It’s time to stop celebrating killing
by Phil Carter and Sara Palmer –
Disposable.
That’s what life means in a killing contest – without merit and undeserving of compassion and consideration. Disposable.
Just about every weekend across New Mexico in fall and winter you can find a coyote killing contest. The idea is to kill as many coyotes as you can, and those who kill the most, or the biggest, or the smallest can win prizes like guns, belt buckles and cash. Killing contests aren’t about population control and they aren’t about protecting livestock. Simply put, it’s killing for the sake of killing.
Words can do nothing to convey the horror felt when you see the red-smeared copper fur of hundreds of massacred coyotes lying out in an open field or piled in the back of a trailer. Bullet-holed and bloodied, you’ll scan row after row of them. Then, in many contests, nothing is done with the fur or meat, and the bodies are dumped on public land without regard of who might find them.
A killing contest isn’t hunting; it’s a massacre.
But perhaps what’s even more disturbing than the onslaught of innocent bodies is the outright celebratory air that surrounds these events. Coyote blood is worn as a badge of pride, a victory crown in a celebration of needless death. Killing contests are mass assault on a species that has filled a key ecological role even in the midst of ongoing devastation of other carnivore species in the American West. Instead of working toward creating a society where all life is valued, we stalk them and gun them down as if their footprints on this earth never mattered.
But they do matter — for so many reasons.
The indiscriminate killing of this native New Mexican species celebrates the haphazard destruction of life — killing without cause. It destroys our state’s ecosystem upon which so many New Mexico residents and industries enjoy and rely. The irony is that killing contests, which participants often tout as a method of population control, actually increase coyote numbers.
When you kill hundreds of coyotes in one weekend, evolutionary biology kicks in, causing more breeding and increased litter sizes. When thousands of coyotes, young and old, fall victim over the course of a season, their natural social structure is disrupted and more inexperienced juvenile coyotes risk coming in conflict with human activity. It’s an endless cycle that creates needless suffering, an imbalanced ecosystem and more excuses for the cruel contests.
When we kill hundreds of coyotes in a matter of days, we irrevocably damage their positive impact on the environment.
That’s why killing contests tarnish New Mexico’s reputation as the land of enchantment, especially when the carcasses are carelessly tossed out on public land, as they were near Las Cruces in December 2014 and Socorro in February 2015. Most importantly, though, this kind of carnage desensitizes us to the act of killing. It conveys a profound disrespect for the sacredness of life and the balance that all creatures bring to our unique and majestic state.
Every creature has the right to live and die as an active participant in the natural circle of life. There’s no reason for killing contests, except to elevate man’s ego and celebrate our dominance, not stewardship, over the land.
No life should be considered disposable. When we live in a world where killing is a nightly fixture of the news, we have to acknowledge that we need to change the way we view taking any life, all life.
If we want to change the violence in our homes, schools and public places, we have to work on strengthening our compassion for all creatures.
When we celebrate the indiscriminate killing of wildlife, when we exchange prizes for lives, we’re assigning a value to life that takes away a precious piece our humanity. Instead of being stewards of this beautiful land and all its inhabitants, we become tyrants.
