COYOTES AND CALVES

Tuesday at Kiwanis my guest speaker was Larry Killgo who is a predator control specialist. He graduated from Texas Tech with a degree in Agriculture and went to work for Texas in rodent control. He moved up to predator control and was offered a job in New Mexico, where he had relatives, and became the director of predator control for over 20 years. He had experience with coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions, and feral hogs. He has supervised killing them with airplanes and helicopters as well as poison from traps and around lambs necks. However his most effective control is the snare located where coyotes will dig under a net fence. Although they could easily jump over as creatures of habit they always dig a hole under the fence. This offers a perfect spot to snare them. He gave stories of how the coyotes breed and live as families in their territory. They don't join in packs like wolves and feral dogs.

He was hired by a deer rancher south of Cross Plains who three years ago had no fawns that lived. After Killgo harvested dozens of coyotes this year he had over 100% fawns. Larry told how the coyotes will follow cows and calves who are springing and devour the calf as it is born. After the program I asked him if he knew Wyman Meinzer. He said he was in class with him at TT. Meinzer in his book photographing coyotes argued that coyotes were falsely accused of killing calves when they eat the calf droppings that are like candy to them. Larry says that Wyman is dead wrong in that belief and has countless stories to back up his observations of calf predation by coyotes.

Asked about feral hogs, he said if he were permitted he could control them with poison but it is illegal and other methods like shooting from the air helps but will not provide complete control. They and coyotes will just get worse if more isn't done to control them. He wants all farmers and ranchers to do more to control the predators.

I hope that he gets to tell his story to more farmers and ranchers. I appreciated his talk to a small audience in CP.