The carcass of ancestral hunting practices

The coyotes are gone. Hunting is not what it once was.

Mar 09, 2024

Around my neck of the woods, the hunters have been quietly treading out into the forest, guns slung over their backs and a sense of duty looming above them. Tracking pawed footprints on the muddy earth. Looking out for blurs of grey-brown furred ones in the murky landscape. Listening for rustling of leaves and placing of steps. They are on the hunt. Not for sustenance, but for slaughter. You see, the coyotes of this land have gained the unfortunate and often deadly title of an inconvenience. Too troublesome. Too much of a pest. And as so often is the case, the solution we have found is to extinguish. Their actions are cloaked in secrecy, trying to fly under the radar of prying and questioning eyes. I find it interesting how these behaviours often want to go unseen. They don’t like questions, which immediately tells me that deep inside them there is something that feels faulty about dismantling delicate ecosystems. Why hide yourself behind guns and secret trails if you are firm in the trueness of it? Perhaps the wild coyote within their hearts howls and shrieks for the wrongness of it all. But they go about their business anyway in the name of order and balance. Usually in the name of protecting their farm animals. We have seen this countless times before, the killing of one animal for another. The decimation of a population because of inconvenience. Hunting for mere shits and giggles and to claim the coat of a wild beast. A truly twisted carcass of a once sacred and honourable practice.

Coyotes were/are seen as sacred spirits of the land, bestowing wisdom as well as playing mischievous tricks. They were revered, for they were thought to bring havoc and chaos if mistreated. Now they are seen as pests. Because they get in the way of other people's profit and livelihood. It is a nuanced topic as many things are, especially when weaving wild animals and wild places in tamed civilization. But regardless of who is justifying the killing of this creature or that, there is grief. Hunting is a beautiful and ancestral practice that delivers to a family and community countless resources and sustenance. Yet what about when a life is taken and left to rot on the forest floor? Just for the sake of extermination. What about when no mouths are fed or resources gained, but simply lost, forgotten? What about when a hunter is arrogant and self-righteous?

There is no longer that very vital key that all hunters must have had in our ancestral practices that makes it a sustainable one. When there isn’t this awareness of the natural world around us, a deep respect and reverence for what we are taking, an understanding of our role in the harmony of our ecosystems, all of it comes undone and turns into savage amusement. I see many hunters these days heading out with their big guns and even bigger egos, off to find some game. I don’t see them humbled by the life they just took. I don’t see them hold that body in awareness and compassion but rough and rushed duties. Thoughtless acts. It is a shame, because this lack of awareness is what leads to animals being overhunted, and suddenly disappearing from a region. Now, it is partly the natural way of things for one species to go extinct, for another to take its place, for the web to be shaped and reshaped by all of our hands. But I also see the mindless, blind hunting of coyote kin and grieve at the thought that they are only seen as a disturbance that must be snuffed. That is not how we are meant to be in relationship with our relatives. That is sad. The disrespect is blatant.

Something I love about Native American mythology is how it is so interwoven with the land. There is a creation story for countless different medicine plants, every animal they know holds personality and legend around it. The natural world comes alive in a way that one can easily connect with. When these stories are told again and again, when they are passed down and held dear, one is taught how to be in right relationship with the land. It is woven into life and in community. It teaches one how to behave. These stories are told and retold and sung and passed on to one another. They are collected and kept safe. They serve as the wisdom of a community. They serve to teach us about the land we walk upon, and how one may relate to it all. They aren’t meant to be literal perhaps as much as mythic. When one hears coyote as the trickster creature, the teacher, the wisdom keeper, coyote isn’t anymore just an animal, they are a respected elder. This feels like what is missing to me in our modern world. The guidance of storytelling as a whole, but specifically the stories that are told about how we may be in relationship with the land. How to relate to other beings. Stories of the creatures we see around us. Stories that weave us as a part of something sacred. Stories that teach us true respect and balance. Without them, people go on rampages, they clear-cut ancient forests and slaughter entire populations, without even a flinch.

We have started to play god in such an intricately interwoven ecosystem that we don’t even fully understand, instead of being the CHILDREN of god, children of the earth. Now we destroy one to protect another. The split between mine and yours. This idea of ownership. We don’t see this anywhere in the natural world to the extent that we have taken it. Firmly believing that we own the world is a hierarchical paradigm that makes one stand above another, and that is not natural law but human order. Natural law is expressed without judgment or ownership. It is expressed as borrowed time, borrowed resources and deeply interwoven kinship. In these actions of hunters - but really this topic stretches out into so many different areas of life - we are missing the bigger picture of what we are all a part of. Many say it is the natural order of things to die to feed another. To become extinct so another may emerge. AND our land and animals ask for respect and reverence. That is the key distinction here. It is found in the intention of the action. Yes, it is inevitable for things to change, to melt into each other, for a thread to break and another to be mended. Trying to maintain sameness isn’t it either, but treating the land as a dispensable dead thing that we can pillage and abuse at our own convenience is a huge disconnection from our true ancestral practices that highlighted US as a PART of a WHOLE. The land that feeds and sustains us. And our responsibility to take care of what takes care of us.

Not merely maintaining order at all costs.

I live pretty close to cities. what is happening here is that unfortunate thing that happens when what was once forests, wild lands, and small farms get paid out for the expansion of the city’s industries. what is left here is really just a small fraction of what once was. All that space for the wild lands and the wild creatures has been bulldozed and in their place has gone big ugly grey buildings for this or that or other. Where coyote once had land expanding out for kilometres to hunt, now has been confined to a few. And without any of their usual wild prey, they feed on cows, pigs and sheep. Whatever they can find waiting for them in easily accessible and reliable pens. When their natural food source has disappeared, they will find another, they are scrappy like that. Farmers and other folk don't really like these wild and unpredictable creatures stepping in on their turf, they would really prefer to keep things all nice and clean and orderly. They want to protect their livelihood, so that means, goodbye coyote. It is a rippling of so many different layers of life right now that weave these results. That’s what makes it so complex.

Yet I grieve coyote. I miss their magnificent howls that herald in the night. I miss hearing their swift footsteps pass by my home on their way to a hunt. I miss their ethereal visitations when the night is still held in the dawn and I see them out in the distance heading back to their dens, watchful and still. There is an emptiness upon the land now. A thread has gone missing. A presence has disappeared. A dear friend is gone. The land grieves.

I wonder if the hunters feel their absence too?