I think the military look of some weapons implies a certain "image" of what they are to be used for. Military weapons are made to shoot and kill people, full stop, not animals. It should make everyone think why people would want to adorn themselves with that type of look. I also find it worrisome how hunters - along with their guns - have taken on a more and more military look (camouflaged uniform type garments) over the decades, these days they look like they go to war like some mercenary unit and not out to hunt.
The irony is that when the M-16, the military version of the AR-15 was introduced to the military in Vietnam, soldiers viewed it as a toy and disdained it. There were teething problems after bad cleaning recommendations and lower grade ammo which gave it a reputation for being unreliable, and the entire AR-family ("AR" stands for "Armalite Corporation," the company that Eugene Stoner worked for when he designed the rifle; there are other "AR" series rifles.) was maligned until it was proven in the first Gulf War. So among "killers," this 'scary looking' rifle was hardly regarded until 40 years after its introduction.
And I personally think coyotes are cool, they have better family values than most humans.
I invite you to witness what a rampaging pack of them can and will do to anything they come across. Again, MOST of the animals are not true coyotes and the cross breeding with dogs is what has made them so dangerous and also why they butcher each other at the least provocation.
Your argument that there are not enough mountain lions and wolves around to keep their numbers down is an interesting one, now how did the mountain lion and wolf numbers get so low, didn't that have something to do with cattle protection too?
Didn't have much cattle here then; wolves and panthers were killed off by fur traders mostly starting 150 years before (incidentally almost ALL of those hides went to European royalty). The geography of the area contained them. Farmers might have shot an occasional straggler, but there was no organized wholesale cull. Panthers STILL exist here; they've just learned to hide from people to survive. I have seen two in person in the wild along with a large lynx. Officially wildlife management denies their existence, but most folks who have lived here have seen otherwise. It's kind of hard to explain away a large three-foot feline tail cut off by a hay mower.
Whenever man feels the necessity to intervene with the population numbers of a certain species it is because of his own prior wrongdoing.
I agree in principle, but my personal reality is that "I" have to deal with the fallout of many, many other's people's negligence and I do not have the luxury of ignoring the problem that they do.
And: The concept that coyotes might eradicate American cattle masses without human intervention is in ecological terms a laughable one. You just seem to hate them. More cattle gets run over by cars than eaten by coyotes - now don't get ideas with motorists please!
The numbers I gave are the averages for MY farm; that's just one of thousands in this region. I don't care how laughable it seems to you; wait until you're digging an oversized grave with a front-end loader or agonizing over leaving a mauled scared animal whose offspring has been ripped to pieces and left in front of it in the middle of the night to get a vet to see if it can be helped.
- which you have conveniently stamped with every carnivore clichée imaginable ("kill with lust", "eat their own",
Coy-dogs, the animals which most often pack hunt and rampage have a super rigid social structure, and when one of them is injured, they turn on it brutally and will also kill any intra-pack defender or pack member even accidentally injured in the fracas. I am not repeating any sort of myth; I have SEEN it multiple times firsthand.
"not racially pure"
Full blooded coyotes don't group into packs, and for those who have to deal with them, including the official TWRA classification, the generic term "coyote" is understood to be a blanket generalization. "Legit" coyotes showed up as soon as wolves and panthers were deposed, but it wasn't until urban sprawl and the loss of family farms allowed for rampant interbreeding with dogs in the past few decades that they became the problem they are. The indigenous critically endangered red wolf, (which is unlike any idea of a wolf most folks have) which is VERY shy, has been almost wiped out by coyote competition. Red wolves share predatory (rabbits, squirrels, groundhogs, etc) habits and habitat here as true coyotes but were so shy that no one knew how decimated they had become until the late 1980's.
even the "eat small children"-adage, we're getting firmly onto Brothers Grimm territory really ...).
I tried to find some news stories but all the local publications are either subscription-only online and/or extremely limited in archives and national wire stories about the election dominate the active sections. The last time a child was killed that I can recall was two years ago, and offhand I can think of at least a dozen cases in the past few years. Locals teach their children to be careful, and like I said about the media in general, they don't know shit about what happens outside of a concrete and asphalt-insulated existence, so there are no mass media appeals of teary-eyed mothers calling to kill every coyote.
Don't get me wrong, I don't have issues with a single dangerous coyote being taken out (wolves are thankfully returning to Germany and of course some of them will have to be killed if they become a concrete danger), but I'm wary of qualifying a whole species as dangerous, damaging and worthy of eradication.
I forget that you have no context to understand how I "hunt" coyotes. There is no stalking of or tracking process; I set up in the pasture field where they have been rampaging at dusk and pick them off as they run through in a pack. When one is hit, the others turn on it immediately, preferring to kill rather then even flee. Even with 30 rounds, five or six aimed shots is stretching things because, well, I'm in pasture field and those bullets go a VERY long way. Once you see them literally rip one other apart in seconds, any thoughts of "management" are deposed. These are NOT wild animals; they are dangerous hybrids.
That's the point about the whole issue of guns that those who think banning them will fix society's ills don't seem to understand and don't want to understand. You live in a different world, one that has a thick layer of civilization to insulate you from your environment, both legally and in terms of survival. You quote abstracts and statistics; I'm in the field in the middle of the night. Seriously, you have NO idea what you are talking about to the point that it is insulting. All it would take to show you how wrong you are would be one encounter of a pack of these thing coming after YOU with no fear after having killed a helpless calf, loyal dog or yes, even a child.
