America Spent 100 Years Killing Coyotes — and Accidentally Created Millions More

The United States government has been trying to eliminate the coyote since 1915. It has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the effort. It has killed, by its own accounting, nearly six million of them between 1916 and 1999 alone. Today, there are more coyotes in North America than at any point in recorded history. They're in every state. They're in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City. In 2015, three coyotes tried to make a den on the campus of Columbia University. The animal the federal government spent a century trying to erase didn't just survive — it used that campaign to become something it was never supposed to be. This video explains why. The answer comes down to a biological mechanism called compensatory reproduction — and to a century of wildlife management decisions that never produced the intended result, but did produce something else entirely: the most geographically widespread wild predator in North American history, built partly from the wreckage of the program trying to prevent it. The killing is still happening. The population keeps growing. → Wild Comeback covers accidental rewilding stories every week — nature doing the unexpected while nobody was planning for it. SOURCES — Flores, Dan (2016) — Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History — the definitive account of the coyote's expansion and the federal predator control program — Sunnylands Center — Coyote Management Timeline: https://sunnylands.org/wp-content/upl... — Hody & Kays (2018) — "Mapping the expansion of coyotes across North and Central America." PeerJ: https://peerj.com/articles/5014/ — NPR / Planet Money (2024) — "Why is the federal government still killing coyotes?": https://www.npr.org/transcripts/12390... — Project Coyote — Wildlife Services spending data: https://projectcoyote.org/protect/ref... — Scientific American — "Is the Federal Government's $100-Million Predator Control Program in Need of Reform?": https://www.scientificamerican.com/ar... #WildComeback #Coyote #Rewilding