Arkansas Sportsman

Easy meal turns into last meal for pesky coyotes

Considering the devious schemes that coyotes employ to prey on domestic dogs, it makes sense that dogs would enjoy leading coyotes to their demise.

Apparently it doesn't take much to convince dogs what great fun this can be, either. They dig it.

It reminds me of Max, a Doberman pinscher that my late father-in-law Arthur owned. One night when Max was a puppy, he treed a possum in the back yard. It was well inside the Little Rock city limits, but that didn't prevent my father-in-law from slipping out the back door with a .22-cal. rifle and shooting the possum.

From that point forward, Max was a possum and raccoon treeing machine.

Max died, and Arthur got a female Doberman that he named Maxine. Not long after, Maxine barked treed. As Arthur shuffled out of bed and reached for his .22, my mother-in-law growled: "Don't you dare. I'm tired of you and them dogs making all that noise."

Art got back in bed, and Maxine never treed another critter.

Most dogs are natural hunters. Kill an animal over a dog once, and the dog gets fanatical.

While visiting with representatives from Crimson Trace and Flir on Monday in Oregon, the dinner conversation turned to western style coyote hunting.

Most dedicated predator hunters prefer to call up coyotes with a variety of mimicries such as that of a distressed rabbit, a distressed bird or, yes, a distressed puppy.

Mike Faw, media relations manager for Crimson Trace, and several guys from Flir hunt coyotes with dogs, but not in a way one might expect.

They don't use hounds to bay and harass coyotes. Instead, they use little yapper dogs like Jack Russell terriers to fool coyotes into thinking they've lucked into an easy meal. The yapper dogs race back to their camouflaged masters with the coyotes in hot pursuit, and then it's lights out. The coyotes don't know what hit them.

"Coyotes are really attuned to other canines invading their territory, and when they see a little dog like the ones we use, they just lock onto them," Faw said. "That's all that matters to them."

The terriers sometimes aggravate the coyotes by running and nipping at them. When they finally provoke the coyote into pursuit, it's a mad race back to the strike zone. Faw said that sometimes the race will end inches from his shotgun muzzle. The coyote is so obsessed with the yapper dog that it doesn't even notice if the shooter moves.

Faw said the yapper dogs seem to derive great pleasure and satisfaction from these ambushes, almost to the point of gloating.

It's only fair because coyotes often employ a similar tactic against domestic dogs. One of their ruses in places where they commonly prey on dogs is to enter a yard and provoke a dog to give chase. The coyote leads the dog to its pack. Even a big, aggressive dog is no match for a pack of coyotes, and the battle usually ends badly.

I heard such an encounter a couple of years ago near my little corner of Hot Spring County. The first sounds were the affronted barks of the dog at the beginning of the encounter, and then the chase. When the coyotes sprung their trap, it was one of the most hideous-sounding things I ever heard.

Foxes abound in our area, but they are welcome on my place even though I have poultry. I am also growing an orchard, and orchardeers say foxes are their best friends.

I feel differently about coyotes. An awful lot of them live in the woods and fields near our place, and I suspect they are a big reason why no wild turkeys live in the area.

Spring coyote season runs concurrently with spring turkey season in most of Arkansas. If you get a chance to take out a few coyotes at that time, it will be a service to the turkeys on your property

The same goes double for wild pigs. If you hunt on your own property, you can kill wild pigs anytime, day or night. If you hunt on property owned by somebody else, you must get written permission from the landowner to hunt hogs at night. You don't need written permission to hunt at night on your hunting lease.

Sports on 04/12/2015

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