A number of people from the Sacred Heart area are planning to launch a "coyote hunt for charity," according to an article and advertisement in the West Central Tribune. Not all of us who live, own land, and farm in the Minnesota River valley agree that killing coyotes is a good or necessary thing.
Coyotes have become the "bad boys" in the minds of many people. They're often falsely accused of all sorts of wanton destruction, of decimating deer and bird populations. Truthfully, their diet is mostly rodents and other small mammals. And those of us that live and farm in the valley know the deer and wild turkey populations are anything but decimated!
Some of us are happy to see and hear coyotes around us and are much more disturbed at the prospect of a mass of hunters sweeping the valley in the middle of the night. We are concerned about damage from four-wheelers and off-road vehicles, as we've seen from a similar hunt west of here. We are not anti-hunting. Some of us hunt ourselves or regularly allow hunters to hunt on our land. We support hunting for food. We support ethical hunting.
It's hunting to destroy another species that we don't support. Isn't that what we falsely accuse the coyote of doing? The people participating in this hunt do not have permission to trespass on the land of the undersigned landowners.
