“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
–Gandhi
Wild Spirit's Executive Director, Leyton Cougar, recovering the coyote skull and trapped foot found at the edge of our property.
Nature is not only ruthlessly beautiful, but unapologetically fierce, and so is the place where humans dwell with wolves. Living in the wilderness brings you infinitely closer to the wild and therefore your wildish self, because in nature the life cycle is ever present. Sometimes, it is brutal, other times breathtaking, awe-inspiring. In all of its facets, it is raw. Not only does this instill humility by forcing us to look at life and death, how quickly a being can go from one extreme to the other, and in that way to accept that death is inevitable. It teaches respect and compassion, to cherish this life we are given and to be present with it. It reminds us that nature’s magnificence and mercilessness does not exclude human nature. In truth, humanity is the greatest influence on all natural systems at this point in earth’s evolution. In this way, humanity’s widespread disconnection with nature often indicates the loss of an integral connection to our selves. This is powerfully apparent in the way people treat animals.
On a day off of work not long ago I was hiking in the woods that abut Wild Spirit’s property with my dog, Ziggy. Near the end of our walk through sandy high desert hills, past drying wild flowers and elk tracks, imprinting our own feet into the sand, we neared a tree where my fiancé, Chadley, and I had seen a dead coyote laid beneath the lowest canopy of pine branches months prior. It was in the spring that we took a similar hike with Ziggy, at the end of which I looked down, and directly into the eyes of a coyote that seemed to have died not long ago, for its eyes were still intact, along with its skin and the minimal amount of fur that remained on it.
Now, it was fall, and Ziggy was off leash. I cringed at the thought of her finding the coyote’s rotting remains. Truthfully, I didn’t want to see it, either. I wanted to be wrong, to have it be a false memory that this was the tree under which the coyote lay, and felt myself hoping that we were not covering that same ground. As we approached the tree I felt the clenching in my gut release. Where the coyote had died it was no longer, but after just a few more steps I realized that the relief I felt was short lived. There, spread on the dirt and dried brush just outside the lowest needles of the canopy laid the coyote’s bones, perfectly picked clean and white washed with sun. The scavengers will do that, ravens and vultures, taking every bit of flesh with their beaks until there is nothing but hardened bones left behind to become brittle as they bake beneath the high desert rays.
The skull was in two pieces, the top and bottom of the jawbone, with the top still pristinely intact. Even the cranium had not been broken. All teeth remained, though many were cracked straight down the middle. The spine, ribs, pelvis, and leg bones – all were there, along with others less recognizable. I felt myself repeating in my mind the fact that I did not need the bones, a mantra that emerged earlier on our hike. Bones are easy to come by at Wild Spirit due to our rescues' diet, and at the beginning of this walk I found myself happening upon the discarded bones of animals the local scavengers had dragged into the woods, fed on, and left behind. Many were quite beautiful in their curvature, geometry, and intricacy. I picked them up, observed them, but ultimately let them go again, it being their mettle to go back into the earth.
While I stared at the coyote’s bones, noting how slight they were, how much smaller they were than I’d imagined (the ribs especially), an object I had taken for a rotting piece of wood a few feet from the rest of the body kept calling my eye. After about the third time Ziggy sniffed it I inspected it myself. There, to my horror and disgust, was a rusted trap with chain attached still gripping the coyote’s foot in its vice. The entire foot and one toe remained. They, too, were picked perfectly clean standing straight up out of the trap like the statement they were. My stomach dropped. When we saw the coyote dead under that same tree months before we never saw the trap. The sight of it stirred and chilled me. It died at the very edge of our property, a sanctuary for wild canines, so close to help; yet it slipped away unseen.
When I saw the trap I knew immediately the jingle and clank that it made over the earth while attached to that coyote’s foot in life, because I had heard it myself. It was dusk, early winter. Our Assistant Director, Crystal Castellanos, had found the coyote and called our team in for help. We tried to catch it, to save it, but the coyote was afraid, and understandably so. We followed quietly through the woods until it darted uphill and across the dirt road into the woodlands across the street. We never saw it again, until now.
It was winter then, when we tried and failed to help that wild, frightened soul, and spring when Chadley and I found it dead beneath the pine tree. We did not know then that this was the coyote we had attempted to save. It added up now, remembering the skin and it’s loss of fur, how the coyote looked mangy, just as the one we had tried to help was riddled with mange. It is heartbreaking to think what that coyote had to suffer all because a human set out that trap. A human that never saw the effects, the coyote dragging its heavy trapped foot behind it, or its lifeless body under the pines, nor did they have to see that even in death the trap still gripped its bones.
I felt a responsibility to that coyote, a responsibility for myself, for the interaction I’d had with it, mourning the fact that we couldn’t save it, that it died so close to help, and more still, a responsibility for all of humanity, for the way man treats the natural world. It hurt deep in my heart to see the coyote’s foot still wrenched in the jaws of that trap. What hurts perhaps even more is that this coyote’s agonizing death is not a unique or isolated story. That hunters’ trap is just one of many forms that plagues and poisons our natural world: it is waste runoff dumped into our waterways, the scar of mountain top clearing, the burn of deforestation, the trash and debris that fills the stomachs of starved whales, the oil coating shorebirds’ feathers, the net that catches dolphins in its quest for tuna, and the poacher’s machete as it takes the rhino’s horn. It is the image of human irresponsibility in the natural world, the disrespect of nature that ultimately points back to humanity’s own broadened indignity.
This coyote was only trying to live its life, just as the human that set the trap was trying to live theirs. And that human who caused the demise of the coyote likely never saw the rotten fruit of their own doing. But I did. Not once, not twice, but three times I met with this coyote, and at our last meeting over the tired creature’s bones I promised to share this story.
In the end, there were four meetings.
When I returned from my unexpected communion with the bones I shared with Chadley what I’d seen. It was not long before we told Wild Spirit’s Executive Director, and the four of us, Chadley, Ziggy, Leyton and I, trekked back to the site where we collected the trap and skull, smudging both along with the rest of the bones with sage. Leyton explained that traps like these are supposed to have numbers on the bottom so that the person who set the trap can be tracked, and that the chain of such traps is meant to be so firmly rooted into the ground that the animal cannot possibly drag the trap off with it. ‘Made in Korea,’ was the only inscription on the bottom of the trap, leaving no way to contact the human that brought this misdeed into being.
The coyote skull and dirty rusted trap with the foot still caught inside it will be sent to Project Coyote in an effort to emphasize the cruelty of trapping by bringing this barbaric practice into the public eye.
The truth is, trapping kills. When man consistently overruns animals’ territory we should only expect to have interactions with wildlife that are not ideal. This is humanity’s doing, not that of the animals forced to cope with the resulting displacement, just as people fleeing from refugee crises should not be penalized for the warring and violence that has stolen their homelands away from them. Environmental degradation and humanity’s subsequent turning of a blind eye on the widespread and brutal destruction of the natural world is one of the greatest follies of our age. It is up to each of us to stand up, speak up, and assume responsibility.