Coyote comments on Society

Yesterday I walked to church. The snow was mostly gone, only small remnants remained of once mountainous piles. The grass was beginning to green. The leaves of spring bulbs were spurting out of the ground with each sunny warm day. The birds serenaded me along the way. Each week I walk, the chorus becomes more diverse.

I walk along a busy road because it is the most direct path. Even that early in the morning, SUVs whiz past me, some turning into a health club so the occupants can get their exercise. The sun does not warm their backs; the wind does not touch their face. And while I haven't seen trash leave a car, the side of the road is littered with careless deposits of empty bottles, cans, and wrappers.

Yesterday amongst the refuse, I saw a sad sight of a coyote which had become road kill. He was on the side of the road, head smashed, guts strewn out, and two surgical gloves on the ground next to him. Apparently a policeman had removed the animal from being a further obstruction to traffic. It was a poignant symbolic picture of what our society is doing to nature.

The come back of the coyote into our suburban landscape is a celebratory thing. The coyote helps to keep our ecosystem in balance. For the most part he eats small rodents: the mice, rats, and rabbits that eat our trash and gardens, and if given a chance would invade our homes. But sometimes the coyote will lunch on baby deer. His presences culls deer populations which over graze their habitats and encroach our yards when they have decimated the vegetation in their territory. Without predators like the coyote, we would not be able to grow the food we eat. Eventually, our limited man-made ecosystems of gardens and farms would overwhelmed by pests. Without the coyote, we doom ourselves to eventual starvation.

In spite of the hazards of destroying ecosystems, our busy lives run right over nature. Our roads run right through wild habitat with more concern for the dollars that will travel through than the ecosystem they bisect. We are in such a hurry for technological improvements, and so concerned for our own economy, that we don't even see the natural economy of plants and animals we run over. We are more concerned about the dent in our car from hitting a coyote than about the fact that a coyote family may starve because a parent has died. We care more about getting where we want to go right now, than about how long we can preserve our lives in an environment we are slowly destroying.

The way the coyote was removed from the road illustrated the callousness with which we destroy creation. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors depended on a balanced ecosystem to survive. They appreciated the life they took in order to feed their families, and many cultures practiced thanking their prey for giving up their lives. But the driver of the car in our culture did not even stop to consider what he had hit. The policeman who removed the body from the road insulated himself first with plastic -that man-made substance associated with imitation and the unnatural. Nature, that which had nourished our ancestors was now treated as contaminated. And the man that treated nature as contaminated, contaminated nature with his plastic surgical gloves which can never be recycle into life again.

The disrespect for nature the policeman showed by polluting with his rubber gloves was reinforced by how he disposed of the body. The coyote was not buried out of respect for the dead, nor were his fur coat and meat harvested for their usefulness to mankind. Instead they were wasted, left to rot with the rest of the refuse from modern society at the side of the symbol of man's progress -the road.

The rush and carelessness with which the body was disposed of only further strengthened the image of how quickly our society is progressing to its doom. The proverb 'waste not, want not' forecasts our society's future need. We are so intent on our own immediate wants and desires that we do not think about others. Whatever gets in our way, we run over; whatever we deem is not useful, we dispose of; and there is no time spent considering the consequences of our actions. If we did, we might be appalled at our own gruesomeness.