu is to blame:

“The data that we're seeing coming out of the USDA is really indicating that what they're seeing...this impact on prices that we're experiencing, is really a direct input of the impact of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza,” said Hollis Glenn, deputy commissioner of operations for the Colorado Department of Agriculture. “It's a fatal disease for poultry, the laying hens, and the flocks of our producers have been tremendously diminished. So, their ability to produce eggs has been a challenge and when they have an outbreak in their facility, the data that shows that.”

Meanwhile, social media is on it! Two samples for yesterday:

And if you made it this far, you need to be thinking about the legalities.

Additional permits might be required for the coops the chicken will live in. 

“Call [your local zoning department] and figure out if you're going to need a permit for your coop,” [Chicken owner Bekah] Russell said. “Because, you'll definitely need one for your chickens, but you might require an additional building permit.”

[Chicken owner Kia[ Ruiz also advised owners to prepare for chicken deaths. The birds are not particularly hardy creatures and predators common in the state will hunt them if their enclosures aren’t secure. And sometimes, the hens might even fight members of their own flock. 

“I had been in that situation when we first got them. They were pecking each other, they were younger.” Ruiz said. “Chickens are dinosaurs. When they see red and they see blood, they will just keep attacking.”

 

Mountain Lions, Dogs, and Lethal Force

This mountain lion was captured and tagged in Boulder in October 2021.
Relocated to the mountains, it was killed in December 2022 after attacking dogs.
(Photo: Boulder Police Dept, via the Colorado Sun)

In 2003, Colorado journalist David Baron published The Beast in the Garden: The True Story of a Predator's Deadly Return to Suburban America.

Its topic was human-lion relations on the northern Front Range of Colorado, where cities bump into the mountains, with a focus on Boulder County. (A National Public Radio reporter, Barron wrote that book while on a fellowship in environmental journalism at CU-Boulder.)

As Colorado moved away from treating lions as "varmints" with a bounty on their heads to game animals with a limited "take" allowed, populations had rebounded. Boulder, like many other places, had a thriving herd of in-town mule deer, especially on its western edge, and lions had followed the deer — as they do. (The usual figure you hear is that an adult mountain lion will kill a deer every seven to ten days, feeding on the carcass while it is still relatively fresh.)

The death of Idaho Springs high-school athlete Scott Lancaster, ambushed by a lion in 1991 while training for the cross-country running team, was the first recorded human kill in Colorado.

(Here is a list of post-1890 fatal lion attacks in North America, which is undoubtedly incomplete, especially as regards the US-Mexico border region.)

The attack on the young runner is key to Baron's book, as his website explains:

Here, in a spellbinding tale of man and beast that recalls, only in nonfiction form, Peter Benchley’s thriller Jaws, award-winning journalist David Baron chronicles Boulder’s struggles to coexist with its wild neighbors and reconstructs the paved-with-good-intentions path that led to Colorado’s first recorded fatal mountain lion attack. The book reveals the subtle yet powerful ways in which human actions are altering wildlife behavior.

My takeaway from Baron's book was that the Colorado Division of Wildlife (as it was then called) was willing to try some active "management" of suburban and exurban mountain lions, but the feedback that they got from public meetings leaned toward "Please don't kill them. We can learn to co-exist."

Have things changed? A headline in the online Colorado Sun reads, "Mountain lions killed 15 dogs in 30 days near a Colorado town. Attacks continued and now a lion is dead."

Subhead: "People living in neighborhoods around Nederland wonder why Colorado Parks and Wildlife can’t do more to stop attacks on their pets".

In response, Sam Peterson, CPW’s Area 2 Boulder South District wildlife manager, held a meeting at the Nederland community center. Most of it focused on how to peacefully coexist with lions, but that’s not what the 140 people who attended were after. They wanted to know why lions were hiding out under porches, grabbing 100-pound Dobermans and 70-pound Labs and stalking dogs on leashes held by humans.

So the debate continues: Active measures versus careful co-existence, with residents coming down on both side and CPW reluctant — for both philosophical and budgetary reasons — to commit to sending marksmen and hounds after every mountain lion seen eyeing a dog.

Some Nederland-area residents now do their outdoor chores with firearms handy. But there's a catch. Under Colorado's "nuisance wildlife" laws (link is a PDF file),  a dog is not worth as much as a goat, for example, if the goat is classified as "livestock" and not a "pet."

• Black bears and mountain lions CAN NOT be destroyed when they are causing damage to personal property, including pets. 

• Black bears and mountain lions CAN be killed when it is NECESSARY to prevent them from inflicting death, damage or injury to livestock, human life, real property, or a motor vehicle. Any wildlife killed shall remain the property of the state, and such killing shall be reported to the division within five days. “Real property” means land and generally whatever is erected or growing upon or affixed to land. (Note: “Personal Property” means everything that is subject to ownership, other than real estate. Personal property includes moveable and tangible things such as pets, furniture and merchandise.)

In the Colorado Sun article, we see what happens when someone uses lethal force — sometimes:

After being driven away from one dog attack, a lion moved on to the next house:

The large, reddish cat walked up a neighbor’s driveway. . .  Several minutes later [the residents] heard several gunshots. CPW’s deputy regional manager Kristin Cannon filled in the rest of the story. 

Cannon says the lion attacked a dog at a home 400 yards from [the first attack]  and that during the attack, the dog’s owner killed the lion. She reiterated what Peterson had said, that it’s illegal to kill a lion to protect a pet but that in this instance CPW won’t be pressing charges due to “the totality of the circumstances.” 

Which is to say that the law is black-and-white but the wildlfe officers have a lot of discretion based on circumstances and the shooter's attitude. In my small experience, I have seen them usually avoid charging a shooter, which might put them in court being cross-examined over whether the bear was in the "personal property" garbage can or trying to break into the "real property" house. And there are the public-relations aspects.

But the option to charge someone is always there, beloved dog or not.