It's that time of year here in Canada when the weather has gotten bitterly cold & the coyote fur is in its prime. That's the time of year I get fired up about coyote hunting. When I grew up (in the early 80's) my dear old dad took me out with him & showed me how to trap. Besides being the best bonding experience ever we both made a lot of cash over the winter. We were fetching as high as $200 for prime coyote pelts. A lot of guys were hunting & trapping and never once did coyotes become an endangered species. I also recall that at that time the country was loaded with upland game, rabbits and all sorts of little critters. My last year of trapping was 1986. That year the fur protestors ran a smear campaign against the fur industry & the general public bought into it. I couldn't sell a pelt for 2 years & when they did it was for only a few cents. It was shortly after that I noticed that there were far fewer rabbits around; pretty soon none. Upland game hunting was awful. There were too many coyotes, not enough food to go around. Ranchers began to lose livestock and people reported coyotes coming into their yards to eat from their dog's dish. The men that made a good living on the trap-line were now unemployed. The fur market crashed for the first time in over 300 years.

I wonder now if those protesters that felt they had done such a great thing have ever realized the ripple effect that they had on the rest of the ecosystem? It was so important to them to save the predators but what about the grouse, the pheasants, the rabbits etc? It's been 25 years and I still wonder if the people that lobbied to stop the harvesting of furs realize that their actions had such a negative impact on so many species and so many people.