WORDS, WORDS, WORDS
Doesn’t “varmints” sound like a word from the past? Along with skedaddle, doggone, whippersnapper and the like?
Here’s William Safire, NYTIMES, back in 2007, on “varmint:”
'I'm not a big-game hunter," said Mitt Romney, campaigning in Indianapolis. "I've made that very clear. I've always been a rodent and rabbit hunter. Small varmints, if you will."
There's a gem of dialect out of the Wild West. In hundreds of cowboy movies, the man in the white hat scowls at the rustlers and the gunfighters and excoriates them with varmint, the meanest, dirtiest, most lowdown word permitted by the prim self-censorship office then run by Will Hays.
And there was that scene in "Duel in the Sun," a 1946 David Selznick epic widely known as "Lust in the Dust," which was directed by King Vidor and was at the time the most expensive movie ever made. Lewt, the ne'er-do-well son played by Gregory Peck, leers at Pearl Chavez, the beautiful half-Indian, half-Anglo who is trying to be virtuous, and says, "I'll try to get you one of them newfangled bathing suits" - to which Pearl, played by Jennifer Jones, furious at his lascivious put-down, hisses the most severe derogation then permissible: "You - you varmint!"
The word had appeared in P. T. Barnum's 1854 autobiography as an imprecation - "ye young varmint!" - as well as in a 1907 A. Conan Doyle story as an adjective: "thin, ascetic, varminty." It is a dialect form of vermin, rooted in the Latin for "worm," and encompasses animals of cunning (foxes, raccoons, snakes) as well as animals that cause revulsion, like moles, gophers, mice, rats and skunks.
The word's usage is bipartisan: In 2004, President George W. Bush told Outdoor Life magazine that one of the guns he kept in his collection was a gift from "Bob Bullock, my old buddy" on his deathbed, a .243-caliber "varmint rifle."
You could challenge his “animals of cunning” phrase (rats? mice? cunning? Really?) As for revulsion, that seems heavy. Mostly, we misunderstand, or just don’t have the knowledge to understand what animals do to survive. We’re so…duh.
Google “varmints” and you get coyotes. Topping this helpful list you will find the website https://www.wideopenspaces.com on which you can read the following:
Arguably the best varmint to go after, considering the devastating impact they can have on your local deer property, coyote hunts are also among the best ways for hunters to stay active and sharp during the winter months. Coyotes are treacherous predators, and if you let them, they will take deer on your favorite property out of the game before you can get to them.
Since they often target does or younger bucks, coyotes can have an adverse effect on the reproductive trends of a deer population. If you shoot a buck and it runs off into the woods to die elsewhere, coyotes can also be the pests that make a meal out of the male deer before you get a chance to collect him.
In other words, you have plenty of reasons to want coyotes off your property. Why not use them for target practice?”
Live animals. Target practice. This is wrong, misinformed, not to mention repugnant, in so many ways.
HUNTING VARMINTS IN VERMONT
Vermont may seem enlightened in many ways, perhaps for its reasonable politics (most of the time), its life style (liberal, non-nonsense New England-ish, primarily), its environment (hey, no billboards!), and history (on the positive side, more often than not). Overall, the state looks pretty good. Vermont is also known for its hunting, and has its share of “varmint” hunting and the people who love it. Our Fish and Wildlife Commission is noted for being pro-hunting in the sense that it opposes just about anything that might limit hunting. It appears to be comfortable in the varmint camp.
It was only a year ago that coyote killing contests–rewards offered for the killer of the most coyotes of any size or age in a single day–were outlawed. The resulting carcasses were tossed in ditches or otherwise discarded. Fish and Wildlife wasn’t supportive of the bill to ban these grisley contests, and the Governor (Rep.) was passively opposed, allowing it to become law without his signature. Of course, even without a formal contest in a state where coyotes can be killed day or night, by any means, every single day of the year, there’s nothing to prevent a bunch of shooters vying with one another to see who can kill the most coyotes in some fixed time. Nevertheless, getting this passed was a significant, though limited, victory for Protect Our Wildlife, and it demonstrated their clout.
As you might expect, Vermont hunting licensing for deer and other large mammals is set yearly based upon the size and health of the deer or other animal population. These estimates are in turn supposedly based upon scientific data. You might imagine, then, that on Vermont Fish and Wildlife’s website facts about coyotes would be accurate. Alas, they are not. For one thing, their estimate of the number of coyotes in the state makes no sense. The numbers are stated to be anywhere from “one per seven or eight square miles to one-plus per square mile.” If we assume the number of one per seven square miles and use the number two as a conservative average per one square mile, given Vermont’s area of 9,614 square miles, you end up with Vermont having either 1,300 coyotes or nearly 20,000. It would be impossible to base hunting regulations on numbers as slippery as those. Anyone might guess the number of mice in Vermont with equally wild results.
According to wolf and coyote expert Chris Schadler,1 the number of coyotes in Vermont is probably around 5,000 to 7,000, more than are found in her native New Hampshire where mange has been limiting their numbers.
Then there is the predation-on-deer-herd argument. Vermont’s Fish and Wildlife Commission (or should we call it the Fish and Wildlife Omission?) seemingly has little interest in doing any real thinking about coyotes and deer predation. Coyotes, unlike wolves who will hunt in packs to bring down large game, have highly varied diets and often hunt alone. They will eat small mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, fish, insects, fruit and vegetables, but rabbits and rodents are their top choice. Since white-footed mice are major carriers of ticks carrying Lyme disease we should happy to have them on any predator’s menu. Scientists who study these animals agree “There is no credible evidence that indiscriminate killing of coyotes succeeds in increasing the abundance of game species such as deer or pheasants.”2
Opportunistic means that when food presents itself, a coyote will take advantage. (Taking advantage suggests being wily, being sly, hence the coyote is the symbolic trickster of western Indian lore, and the one Looney Tunes’ dubbed Wile E. Coyote.) Presented with both hunger and opportunity, coyotes will take a fawn, even though that isn’t their primary food source. Yet tractors are the most common killlers of fawns, because fawns lie quietly to hide from predators in tall grass–where I memorably came upon fawns, twice––and mowing starts in early summer when there are many fawns. It's an unpleasant thought. But the biggest predator of deer is hunters. And hunting regulations determine and control to a large extent the size of the state’s deer herd.
COYOTE LIFE
In the wild coyotes don’t have long life spans. They may live for a scant four to five years. A half to three-quarters of their offspring are unlikely to survive their first year. In New Hampshire there may be about 5,000 coyotes, and Vermont may have 5,000 to 7,000, Maine, given its size, may have as many as 10,000 to 12,000.
Survival of a pack is ensured by certain breeding behaviors. In a stable pack, only the father and mother will breed, and the mother will prevent daughters from breeding. In fact she might kill a daughter’s pups. This behavior serves to prevent expansion of the pack beyond what might be supported by habitat. Two-thirds of females don’t breed anyway. They have only a week of fertility. Mating occurs from January to March. Pups are born in April, and will move out of the den after eight weeks of nursing.
Coyotes are not endangered. All the years of killing have produced–more coyotes! How does this make sense? The answer lies in their social structure. When their pack is disrupted it stimulates increased reproduction. If the dominant breeding pair is killed, the pack breaks up and its members disperse. They will all look for mates, and reproduce. The more coyotes are killed, the more habitant for nutrition is available to those that remain, and those that remain will produce more pups. When a coyote is killed, it is one less mouth to feed, and that much more for the others. More pups will result. If an entire pack is eliminated, a neighboring pack, sensing opportunity, will move in. More territory, again, more habitat and more pups. This is a simple fact of coyote life that hunters seem unwilling or unable to understand. How else, then, do they account for the fact that years of indiscriminate killing and attempts at complete extermination have only increased their numbers and spread?
Coyote hunters are so…duh.
STOP BEING STUPID!
“There is something perverse about a government and a society which would mark a species for death, setting it outside the bounds of even our wildlife protection laws.” (Dan Flores, Coyote America)
Can simple logic be invoked to establish a season for coyote hunting, as there are seasons for other mammals? This would be an argument for consistency, based on realistic data. Or are those who regulate hunting impervious to logic? Sure, logic wouldn’t work for the fringe hunters who are truly sadistic and would like to shoot coyotes as target practice. I’m assuming this is fringe behavior, not mainstream. But could it work with members of the Fish and Wildlife Commission whose mission statement is, after all, “the conservation of all species of fish, wildlife, and plants and their habitat for the people of Vermont.” (Note the word “all.”)
Is there a way to be rid of killing 24/7/365 in a positive way? Does ethical hunting behavior matter to the public? Or is there a fear that placing any limit on indiscriminate hunting is analogous to gun control legislation where any legislation is seen as a step to “taking away our guns," the old "slippery slope' argument? Can that be countered?
Isn't the attitude “if there isn’t a problem, why fix it?” a misunderstanding? Isn’t the stable pack a superior alternative to the dispersed animals and their increased reproduction that occurs with disturbed packs? Isn't that an issue with ramifications?
Varmints! A verbal step away from vermin. What makes a varmint anyway? Why are animals like foxes, coyotes, skunks, etc., considered varmints in the first place? Is it because they are a nuisance, or somehow useless? Is it because we, as humans, just don’t like them? Do they annoy us? Do they threaten us? Are we so helpless we can't fend them off without killing them? Oh, poor us! Poor arrogant us! We wield so much power over wildlife on this planet that we have already exterminated much of it, either purposefully or through negligence or through complete idiocy.
We need to rethink this.
1Chris Schadler, lecture, 7/11/19, Ilsley Library, Middlebury,VT
2 A.M. Kitchen, E, M. Gese ad E. R. Schauster, Resource Partitioning between Coyotes and Swift Foxes: Space, Time, and Diet, Canadian Journal of Zoology-Revue Canadienne de Zoologie77, no 10o (1999) via Chris Schadler
