Text by Amy Shutt // Photos by Ashleigh Scully, Brittany Crossman, and Amy Shutt
Let’s talk about the wildlife in our backyards.
I’m going to get straight to the point. I want to talk about the responsibilities we have to the wildlife with whom we share our immediate surroundings. Yes, I mean the raccoons we hear arguing in our back gardens at night, and the opossums playing dead in our accidentally open trash cans outside, and the ghostly red streak we see shooting in front of our car as we drive home on a dark evening (that we somehow know is a fox), and the coyotes singing us serenades at twilight.
I hear people often express in exasperated voices how they cannot believe they are seeing foxes or “so many” raccoons in their neighborhood. They can’t believe they live in a city and feel these animals should not be there - in the city - as well. They would rather see those wild animals in the woods where they “belong” - as if cities have always been here and these wild animals are encroaching on us, with their trees and forests. There is a disconnect in such statements. I think it comes from just not knowing the facts or from blindly believing untruths that were passed down over the years. I am mostly optimistic and feel that if people are exposed to the facts, they will see the flaws in those statements.
The first truth I want to discuss (as far as the United States is concerned)is this: the four animals mentioned above have actually benefitted from human expansion, and there are reasons they will hang around the edges, in suburbs, in small towns, and in large cities. They are even labeled "edge species", and for good reason. They learned early on that our villages, towns, and large cities provide a lot of food via our trash and the rodents that are drawn to it. That is a fact and not much is going to change that. We’ve inadvertently produced perfect conditions for these edge species to thrive!
Another fact is that removing a wild animal from a suburban or urban area, whether a single raccoon or ten raccoons, or a whole fox family, does not solve anything. What actually happens when a trapper removes an animal? Well, with his trap and animal in hand, he leaves your property and has also left a vacancy for another individual animal to occupy. If the local population of that species is healthy, another individual will fill that vacancy, sometimes overnight but certainly sooner or later. Therefore, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll notice another “pesky” critter that will “need” to be removed. Rinse and repeat.
Some people may not care much about where the wild animals they have had removed from their properties end up, but I’m sure most do to some degree. Some people may turn a blind eye and just tell themselves it was released in the woods miles away and that all is ok. After all, ignorance is bliss. But, you need to know that is rarely the case.
For instance, in some states if a coyote is trapped, the trapper has only two legal choices: euthanize it, or, if he has the proper permits, sell it to a coyote pen operation. It’s often the same for red foxes. I hear the going rate is a hundred dollars a head where I live. So, the trapper can euthanize the coyote and get nothing in return or for a hundred bucks, he can sell a coyote to a person who will put it in a penned-in property, where it will be chased and terrorized by competing hunting dogs with no place to hide and no way to escape. These competitions can last days. The coyotes and foxes will be ran to such exhaustion that they will often give up after a few hours, too tired to run anymore. At that point, the hunting dogs are more able to kill the exhausted coyote or fox (although not legally-but can you imagine trying to call off dogs from a target that is helpless in front of them?). In other words, these animals are possibly doomed to a cruel and grisly death, or at the very least a tormented existence.
