 We do have a large crowd tonight, we have a lot of feelings down here, I would ask that you remember that this is a working board meeting, this is a time once a month where the board gets together to discuss agenda topics, so we need to be able to have that time. We'll have your public comments right after we get through the minutes, I would ask that you be respectful during those times, everybody will have two minutes to do their comments, we have a timer here, if you would please just be respectful, we would appreciate that very much, we have a lot to get through tonight, first up, I'm going to sit down, but first up we need to approve the minutes from last meeting, everybody should have received a microphone, we can't hear a word you're saying, we do not unfortunately, normally we don't have a crowd this size and it's easy to hear, you've got two ears, one mouth, there are some seats up front for those who are having a hard time hearing, you might have better luck there, okay board members you should have received your packet with the minutes from the last meeting, is there a motion to accept the minutes, bill, can you speak louder, it's very hard to hear even if you are up, please stop talking from the audience, we have a long meeting to get through, a lot of public comments, we will try to speak louder, okay, is there any discussion about the comments, I mean about the minutes, done, all right, we'll take a vote, just raise your hand if you're in favor, we're approving the minutes from the last meeting, decisions unanimous, okay, next on the agenda is the public comment time, we'll stand up so you can hear me a little bit better, I will call the names on the public comment sheet, each speaker will have two minutes to say their piece, I do want to stress this is not a back and forth between board members and the public, this is your chance to say what you want to say, but this is not a debate time, please tell us your thoughts, we welcome your thoughts, but those are the ground rules, you have two minutes to say what you'd like, I will read off the names to the best of my ability, my apologies in advance if I get a name wrong, some of this is pretty hard to read and I would guess that if I showed this to everybody you would agree and we could have some unity there, I think, so I'll do my best, just please stand up where you're at, and we'll hear it, we'll start the timer, first up is Kevin Lawrence, just real quickly, I see we have a lot of speakers today, I'll just try to get it in a minute, I know you folks have a lot of important work to do, there's questions about you know, at what age animals should be harvested, I've been watching on my farm this summer, a lot of our harvesting going on, the hawks come in and take my little bluebirds off the line, working those little babies, which I don't like to see, but it's going to happen, the coyotes are coming, they take the baby foxes away, and the parent foxes drive them out of my orchard, so what's going to happen, I'm going to go in and spray my apple trees and kill a lot of bugs, things like that, this is going to be part of the cycle of life, I guess, I'm not going to get into the cold air before we get engaged in that, but I hope you folks don't get engaged in activities where you're micromanaging sports to the point where people have to check the book every 10 minutes to say, oh what day is it, you know, where are we, things are working well now, I think the populations are healthy and abundant, which is sort of your charge, I hope you can work with that, thanks. One other point I was going to make too, this is not an opportunity to comment towards the previous commenters, please just say a piece, Justin Lindholm. I'm Justin Lindholm from Menden, Vermont, used to be on Fish and Wildlife Board, I grew up in Deep Woods, I've been in Deep Woods all the time, and I've looked up other kinds of woods, I've got a coyote, I've never had an interest in shooting coyotes even though I've had plenty of opportunity, but what I've noticed out there in the years that I've been in the woods, and I've spent a lot of time at it, I've noticed between bears, fishers, bobcats, and coyotes, the coyotes stay away from people more, and the reason is there is no close season, I think, that's my opinion, that because there's no close season, the coyotes are more leering of people, and this is important for them to stay that way, because we have a new type of deer yard now, the deer yards that I've seen in the past are no longer used, where they have the thick evergreen. Now they're using the deer yard, which is called suburbian, they get around houses, the deer get around houses to do their wintering. The reason for that is to stay away from the leery coyotes. For that reason alone, I would not have a short season on coyotes just so we can preserve this new type of deer yard. Thank you, Justin. This is concerning the bear part of this. We should be keeping everything as is, especially the two part of it. We're up to 92% of the teeth being reported last year. It gives a bear biologist something to work with. Please don't take a step backwards and give us a month to turn in our teeth. Thank you. I cannot read the first name, the last name is Dwyer D-W-Y-R-E, I think? That's me, and I thought we were going to speak after someone asked. Sydney Bents? I'm presenting the petition, so I'm going to wait. Jason Warfield? I'll be really brief. Just given the public interest in coyotes and coyote hunting, I'm skeptical that the optimal level of regulation is essentially zero. I'm hoping that this meeting can resolve some of that confusion. Thank you. Aaron Springfield? Hello, Aaron Springfield. I'm one of the VLS students. I just wanted to give a little preface. You're going to hear our petition today. I know a lot of people are probably concerned about protecting themselves or children and livestock from coyotes. We don't want to stop anyone from doing that. Even the strictest standards under endangered species acts don't prevent people from shooting an animal or to protect themselves. Even the strictest standards under the endangered species act don't prevent people from shooting an animal or to protect themselves. We don't want anything like that and you're not going to lose the ability to defend yourself for your livestock by shortening the season. John Brown? I'd like to just comment on the bear situation. I'd like to leave everything the way it is. Go with the experts that we hired in the state professionals to know what they're talking about. Jeff? Somebody? Jeff Seward? I'm honored. I have skin in the game. I'd really like to leave things the way they are with respect to the coyotes. I don't know why we would bother to protect invasive species. S.J. Blah Blah. Scribble? Okay, Lori Veach. V.E.A. and T.C.H. Hi, Lori Veach. I live in Plainfield. I'm sorry. Can you speak up? Sorry, I have hearing issues and I'm learning to speak with and hopefully you're in play on the night. I've been told that I speak more slowly now that I can hear myself a little bit more softly. You know, as a friend of the coyotes and of all creatures I think we have a coyote family on our land. My son has heard them at night. We also have three sheep, and I don't want our sheep to be hurt by the coyotes, but I think if the season is limited, the coyotes' families can be more stable and they won't be disrupted. I think that if the season is limited, the coyotes can be more peaceful. And I do apologize for us not having the microphone here. We didn't just make this large a crowd so I apologize for that. Judy McDonnell? Judy McDonnell? Oh no, I'm sorry. I skipped one. I was not intentional. I'm sorry to tell Densey that the season on coyotes traditionally not permitted landowners to kill coyotes in defensive property. Best management practices and science all point to the fact that the current open season on coyotes does not damage populations. They actually increase breeding and cause disruption to the packability and cause problems with coyotes created to have them to begin with. I have not seen one peer-reviewed scientific study that supports the open season on coyotes, yet the open season persists. The open season is solely rooted in emotion. But the open season is rooted in emotion and the deep patriotic misunderstanding supports coyotes. That is not proper wildlife management. And really instead of me pleading my case to fish in wildlife tonight, it would be great if you would explain to the public why there's no concession. And I think the burden of proof should really be on us to tell us why there's no concession. It holds a lot of power over our wildlife that Vermont Statute is here with all Vermonters. And again, under Vermont Statute 482, it states the board should adopt the rules to maintain the best utilization levels of wildlife. There is no utilization of coyotes that are killed in the spring and summer. Their pelts are worthless. They're not marketable. So an open season would allow animal food lines. It would cause the coyote puppies to be able to spend time with their mother and offer those protections to virtually every other animal. So I urge you to think openly about this petition and have courage to go get time. Thank you. Yeah, to comments. We have a lot of commenters, all of whom's opinions are important that we want to hear. We have a long list of folks to go through. Understand this is not a public hearing. In fact, this is a working meeting of the board. We have had public hearings and often do. In this case, it's a working meeting of the board in which we provide a short time for public comments at the beginning. So please be our partner in this. Don't react to folks and let us move through the public comments as well as we can. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner. Judy McDonnell. Judy McDonnell, I look very free. I support the petition that's going to be coming in front of the board tonight to introduce the 24-7, 365-day season on coyotes. They need time to raise their young without fear of being hunted or bombed out of their beds. And I would like to see the board be open to this because we have a paradigm here in Vermont and in other parts of the country that coyotes are bad. We want to kill them and there's no reason for that as the research shows from the very nice animal and their good cats. They're all part of the system, God's system. All part of it. They keep everything balanced. We have to keep things balanced that are natural. Meeting them all the time. Thank you. Barbara Burnett. Yeah, I'm from Montana and I talked about this meeting recently with the petition. It seems like all the animals that I photograph, that there isn't an open season on most animals. They do leave the breeding season without hunting. And that allows pack animals like wolves and coyotes or even other animals that they don't breed as much. If they have the breeding season off-limits. So I think if you want to protect your livestock, if you want to protect things like that, they will support this petition as well. And it's a scientific fact and that's why I support it. Thank you. Nimrata Kargira. How do you do? I'm really nervous. I speak on behalf of coyotes and all wildlife. I'm not against hunting and believe that it is an age of skill that should be kept alive. I do plan to learn to hunt for my own food and reconnect with the sacredness of life and where it comes from. I am against the brutality and torture I see in the hunting scene here in Vermont. It breaks my heart to see the cruelty of the care of these precious creatures. A compromise of a close season of consideration for top-rearing seems like a fair and decent agreement if we as a community can hear each other and live in harmony with nature. And I do support the petition. Ann Jamison. My name is Ann Jamison. I'm from Marshfield. I support the petition because not only does an open season on the coyotes encourage the wanton waste of their lives, it does nothing to manage the population or protect them in trust as per law of the customs of the citizens of Vermont. Coyote puffs are born in April or May and learn their skills from their parents. The death of one or more of those parents throws that either causes the public to start, death or throws that training out of alignment. Constant year-round harassment also upsets the social hierarchy potentially increasing greedies. Most importantly, an open season tells the public that coyotes are considered permanent and not worthy of even the minimal detections that we offer under wildlife. They do not reflect the sound management principles. A regulated hunting season would at least ensure that a coyote is held for the help only markets are aware and would prevent the legalists death. The petition does not change a landowner's right to take action. Simply asks for a humane science-based management policy for the hunting of coyotes in Vermont. Thank you for please considering a close season. Laura Smith. I am a native Vermonter. I grew up in Vermont. I farmed in Vermont for a number of years and there were packs of coyotes around. I believe that I support the petition for not having a social season on coyotes because of the fact that we've tried for centuries now to eradicate the coyote. It's not working. Those methods do not work and I think we need science-based approaches to what we're doing. I never had a single loss of predation to coyotes in all the years I farmed and that is because in Vermont it is possible to farm without losing livestock to coyotes. I have seen farmers and I do know farmers who have had the coyotes disrupted in their area and have lost livestock to coyotes as the coyotes seem to try to work out a new hierarchy. Potentially a new alpha male comes in and they need to prove themselves. I think we need science-based approaches. I think the emotion that's here that says that this is a tradition is false. My dad was a school teacher taught at M&U for 35 years and he has a biology degree and I grew up helping him in conservation efforts and so there is a very strong tradition in Vermont that is not about killing wildlife but it is about conserving wildlife in ways that are sustainable and humane. So I put my vote in for not having this open season on coyotes anymore in Vermont. It makes sense and it's the right thing to do. Thank you. Good for us. I have support for the commission and I think that this year-round killing of coyotes is kind of appealing to a small number of people. There's no reason to kill animals year-round. It's killing for fun and I think that's morally reprehensible and it's not necessary and I think the science fell out. So I would be totally on board with the majority of the people who cherish wildlife conservation prevail over a small number of people that want to kill coyotes year-round and deprive them of their wildlife into their wild death experience. Thank you. Jeff Bonnier, do you need? Yes, my brother is from Vermont. I was chief for 15 years. I never lost a lamb. I had a good dog and I had a dog. We have always had coyotes before I lived. I spent a lot of time in the woods. I find their tracks. I know a little bit about their habits. We've also always had deer before I lived. Now in the last few years unlike what another person said, we have not had an abundant supply of coyotes at all. We have had kill coyotes because there are some serious hunters who take advantage of this. Kill coyotes any way you want all year round and using a technique where they use two trucks, two sets of dogs, and two follow-up cars radios and transmitters, they are able to track these coyotes eight, nine miles into the confine and catch it crossing a road or between two houses and then they shoot it. And these guys have done things like put pictures on the face of their dogs tearing these coyotes apart. Now who's better, you know? Anyway, there is a place for coyotes in the landscape and if you go to the Fish and Wildlife page on coyotes, the Fish and Wildlife page says something. Hello. I support the participant. I too have a native from Hunter. My family has deep boots and hunting. There's a place for hunting. It keeps wildlife healthy. It feeds families. I hear a lot now where people are complaining about all the land that's being posted. And I can tell you from firsthand experience when you find a body dog on the farm next door, you want to post that land. That's what's happening. So it's wanton waste. No one's using the animal as it should be. If you're going to hunt for subsistence, if you're going to honor the wildlife and the environment, you hunt and you respect that animal and use it. This is not honorable hunting. Thank you. Sheila Global. I'm not from Vermont and I'm from a big city and I'm learning about wildlife and I'm absolutely appalled. I think it's state-sanctioned cruelty. I've been following Project Coyote, which is all over the country and there's a wildlife biologist in southern New Hampshire that hurts me several times. And I have learned that coyotes are not vicious there. When they kill they just eat like everyone else does. The males are monogamous, perhaps human men could learn from them. And they're excellent devoted fathers and they do bring back food for their young and take excellent care of them as the mother of the stew. And I think the open season, they have just as much right to be here as we do and I think that the open season shows a blatant lack of respect for a form of wildlife. The American Indians revered the song of the coyote. I was afraid of them when I first moved up here but that was out of ignorance. I think a lot of the fear and a lot of the hatred is out of ignorance and people would attend some of the presentations by a wildlife biologist that we built some coyotes from certain years plus. You just need to learn it's just about learning. I think a lot of the hatred is just not being educated. Larb Shields. We're having this important meeting and a lot of you see I first wanted to address the elephant in the room just because someone maybe against the open season doesn't mean they're against hunting. As you've heard a lot of people state today, hunting should be done ethically and based on science. Many of you have said an open season keeps coyotes fearful and doesn't mean it's numbers. I would like to say that most wildlife are fearful of humans and we don't have open season on all of them and I'm sure there's something that can cause damage or are not popular. The season is so disingenuous considering the close season you can still kill a coyote and defense your property yourself. Additionally an open season may not reduce numbers but it certainly disrupts pack stability and it increases breeding at younger ages. It messes with your territory in the long run and can create so much stress that causes more conflicts with humans. Also the fact that Vermont has a huge problem with ticks in coyotes' main frame of the small males that have harbored the ticks that carry the lawn disease should be another reason to support the close season. I would like to add that I personally feel, along with many other homeowners, that no species should be disrespected and hunted 365 447. Every species has its important role in the ecosystem. Like I already stated, there can be contributed to increasing the line of disease. Finally, I love the outdoors and my life. I along with many other homeowners would like to be able to hike, kayak, etc. in the woods without the need to wear bright orange or maybe a lot of noise for lawns to be better than this. Please support the petition. Charles Palmer. I'm Charlie Palmer. I live in Dandle. I'm a lifelong resident. I'm here in support of the department on day rules. I think that Lewis and Mark in their court have got a very thoughtful job in tracking the new regulations. And I certainly hope that you've got a board that will continue to support us. Alex Whitlock. Yes, I called them. Devin Craig. Yes. I'm Devin Craig. I'm from Plainfield, Vermont. I've been hunting for 59 years in this state. I graduated as a wildlife biologist from the state of Vermont from University of Vermont in 1974. Second in my class. Those are my certifications. I heard biology talk here. Gerasian nulfora, zebra mussels, coyote. They are non-indigenous species in this state. Why aren't they treated the same? It's because Walt Disney did his job. Because everybody thinks the coyote that lives right over there on that hill is the same as their phyton. All emotion. I've heard emotions before. All emotions on their part. But anyhow, we need to not have seasons on coyotes. What's next? Skunks? Woodchucks? French forals? You don't need to regulate them. They're self-regulating. The coyote was an undue influence on the populations of animals in this state. It filtered in through Canada, down in, and took the place of wolves. They can live for wolves' hands. They are here, and they're here to stay. The old Indian Hubbard, the last two things on this earth, are going to be cockroaches and coyotes. Lisa Barrett? I urge you to limit the hunting season for coyotes. I must say, in terms of coyotes being more fearful because they're hunted, I walk every day with my dogs in the woods on posted land, where nobody shoots anybody, and there's a coyote in there. I take coyotes back all the time. I have never laid eyes on a coyote when I've been walking in those woods. Coyotes made for life. Both parents hunt to be very young. And that happens in the summertime. The young are born in April and May, according to the department's website. And if you shoot and kill one of the parents, while the young are dependent on them for hunting, they're destabilizing the remaining pack, and I think you run the risk of having the remaining adult get pretty desperate and grab getting food for the pups. That's not who we want. So please, let's not kill these wonderful animals in the summertime. And I say wonderful animals because they are part of our ecosystem, and they have taken the place of wolves as best they can. Thank you. Diana Solier. Hi, I'm in support of a shortening of season. I'm in support of animal reputation. I think they each have a right to live here, not just humans. Coyotes serve a particular role in our ecosystem. They do help reduce the rodent population, which is a factor for ticks and Lyme disease. Humans have disrupted and destabilized our natural ecosystem. Wolves and catamount are extricated here thanks to human activity. And I think the coyote can fill in that niche into some degree. I think we need to pay attention to the science, not the emotion behind whether we like them or not. Killing them, as many people have mentioned, in open season is quite cruel to the parents that are trying to raise their pups and dangerous in terms of their sustainability. Of course there will be more coyotes. So the management technique, which I say management technique, of trying to eradicate them will probably never really work. So the approach of us trying to shoot them randomly here around is not doing any good. Carolyn Canning. Jerry Huck. We land in central Vermont. We spend a lot of time in the Wilson Coyotes and I've trapped coyotes. I do all that photography. We also have watched coyotes over time. Evils in our orchards and we consider them a benefit to us so I'd like to see a closed season. I just think it's the right thing to do in terms of management. I would personally rather see a closed season, but the closed season is a bad one. Emily DiNolfrio. Hi, Emily DiNolfrio. Morse Town. I support Vermont Law School's petition for a closed season. I believe it's a fair compromise for those who hunt coyotes and those who don't. We know it protects landowners rights to defend their property. It protects our rights to defend ourselves. It's just a really great compromise and I think Vermont should have a close year. Jacob Rooster. We'll pass it. Jim White. Hi, Jim White. I'm a member of the Vermont Wildlife Coalition but I'm speaking for myself. I read the department's 2018 report on coyotes and it mentions Connecticut as an example of a state actively dealing with coyote attacks on peasant people. So I wanted to take a closer look at that. I found 2017 that 39 reported coyote human incidents in Connecticut. Almost all the incidents were coyotes going after pets. Not people. The people got involved trying to protect the pets. So that's 39 incidents in the state with 5.7 times the population of Vermont. In 2017 in Connecticut there were around 1500 total dog attacks on people. Connecticut had three incidents of humans and coyotes making physical contact. But these three incidents were over a whole decade that ended in 2018 and one of the coyotes had raised. In Connecticut there are more bear and bear incidents with people than there are coyote incidents. The department argues that the open season keeps coyotes afraid of humans. Another possible assumption is open season helps to frighten people more than coyotes by feeding their perceptions of coyotes as dangerous vermin. But close season makes a lot of sense to me. Hunters can still hunt and the department could beef up education about how to do it with coyotes. And it's all more in line with the North American body. Thank you. Hold on. Somebody with the last name Ball. Would you state your first name? My name is Jan Louise Ball and I want to make sure that you hear the story. It's a very important story. That's okay. You can tell from right there. It's a story about something that I experienced on Snake Mountain. I lived in Addison and I experienced piles of coyotes twice when I went out hiking. Piles of dead carcasses broke my heart. I love coyotes. I'm part of New America and I still treasure every animal and there's no reason why anything should be killed all the time. I heard this dog barking up on our mountain, Snake Mountain for two days and I said to my dog Lobo, come on let's go see what's going on. And we went up there and on the way up these two young men, not that old barely able to hunt with their guns were going up. And I said, where are you going? And they said hunting. I said, where are you hunting coyotes? Oh, okay. It was wintertime. There was snow on the ground. I said, well there's a dog up there barking. I've been hearing it for two days. Oh, that's our dog, they said. I said, your dog? What is your dog doing up there? For two days. It's an occasion to lure for the coyotes. I was appalled and sick in my stomach and sad and for what we're teaching our children. It's okay to do this? To kill for no reason at all? So, I mean I swear, every word of this is true. I would not even begin to make up a story like this. I said, you do what you're using your dog? And they said, yes. And I said, how can you do that? They said, well we just put the dog in the cage, the coyotes here bark, they come in, they try to get into it, they can't. They follow the tracks back to the den and they kill them all and they get them all. I said, oh my god, how can you sleep that night? How can you feel good about what you do? I said, you are killing a whole family. How would you feel if someone came in your home? Your time's up, man. My time is up. Well, everybody else took less time. Could I finish this story? No. Teach our children it's okay to kill for no reason at all. Jerry Nolan? Yep. Jerry Nolan's over selected. I'm gonna take my beard down here. Yeah. Having been born in the last year of Herbert Hoover's administration, I probably remember a lot of stuff that most of you only read about in history books. Back in the 1940s, the fuck they rode in front of our farm in Bolton, used to be lined on the first day of deer season, bumper to bumper with the hunters. The whole road from West Bolton down to Jonesville, all five miles up. Today, you go along that road on the first day of deer season, you're lucky to see two or three cars of hunters. Now, some years back, the Fish and Wildlife Department put out a movie called the Winter Bottleneck. Have you ever seen that? I used to use it in my environmental studies program at Burlington High. I always used to manage to do that in November, which is always a surprise to students from Burlington. What they were showing in the movie is how deer can overproduce and actually eat themselves out of house and home. Back in 1969, 70, I think they reported they had lost 180,000 deer to winter kill because they were just over populated. Now, since the hunters aren't doing anything anymore, compared to what they were doing in the 40s, who's going to take care of this population boom with deer? I read just this past fall that they were expecting a big deer kill because of the population was going to be over what they could supply with the natural food. Well, fortunately, we had light snow. But I'll tell you, we need something to take care of the deer population and maybe the coyotes are the way to do it. They are not an invasive species. They are a replacement species. And the plenty of the dudes I'd rather have a 50-pound coyote and a 180-pound wolf sitting around the school bus stop morning cooling. Thank you. Rob, Dylan? Yeah, that was my father. Thank you, chair, everybody. I will remember the board and the commission board. For a while like this, confirm the ecological value of coyotes and the top naturalized predators from our zebra system. Hunting them may have some benefits, but also currently practice some serious drawbacks. Unlike deer, hunting is not ecologically necessary. Predators generally self-regulate and can have negative effects on the coyotes and hunting itself. This proposed closed season would help. The Fish and Wildlife 2017-2018 Coyote Procuration Report, the department acknowledged that the limitless open season killing coyotes was a relic from when they were considered vermin. The perpetuation of this outdated fruitless extermination tool is at odds with science-based wildlife management. It not only may cause packed disruption, we can leave that aside for now. But it also spoils the image of hunting in Vermont at a time when we need to be improving it. When I started deer hunting and a third of all Vermonters had hunting licenses, that's 100,000 out of 300,000 people. I was very proud of the day I named one upon the buck board, the trophy case at MMU. MMU no longer has a buck board. That may mostly do to demographics and suburbanization but other factors distribute. A very visible one is social media used by both anti-hunting groups and hunters themselves. Coyote hunting is compared to deer hunting. Nonetheless, some participants have a health-sized social media presence that contributes to the deadening and degradation of the time-wired and constitution-protected pursuit. No one posts photos of their buck claiming they hate deer or whether we should kill them all. Such behavior drags down the image of all hunters to the non-hunting pole. And however indirectly or unintentionally, this board has facilitated the past by allowing the relic to a no-limit 24-hour-a-day open season to drag on. Commissioner Porter and I had a conversation recently and he could tell me if I mischaracterized it. We agreed that we should not concede that the numbers of hunters would just keep declining. That we could rebrand hunting, highlighting the psychological benefits for most long with other virtues to attract wider participation. Sorry, I'm finished. However, he said that the department... Sir, I didn't let the others finish so I can't let you. I'll submit it and write it. Alright, thank you very much. That's a great idea. Sophie, somebody? Sophie? What's your last name? I asked this question. Why do people hate coyotes so much? Why are they made to seem like they have no value? They definitely have value. I know here on the East Coast, there are top predators just like wolves that are at our best. They are needed for a balanced, healthy ecosystem. Look at wolves and what they did in Yellowstone. Coyotes didn't have families in a monogamous relationship. The alpha pair male and the rest of the pack helped raise the pups. So if the main pair get killed, what happens to the pups? They die without mother's milk and the rest of the pack might start mating between themselves and breed more coyotes. Would you like it if your husband or wife or child was killed for fun? Would you like it if your kids were left without parents? I've seen horrendous pictures of many, many coyotes hanging dead with hunters so proud of all their skills. This is disgusting. Just to kill them with fun is they are not good to eat. A lot of hunters will just leave them in the woods to rot. Then another wild animal might eat them and get lead poisoning from the gun shops. They are families that are being torn apart for fun. There has been much research on a coyote's eat. Research and analysis 1,429 scattered coyotes. The results were 42% rodents, 23% fruit, 22% deer which are probably a lot of carrion and 18% rabbit. We need to be able to cope this with all the wildlife. We want to compromise. We don't believe in hunting coyotes at all and hunters want to kill them all year. Let's make hunting season from October to March. This way coyotes aren't orphaned from there to die and coyotes get a break from being hunted. I was watching the Earth documentary that said 60% of our wildlife has been killed in the last 50 years. That means we only have 40% of wildlife left in this world. Please protect our wildlife. We need our wildlife for a healthy ecosystem as well as our children and children to enjoy. One more, Barry Launderey. Barry Launderey, I'm here on behalf of the Maine Society of the United States and I am obviously in support of the addition of a regulated season. I want to thank all the members of the public who are here to gain and voice their opinion. I hope that the board considers something beyond just the population size when they think about what is the best policy for coyotes in Vermont. We know that there are conflicts with land owners, especially around the use of hounds during the summer. We know that there's waste, that they're killed for no reason, their pelts are not of any value during the times that we propose to purge good hunting. And we also, we know as in spoken of, they'll harm that this activity does to the broader image of hunting in the state and encourages people to post land. And that's something the board should be aware of when they're considering policies, that there are reactions to inactions from the board. You have the responsibility under the law to look out for the public welfare. That's in the statute that satisfies the department of the board. And I would argue that that means taking into consideration more than the population size, it means all these other problems and factors that are around coyote hunting that can be addressed by instituting the reason that being proposed in the petition. A few things to address that are false claims. This petition doesn't end all coyote hunting. I think we've established that that claim is dismayed. The deer population is not negatively impacted by coyote hunting. That is not to be proven. I think the department will confirm that. Coyote hunting is not a mechanism to maintain the population of coyotes in the state. They set self-regulate and again the department I think will confirm that too. The commission has said this is not a public hearing. He's right. What we're asking for are public hearings by moving forward on this petition, allowing for actual public input about the policy that's best for the whole state. Thank you very much. Excuse me. Yes. Maybe I'm missing a sheet. Am I missing a sheet? Because I've been through them all. It's not your man. Hold on. We'll sort it out. That was number 31. Could you please raise your hand if you feel like you signed up? Please identify yourself. My name is Diane Hansen. I'm from Maryland. I'd like to speak about an incident that happened in my home on February 23rd of this year where a pack of coyote hounds chased a coyote into my backyard and crossed $500 worth of property damage to my greenhouse. The hound dogs clearly mauled the coyote as my children watched out the back window. The hunters did not respond when asked to remove their dogs immediately. They stood there in my yard and watched. The violence and disrespect my family endured was deeply traumatizing and my children could not understand why anyone would cause someone suffering to a wild animal of any species. These hunters were not held accountable by fish and wildlife for the damage they caused nor will they be. An open season on coyotes has proven to be dangerous in my community as I have many neighbors who have been harassed by coyote hunters for 20 years. For decades coyotes have been slaughtered and executed in mass numbers only to expand the population across the United States. Unregulated killing of coyotes balances the health of our ecosystems and allows unethical hunters to practice above the law. We need to close the open season on coyotes and if we need to manage their population I believe there are many ethical and humane ways to do so. With no safety regulations, guidelines, mandatory education or protection for property owners on coyote hunting in Vermont closing the season is a sensible solution to oppose the public safety issue on private property. Thank you. Thanks. Just take two steps. Hi, I'm Ron Borowski. That is to be my table right there. Old Fish and Wildlife Board Member who chaired for four years. Back in 2000 and 2006. I worked through the board expansion from 7 to 14 members. I dealt with this coyote issue once before. Got to be great stories for it. That's as far as testimony and coyote that I'm going to give. I did the elk, the deer rule. I did board expansions of authority. That was what board members and anything else. As a board member I was encouraged, discouraged, argued with and told what to do, what not to do and I miss it every day. You guys have a great opportunity. This is kind of like deja vu to me. I am proud of myself and my board. I chaired for four years through the product of blogs. A lot of fun sometimes, sometimes not. Books and lawsuits. I miss it dearly. My message is very clear and nothing to do with testimony on a subject is that public board is a wonderful thing. I want you guys to realize that and everybody else is that you folks are appointed, you're not elected, you're not running for office, you're not succumb to political influence, direct political influence. This is about as close as it gets. You're top feeders. Now I know a couple feet of people, you know what I mean when I say that I do watch my time, you will be kicking me out of here. You've got the right to ask questions from the top, not from the bottom. You don't have to go with here saying you don't have to go with that. You can go with the professional opinions and you have to do so by statute. A board can fail. And it succumbs to either some type of political or personal pressure either from the department, from the board itself, or from the public. You guys need to be really careful what you're trying to fix or what you're trying to move forward on. Just words of encouragement. Nothing even pertaining to this issue. It's a lot of fun. Hope you enjoy your time. I have a little time to get involved again if need be and certainly would like to welcome you and I like Mr. Bailey here at the very efficient game club for a meeting. Take care of it. We have a speaker there if we ever need to. Alright Brian. But anyways, enjoy your time. It's a public process and I'd like to say we've dealt with this issue before. We'll go over there. Thank you very much. Thank you. My name is Bob Richard from Berlin, Vermont and I see a very emotionally charged topic on both sides. I'm hoping the board makes this decision not on emotion but on facts and logic. Again, this is about coyotes when I'm going to speak bear. Anybody that has studied the bear population in the 50s, 60s and 70s, it was way less than it is today. Somewhere in the 80s there was a study done on the sows that were shot during the rifle season and they realized after they studied the ovaries that the weekend of Thanksgiving 80% of the females taken were females. They didn't realize that. So they tweaked the season by backing the bear season out of Thanksgiving weekend. That had a monumental effect on the bear population. If you talk to the bear houndsmen or whatever today, there's way more bear and in my opinion sometimes too many. My point being tweaking a season just a little bit can make a very big difference. Humans are the only predator that a coyote has. Like the saying goes, if it ain't broke don't fix it. I don't think it's a problem by trying to fix a non-problem with an inadequate fix may cause a larger problem with more collateral damage. Thank you for your time. My name is Bill Hickock. I'm president of the Vermont Pro-Hundreds Association. I'm here to talk about the new proposed deer rules and just to clarify something our board has met, talked about these rules at Nauseam for a long time. Twice we voted unanimously in favor of the new rules. We think they're great. Sure, every member organization can't represent 100% of their members all the time and there's some members who don't like either losing a buck because we're going to have a one buck season or maybe they don't want to see crossbows in the woods. But in general the rules are a dynamite step forward and a reaction to a reality that has changed these woods. Deer today are different than deer before and the hunting situation is different. I applaud the board, I applaud the department we all do and we look forward to hunting in November with Bo Herra with the dynamite quinn. Thank you all very much. Donna Gable, I live in Plainfield, Vermont. I have a number of, hey Brian, I have a number of relatives and friends who hunt. I am not against hunting. I always feel the need to state that in these forums because I think that certain sides are painted certain ways. I am very hopeful that when the board looks at this issue they will look at a science based approach and factor in empathy as well. I can't imagine opposing this petition. It's a common sense, reach across the aisles, make everyone on both sides a little bit happy and if you feel vehemently opposed to it I have to wonder why. I have to wonder what it is inside of you that so desperately wants to kill something that you're not going to eat. I think that drive needs to be curved and looked at and acknowledged and curved and looked at. Thank you. I'm Audrey Huston. I'm from the Bo Herra, Vermont and I'm a native monitor and I come from a hunting family but I support the closed season petition and that's because I think that if you decide to hunt something you should only take what you need to support your own family and my family only takes one deer each year and we use every single part of it that we can but growing up with social media I see so many people posting photos of coyotes that they do not use any part of. They don't eat it, they don't do anything with it they just post a picture and throw the bodies out completely unnecessary and we need to put an end to the unnecessary hunting of coyotes. Two more looks like. Bonnie Geisler from Coventry, Vermont I got involved in the coyote issue in Vermont because me and my neighbors were concerned about coyotes being chased by packs of dogs, then snowmobiles, ATVs, and then vehicles on the road on our posted and unposted land. So I actually hosted a wildlife biologist to come and speak at a local library and it was a standing room crowd and she did a lot to dispel so many of the untruths and fear about coyotes that many people grew up in Vermont with. I got a call a couple days after the presentation from an elderly lady that wasn't able to get out to attend the presentation and she invited me to come to her house to talk about it. Turns out that she had a neighbor show up at her door with a rightful and a dead coyote in her hand, in his hand and she wanted to know what her options are and what the laws were about coyotes in Vermont and I explained the current situation is that hunters in Vermont can kill them pretty much 24-7 365 days out of the year almost in method and really the only protection she had was to post her land and she didn't want to do that because she wanted to support ethical hunting and I think most people in Vermont agree with her that we agree ethical hunting that includes fair chase, a swift and humane death, the animal is used for food and the hunting seasons make sense with the breeding cycle of the coyotes and I hope that the Fish and Wildlife Board continues to create policy that represents most Vermonters that want ethical hunting. Thank you very much. My name is Pamela Kraus. I'm from Brookfield, Vermont. I did not grow up in a hunting family but I sure just married into one and I've learned a lot and we all get along but one thing we do agree on is that we do not want an open season for coyotes that a closed season would be a great compromise and I just want to reiterate a few things that were said. I do support the petition. I agree that the open season is not supported by science, it's not good management or stewardship that we do need the large predators especially for small mammals that carry deer ticks and spread Lyme disease. The ticks are out in force. More and more people I know have Lyme disease and communities are helping with that to keep the small mammal population down. The more mice there are, the more deer ticks. And I agree that it is not an invasive species but is a replacement species and that it's an important top predator in our ecosystem. And I do agree that it is not a 24, 7, 365 days a year hunting is not what we want Vermont to show the rest of the country to show everybody it's not ethical hunting and I think it does a stain on our state and on ethical hunters in our state. Thank you. Thank you. I believe that concludes if we miss anyone. Okay. Thank you all very much and I think that went pretty well. I appreciate that. We're going to move to the petitions now. Okay, yeah. We're going to hear from the petitioners now so while I introduce the ground rules around the Vermont Law School, school students come up. Student, sorry. Each petitioner will have 10 minutes. Petitioner can run, can say it however they want. They can present however they want. They can invite questions from the board if you want to ask questions and that's something they want to entertain. That's fine. But this is not a time for the petitioner to question the board. This is our time to hear from them. This is the same for both petitioners. They have 10 minutes maximum. They can use 10 if they want or less. So that's it. I would ask that you continue to act respectively like you did during the comment period please during this time. We appreciate that very much. Yes. I'll have Keith track right here. Commissioner Porter here is going to keep track of the time. Before we start the time, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us where you're from and then we'll start the time. I'm Cindy Fence. I'm from South Royalton specifically the Vermont Law School. I'm the co-chair of the Animal Law Society and I'm here to present our petition for a responsible hunting season. Thank you. I'm sure you've all heard a bunch today. I'm not here to advocate for the end of hunting or the end of coyote hunting rather I'm here to advocate for responsible hunting and this is a position that this board has fostered for a long time responsible wildlife management and I believe that this petition for a regulated coyote hunt furthers this board's goals and it respects hunters, wildlife enthusiasts and all Vermonters. We all know here that the Constitution of Vermont protects our right to enjoy the land and the wildlife of Vermont and it's held in trust for the people of Vermont and in 2018 the Fish and Wildlife Services released a report on coyotes. Fish and Wildlife argued for the North American model which believes that you should not take any wildlife any individual without a legitimate purpose. Don Isabel, a game warden in Vermont for over 20 years agreed pleading to Fish and Wildlife to enact a wanton waste law and to end the wasteful and disrespectful killing of coyotes and to this end the Fish and Wildlife Board has earned some praise last year for supporting the end of the coyote contests. However, the exact same practice is still legal and at times praised. When we call it a contest you can go out with any number of people and kill any number of coyotes and that's considered shameful now and illegal and you would be fined but if you don't call it a contest you can go out with the same amount of people the same day at the same time kill the same amount of coyotes and cause the same effect on the wildlife but so long as you don't call it a contest it's considered a respectful and genuine wildlife management practice and at times even earns praise. And we question how Fish and Wildlife can reconcile the motivations for rightly ending the coyote killing contests but still permit the exact same activities to move forward and perhaps that argument is too sentimental. We heard a lot listening to science and not giving in to emotion but supporting this responsible season makes sense biologically and scientifically. This Board identified several reasons in that 2018 report for maintaining the open season to prevent conflicts between coyotes and humans to ensure a healthy and robust population for a coyotes and other game to protect our livestock and to foster respect for coyotes and all of the data that I'm about to cite a lot of which is from that 2018 report fosters and promotes those ideas and those goals that were identified in 2018 First I'll address the human coyote conflicts and preventing them. According to that report most conflicts between humans and coyotes happened in suburban areas where humans have habituated coyotes by feeding them but we in Vermont have not seen the same kind of conflicts like they're having in Chicago and Los Angeles which were two of the cities that were identified when studying human conflicts but we're not Chicago and we're not Los Angeles. We don't have the same kind of rapid development in the same kind of sprawling pervasive suburbia we have beautiful forests and lush natural wildlife but Fish and Wildlife report posed that the lack of hunting in these cities was the reason for the conflicts but has failed to cite scientific data to support that. However studies from Howell in 1982, Carbon in 1989, Baker and Tim in 1998, White and Garrett in 2009, Alexander and Quinn in 2011 all found that feeding coyotes and thus habituating them was the single greatest cause of the conflicts and one of those studies found that 100% of those conflicts were either directly or indirectly tied to habituation but several studies again Carbon, Tim, Lucasic and Alexander have noted that the majority of conflicts happened during pup rearing season and during breeding the coyotes were desperate and training their pups to hunt and it makes sense then that if we want to mitigate coyote human conflicts we should decrease the amount of breeding coyotes. Fewer breeding coyotes and fewer pups means fewer coyotes coming into conflict with humans and we have recorded for a long time that when coyote pack structure is disrupted, killing the breeding male or breeding female. Well, there's had a tough time during breeding and pup rearing season so we can only have these two meaningful methods we selected to have both management strategies both management strategies that have proven scenarios and contains hundreds of coyotes to keep them hunting Second, responsible coyote season's mineral sedation on livestock happens during the breeding season. So the most effective way to respond to this is the same way that we use these pathways by promoting healthy family factors. And it's also good for wildlife in that 2018 reported hundreds of strong pups and strong family bonds will be processed as a cultural area because it keeps other sedating cuddles as they defend their territory. Even for them it doesn't prevent people from sedating their pups. In this situation, we need to reduce the number of breeding coyotes to have this situation so it's time to implement it. Let's say tomorrow that you see that the coyote population has no impact on your population. This is tomorrow that reports things but all the coyotes and their own people, both coyotes, have no long-term negative impact on your population. If our coyote populations are stable, once and without hunting whether or not we hunt coyotes will not have the stress on your population. But then without you, we need to change coyote populations and it will not change your population. With such an easy compromise it's not just an abundant population. An abundant population with years of starving can't control but a healthy population. A population that can thrive in their natural habitat and engage in natural behaviors and it's not allowable to raise them. If it's rough to pass a factor, it's certainly going to be a permanent coyote. If it's rough to pass a factor, it's not allowable coyotes to engage in their natural behaviors. It's not that we hunt it with no timeability at the healthy population. And finally I'd like to do, and that is the reason that we ended the coyote context with respect. Because that is not called for respect. If these coyotes have been robbing for months, does that show respect? Contest is so high in the wildlife of Vermont that honestly we've held in trust for all of them on this. Thank you. I'd like to give one of my primary functions to advocate for the community and for access to public good for the population. I'd like to give my assistance in preventing this and help these communities. One thing that I do want to touch on is the concept of defensive priority reduction. There's a professor, Eric Lee, who's been studying the predators. He's been studying the predators. He's been trying to focus on predators and seeing that he's frankly, for the majority, is stride-able on the subject on the topic. And he's very clearly reproducing the rise from helping animals. So to boil that down to a simple statement, the animal that has too much competition, and also outside, can also do the same side of what it is to help the animal. So when you're contemplating defensive priority reduction, contemplate that as a constant of helping animals, which is something that we can all be striding down on our answers. So this afternoon at the board is a 2017 email from the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection to require my specialist, Chris Danes, to the board. Many of you may not have that matter as well, because we raised this afternoon. The individual has been previously coming to fire from, if I don't need to organize any concerns, I read that. That means that I don't want any more of that to occur on my account. In the letter, it's quite clear that the concept of the flood season was an abject failure. And Mr. Danes dealt with several issues, including an increased concept during the flood, and followed by the statement. Considering all these factors, could we be supported eliminating the flood-hunting period, which was critical in most of May, to allow forking the opportunity to take priority during the time of the year, that is considered most beneficial in reducing the impact on the season. I think that's rather a sort of argument, but not only does it benefit people, but also non-gainers. The Connecticut Board has since finished field, and the season is once more open year-round. There's no limit on the number of factors you have. When we note that all parties agree that we should have healthy populations, all parties agree that current regulations are not limited to population drivers. We understand that the department has a statutory direction to provide access to the resource. These factors alone are not the reality, because there is no need to further regulate the season in the month. It exists in the concept that the current regulations are somehow just as successful to be made. The person signaling is a suggestion that attracts them, has no place in the loophole to catch them. With no biological imperatives to reduce access to the resource, questions before the important, simple matter of one person to reduce access to the resource on their personal development. There's a word compromise a lot, but I haven't heard a compromise generally involved both hard and easy to work with. There's this compromise that's hidden before. This type of driver has no place in wildlife management, and in the future of Connecticut, we can see the problems that are present in the economy. There's some simple and compelling facts we're especially asked to do in relation to the personal regulation around the economy. Campbell Royer is going to do that presentation for the department. For folks that remind her new on the board, Kim is with the department, basically spent four decades, started with the department as an experienced biology, previously had a degree in wildlife management from the University of Vermont. She had worked on different jobs and capacities when she hired the department in the early 80s. She was principally a habitat wildlife biologist and then had worked her way up to become a district biologist of the department and spearheaded the furbearer project when she was in the field. Recent times back maybe seven or eight years ago she was asked to come up and work in the central headquarters office to help with the commissioner's office with the administration of the department. And through that tenure Kim has evolved in all kinds of issues of the department, prior to strategic planning budget setting, policies, priorities across all divisions within the department working for previously commissioner Barry and then commissioner Lewis Porter. So in recent times I'd say maybe two years herself Kim had decided to go back in the field given the probably an hour and a half commute she had every day to come to headquarters. I have to say her attendance was there with better than mine. I had a 15 minute commute but I think all of us in the department in particular the life of commissioner quite have a lot of gratitude and thankfulness for Kim's work that she's done on behalf of the entire department. She's now spearheading the furbearer project as well as wearing a hat of private land habitat work where she's been spearheading workshops throughout the state of Vermont working with our lands and habitat management program to try to get landowners more engaged in wildlife habitat. So I thank you Kim for sharing your thoughts. Thank you everybody for being here. I will try to speak up but if you can't hear me in the back please raise your hand. I really appreciate all the comments. I'm appreciative of the interest in this animal which I personally think is a pretty cool animal. I think most of us here think the same way. So I'm going to try to stick to the science as much as I can and as much as I know it and if you guys have questions please feel free to interrupt me as I go forward. That is for the board. Yeah I'm talking to the board. Sorry. You guys have to wait. You can call me sometime. All right and Louis I might get in your way. No you're good. So we're here to talk about the coyote obviously and I'm actually going to give you some historical context some of which you probably already know but all of these things play a role in where we are today and I actually always start out with my furbearer talk when Jesus was walking the streets of Palestine and this in New England at this period of time we had a Native American culture that relied pretty heavily on the wildlife the native wildlife that were here and they lived fairly lightly off the land in northern New England because they moved around a lot and they took basically what they could carry on their backs or what they could wear or what they needed to eat but they did obviously have to rely on the animals that lived around them and near them there are two major exceptions more than two but two that pertain to coyotes that are now missing from our our dynamic ecosystem now obviously wolves and mountain lions both been educated and I'll talk a little bit about how that happened and why interestingly Vermont was settled much later than most of the southern New England states and in 1760 we only had 3,000 settlers of European descent and the settlers that came up here from mostly southern New England came to carve out a subsistence farm on the landscape in general and most of you know how this contributed to the land use history in Vermont we saw each settler carving out his own little farmstead and by 1790 we had a European based population of 85,000 and by 1800 that population had skyrocketed to 155,000 and each one of those family groups were carving out you know their own homestead so we actually ended up with our forest which was 90 to 95 percent of the state when these people first came here was actually transformed to agriculture and only 30 percent of the state had forest at the end by about 1850 so these settlers also came with sort of a mindset and you can imagine what that would be if your livelihood depended on your sheep and your cattle in order to survive anything that threatened that livelihood was going to be something that you considered a risk probably a risk that you didn't want to take and so wolves and many other predators were bounty starting in the late 1700s and it was interesting I actually went up maybe 15 years ago to the Historic Society and talked to Greg Sanford I don't know if anybody knows who he is but he was the Vermont State Historian at the time and I was looking for links records because we only had three historical links records at the time and he said you know I have something I think you might be interested in and he goes down these creaky steps in this Victorian building where they were housed and he picked up this big leather bound book and it basically said wolf bounties 1777 to 1790 something and inside this book are pieces of paper I'm holding these papers signed by Ira Allen and Thomas Chittenden and I think what happened according to Greg was when you shot a wolf you cut the head off took it to the county clerk and the county clerk would send it up to the state treasurer which I guess was Ira Allen and Thomas Chittenden at different periods of time in there they would sign it and send back $20 and that $20 would then go back to the farmer and you can imagine $20 in the 1700s was probably anywhere from three to six months salary for these guys so besides the fact that there was a risk associated with predators there was also this financial incentive to go after wolves and you know I was actually pretty interested in whether there were any weights associated with these because we have very little information about the animal that was here prior to European settlement and unfortunately they didn't record anything like that but I actually worked with Middlebury College students and they digitized the records by town and this is what they came up with and some people think this tells us a lot about the distribution of wolves but really what it tells us about is how Vermont was settled so between 1777 and 1781 clearly people were coming into Vermont from Albany area and settling the Teconics first and where people and settlers overlapped with these predators is where we saw the highest hate and you can see there was some movement up to the Connecticut river valley and in subsequent years you start to see more activity up in here what's interesting is you'll notice there in this here there's a couple of blue dots and in subsequent years I have several other maps there's a few more blue dots the blue dots are actually mountain lions so mountain lions were bounded as well I'm not sure whether they were just in the wolf bounty ledger you know inappropriately or if that was sort of the ratio of mountain lions to wolves at the time it would stand to reason that there were many more wolves probably than there were mountain lions who have a much larger home range but mountain lions were extirpated as a result of this bounty and unregulated take and the clearing of the forest all three of those things came together in a perfect storm and affected many of our wildlife species at that period of time so this predator relationship is incredibly complex how predators interrelate with each other is the system is very complex so complex that I would suggest that we don't completely understand it yet and maybe won't but what we do know is that when you remove those top predators you see an increase in the middle predators and this is exactly what happened in Vermont when we lost those top predators we saw bobcat and fox populations go up and we'll talk a little bit more about that later and a similar thing happened when they reintroduced wolves into Yellowstone most of you probably know this the coyote population dropped by 50% you reintroduce a large predator and you see a decline in those middle predators so prior to European settlement as we've talked about tonight a little bit some of you brought up they were actually animals that existed west of the Mississippi only as far as we know probably tied to the prairies west of the Mississippi and then as those European settlers moved west and cleared the land and unregulated take of those predators the coyotes moved east because they're more adaptable than the wolves over here and some coyotes actually moved north through Canada and into the northeast and these are the coyotes that came into Vermont and some actually moved across Ohio and Pennsylvania and moved east in this group and probably I don't know 18 years ago maybe 12 years ago we cooperated with a researcher called Dr. Roland Kayes who was working out of the Albany Museum of Natural History at the time and doing a lot of genetics work and we provided him with a bunch of coyotes I forget how many but upwards of 30 something or more and he did genetic testing and compared it to what was going on in western coyote populations this is pretty interesting you look here Nebraska and Texas coyotes the gray are all coyote genes just to be simple about it but you can see how diverse those coyotes are there's a whole different a whole bunch of different genes in both Texas and Nebraska coyotes and then this is actually Ontario and Ontario I don't even know what we call these researchers call the canid species now because we really don't know a lot about how the genetic mixing is going on and what's happening with the species but you can see up here the genetics is still somewhat diverse but it includes the red is what's called I would call it the eastern Canadian wolf I think it's called the Great Lakes wolf here the yellow is Canis lupus the gray wolf and the gray are coyote genes I think that there's a species up there that has a lot more of both of the other types of wolves and then once they cross the St. Lawrence which is somewhat of a barrier back then and probably even more of a barrier now because the St. Lawrence does not freeze much anymore because of shipping and because just climate change they we what Dr. Case thought was that because the northern New England population of coyotes is so undiverse we basically have coyotes with maybe two different coyote genes and one wolf gene so a relatively undiverse population probably because only very few female coyotes made it across the St. Lawrence and our population is based on a very small number of animals that actually made it here so it was kind of like a bottleneck so in the 1940s this unique animal shows up in the state the department really didn't know anything about this animal it was brand new this is the map that I pulled out of a file this shows where they thought the distribution of this animal was in the 1940s so sort of up here where you'd expected if they were crossing the St. Lawrence maybe down in here as well and when they first arrived and some of you have been around a while will remember that a lot of people call the coyotes and the assumption was that these animals were breeding with domestic dogs and although that is possible they can hybridize and they actually can reproduce the pups can reproduce but the pups of those hybridizing animals the reproductive cycle is actually phase shifted and what that means is that the pups the female pups will actually come into heat in December or in the end of the fall and because of that they actually have their pups in the middle of winter and survival of those of the pups is very low so even though they can hybridize the actual success of those litters is almost non-existent so we have, I think Dr. Kay's found a very small number of domestic dog genes in our coyotes but hardly worth noting so they are an eastern coyote, we do not have coy dogs, I guess that's the bottom line and our coyotes tend to be larger than the western coyote they can be an average of 10 pounds larger and some of them get quite a bit larger than that as some of you can attest and their skull size is 6-11% larger, it's wider their teeth are a little bit bigger and the behavior that we've become familiar with in Vermont that family group structure is different than the western coyote which tends to be a solitary animal much smaller our coyotes often kind of hang out in family groups and we'll see that through the winter period and some of that may come from that sort of wolf genetics what's happened to enter Vermont at a very opportune time for a predator we know that after the Civil War many of those farms that had been established in the early 1800s were abandoned and we started to see some regeneration of young cars at that time that farm abandonment continued to today it's still continuing as we know but it really heated up after the Civil War and through the early 1900s and that resulting early successional habitat or young forest as we call it actually created some really excellent habitat for prey species and so we saw things like snowshoe hair cottontail rabbits, our deer population once they had been reintroduced in the late 1800s explode through that period and we ended up with a prey base that was perfect for a predator like the coyote in addition there was a tremendous amount of space on the landscape because there were no other coyotes occupying the landscape anywhere so as these animals came in their reproductive rates were probably quite high and the the pups probably survived quite well through this period and in the 18 in the 1980s the department partnered with the University of Vermont and we did a study in the Champlain Valley Dave Persons was getting his masters at that time he has since gotten his doctoral thesis he's gone and worked for a last sufficient game and now he's retired and back into the month but at the time he actually my pups is right in the middle of the sorry I apologize he actually did a study in the Champlain Valley on coyotes he collared 29 coyotes in 11 different social groups and you can see up here these are the 11 different social groups and you'll notice that there's actually some territoriality going on here and what he found is they had fairly large home ranges but they actually defended a home range of about 4 to 8 square miles in the Champlain Valley and these home ranges were made up generally with a breeding pair or an alpha pair as we all know some resident associates which are really just yearlings who may hang around with the parents for 6 months or maybe even a year and a half transients which are the animals that move around the landscape because they've been kicked out of their home range for unoccupied home range and these are the vulnerable ones to mortality by roads and cars and hunting and all those kinds of things and what he found was that 50% of his animals that were collared were died either mostly human cause again the same things hunting and cars and some trapping and he also did a food habit study and what he found again this is why coyotes tend to be so much more adaptable than wolves is that they basically can shift from one food type to another you'll see here the blue bar which I'm sorry it's not that easy to see is deer and you can see deer is an important food source for coyotes in the spring summer fall and winter at least in Vermont and the Champlain Valley and this is 40% up here so 40% of I think he did this with Scats and I've had evidence of deer in the spring also woodchucks at the time the red bar pretty important for that one little species the orange bar is small mammals rabbits mice all those kinds of things the teal bar this kind of odd looking one is vegetation no that's insects and insects you know they play a role right in the summer and the the throw up the colored bar is vegetation and that is like things like apples, cherries, raspberries and you'll sometimes find coyote scat with pits in it from vegetation so again vegetation is a pretty important even beech nuts I think are important to coyotes in a few years the last bar is one that's probably not available everywhere because it was a Champlain Valley and there were a lot of farms within the home ranges domestic cows were part of the coyotes diet and these were not normally animals that were killed by the coyotes but the farmers would throw the dead cattle in the back 40 and the coyotes would find them and they feed on them so early on like I said this availability of food and habitat affected the reproductive rate and the survival of these pox and coyotes tend to respond to habitat availability and food and so when we have years of a lot of food and a lot of habitat their population will go up and when you have years where there's scarce food their population will go down and it'll just bounce back and forth like that and so I was asked by the legislature to come up with a population estimate and before I give you this that I just tell you this is a very squishy number do not go to the bank with this number this is based on Dave's work that was done in the 1980s in the Champlain Valley but it gives us a sense of how many coyotes might be out there on the landscape so you assume that core home range of 4 to 8 square miles now in the Champlain Valley it's probably smaller than what it would be in the forest areas probably larger home ranges maybe anywhere from 12 square miles so I picked 8 as sort of the average and so in the spring this time of year you're probably going to have the two adults maybe 4 to 6 pups you could even have more I mean they can have upwards of 8 or 9 but just pick 4 to 6 and 1 to 2 juveniles or transients that are hanging around so you could have in the spring as many as 7,800 to 11,000 and maybe more or a few less okay but that just gives you a sense of the number now of course we know that about 50% of those pups are going to die by fall some of those transients are going to get kicked out and they're going to die but you could still assume that even if the adults died probably somebody's going to move in and take over that home range now because we're pretty saturated with coyotes now so let's still assume the two adults have the pups 2 to 4 and still maybe 1 to 2 juveniles so you're down to maybe 6 to 7,500 coyotes in the fall and then that will build back up again in the spring and that will go back and forth so you're going to have a population that varies from year to year based on food and habitat and then also from season to season based on just mortality and so I was asked also to talk about with the legislature the influence on prey species that are hunted by humans and this is probably one of the biggest issues around coyotes there is a perception that coyotes influence deer in particular, possibly moose and other types of prey species and what I try to remind people is that our prey species deer and moose in particular evolved with predators and not just coyotes they evolved with wolves, fissure bobcat, black bear mountain lions so they chances are that an animal like a coyote is not going to extirpate our prey species and I will add and it's important to add that humans were also important predators of these species prior to European settlement I mean we have played a role in the system and we are part of this system since time began since human walked upright on the landscape humans have been part of the ecological system and we can play a responsible part or we can play a part that is negative but we have been part of this system and we can't exclude us from when we have these discussions about these animals so there have been a lot of studies around the influence of coyotes on prey species and a lot of these studies were because biologists were concerned about the influence of coyotes and predation on deer and so there have been studies in New Brunswick, Massachusetts I couldn't find the actual number of fawns that they collared but I know they did a study many years ago New York actually did a study in the winter they collared 39 deer to see what the winter kill was on deer and 56 fawns in the summer Minnesota 66 fawns in Pennsylvania 218 fawns and in general what they found the adult deer in the wintering areas three were actually killed by deer the rest were scavenged 36 of them were scavenged the rest of those fawns were 50% mortality in the first six months and that mortality I'd say 45 to 55 let's broaden that in the first six months and most of that mortality came from predation and that predation was split between often split between that black bear and Kiles now since I put that other paper together there's been some research done in Delaware which is somewhat enlightening and in Delaware in the last year or two they've been doing a study in an area of the state where they do not have predators or they have very very low densities of predators and they were looking at what was the survival rate of fawns in an area where you didn't have any predators and what they found was the same survival rate 45 to 55% so what they have attributed the mortality to in their study was that the fawns that were born less than 6.6 pounds tended to have a tough time surviving so the body weight of the fawn made a difference in survival and that probably related to the maturity of the doe the more mature doves tended to have more successful survival of the fawns but what I found really interesting is that that rainfall had an influence on those fawns and that they said that one day of one inch or more rain could lower the mortality could lower the survival of that fawn by 50% which means that climate change could have an effect in the future on some of these populations and it's not something we factor in and this is just one study in one state but it's something that sort of opens the door to some questions about what really is driving this system and where actual prediction is natural mortality these low birth weight precipitation and doe maturity is likely the ultimate mechanism controlling neonatal survival but it's masked by the emphasis on predation so it looks like predation could be compensatory and not an additive mortality so most of these studies have concluded that coyotes really do not affect the population of deer negatively or control the populations of deer I should say they can affect them negatively but they don't tend to control the population of deer except possibly in areas where we get consecutive difficult winters with deep snow and cold two or three years in a row and then you have coyotes getting into the wintering areas that can have a downward pressure on that population and that's you know in Vermont I think Nick takes that into consideration I think the only place where that possibility probably exists is in the northeast kingdom but it really is our habitat again wintering areas I mean here's the theme it's our wintering areas and the quality of those wintering areas that it's really important to maintaining these populations and ensuring that species like deer in bad winters survive regardless of all of this scientific information and some of it's relatively new and regardless of the work that Nick does in outreach and I try to do an outreach there still is a deeply rooted perception that coyotes do compete with hunters for the same species and this is something that we will continue to talk about again the science is fairly new so for some folks you know it takes a while to get that out there but it is something that we've been working on trying to talk about influence on other predator species we talked a little bit about the fact that this is a very complex system and how predators react to each other is hard for us to know or understand but simply Vox we do think probably their population declined makes sense when coyotes moved into the state and what's interesting is day persons actually he captured his coyotes with foothold traps and when fox were captured with foothold traps sometimes he and his student who was working with him would come upon the fox and it had been killed and so she decided more angles decided that she was going to call her foxes and they could sort of see try to figure out what's the relationship between these two animals and what they found was that the foxes tend to get pushed to the periphery of the home ranges and that really probably the population had declined fairly significantly since before coyotes were on the landscape so certainly coyotes have had an effect on how foxes use the landscape and their availability of territory and food bobcats is also another this is a really interesting one I could spend a whole talk on bobcats but I'll just say it by saying this is a schematic it's not based on any data so don't go looking for it in the literature this is just my perception of what could have happened for bobcats but we can assume bobcats are at the northern edge of their range in Vermont and prior to European settlement Valley Forge Pennsylvania had the climate that we have in Quebec Canada today it's much harsher so chances of bobcats really at high densities existing in Vermont probably was pretty low we probably had, we know we had a population of bobcats but they probably didn't do as well as they're doing today then we had all that land clearing eliminated that competition of large predators and reintroduced deer deer population starts to take off as the habitat gets better bobcat population climbs right with it you get to the 1940s and 50s and you have peak peak deer populations then close 50s 60s 60s 40s to 60s highest deer population probably ever and bobcats followed right along and I've had houndsmen tell me about bobcats killing deer caching them following that bobcat finding another cached deer following that bobcat finding another cached deer that bobcat could live off those deer all winter long and then this guy moves in the coyote and now that cached deer is gone in about 48 hours or even less and so the bobcat that had a pretty easy way of making a living through the winter which is its challenging season but it took a lot harder to have a source of prey then, oops, sorry then Fisher introduced to control porcupines and so more competition the forest began to mature we've got that middle age forest now so food sources go down for the prey species and we start to see a decline in both prey species and in bobcats and this was reflected in our harvest records now and maybe we're not really sure why this actually was done before things have shifted around but bobcat numbers are going back up again and I suspect it has something to do with maybe turkey populations another prey source that's available again, I'm just speculating here based on my own history but it's interesting for us to think about our baseline and a lot of us have this baseline of population, I mean that's what we remember those of us who are my age and our habitat probably just isn't there anymore to support those numbers so we do think that coyotes probably influence these species including not just fox and bobcat but raccoons and feral house cats as well all of which can have a pretty detrimental effect on songbirdness on waterfowlness on grouse and turquiness so it's possible that if coyotes can actually limit some of these other species then maybe there's a beneficial effect although again the system's so complex that we can't really say pro here con here, two strikes four, three strikes against it we just don't have that kind of information but it really just exhibits the complexity of how these species work to operate against each other so the legislature asked how the coyote season actually integrates with the North American model and most of you know we have the year round coyote season we have a trapping season from last Saturday and October to December and the North American model basically a response to the complete devastation of most of our most iconic wildlife species and luckily sportsmen stood up, mostly sportsmen stood up with some legislators and congressmen and said we need to do something and so there is, the North American model is based on seven tenets those are aspirational tenets, we don't actually meet all those tenets they are things that we think are important in terms of wildlife management and the most probably, I think the most important one is this public trust tenet which says that in North America wildlife is owned by everybody and we are the trustees of whether it's the state or the board is actually part of being the trusteeship we are the trustees of these species for the public for today and for the future and I think the way we see this is that we are responsible for maintaining current and future sustainable populations that's our role, that's how we see it and we want to also provide opportunities for all the public that are interested in these wildlife to have access to them, whether you just want to view them, whether you just enjoy hearing them out of your bedroom window at night, howling or whether you like to hunt or trap them, as long as that harvest is sustainable and allows the rest of the public to have access to those animals we think it's in accordance with the North American model and we appreciate that some people just like knowing these animals are here, we think all of these animals have intrinsic value they're all valuable to us and we take the sustainable management of them very seriously and if we thought that any of these seasons was risking the population now or in the future we would recommend to the board that it be changed right away and I just need to make a point here and it's a little bit self self-serving but a lot of the funds that came from for the reintroduction of these species that are here not by just randomness but because there was a huge effort in the 1900s to reintroduce or come up with recovery efforts for many of these species and it wasn't just the department although we played an important role in many of these but like I said, White Tail Deer were reintroduced in the late 1800s by the precursor to the Vermont Federation of Sportsmen Beaver but that was a department effort primarily starting in 1921 we brought in Beaver from I think New York and maybe a couple other states I can't remember and then we had a longstanding live trap and transfer program to spread them around the state and Fisher was the forest and parks department because of porcupine through the 50s and 60s turkeys was a department effort starting in time but as most of you know that trap and transfer program went through the 80s through my tenure with the department geese were opinioned in 1956 to establish a nesting population of geese you can imagine we didn't have a nesting population of geese within our lifetimes and Martin were reintroduced reintroduced into Vermont in 89, 90 and 91 in 118 animals from New York and mostly Maine and reintroduced them in the southern greens in partnership with the Forest Service and my point about this is that most of these have been funded with the tax on firearms and ammunition and with some of this well even none of these really some of our non-game species today also are funded through state wildlife grants so there's money going into this from many places but I just also want to mention that as the furbearer project leader there's really not even two of us working on maintaining about 16 or 17 furbearer species and we're fairly pragmatic about where we put our efforts and we put our efforts on species that are at risk and the species that have been at risk in the last 20 years have been martin and lynx and so we've had camera studies going on for the last almost 10 years on both species to try to get a handle on was that reintroduction successful we thought it wasn't at first, now we found some animals so we've got a long standing study going on with sexual connected university to look at martin populations we've had a long standing study going on to put out cameras for lynx this is where the species that are really at risk and to be honest we really don't have the capacity to put a lot of effort into species like fox and coyote even though we value them even though we respect them even though we think they're really critical to the landscape we don't have the capacity to put a lot of effort into species that are resilient and so what is the scientific biological basis for the open season well it does in part stem back to when the coyotes first moved into the state they were considered vermin that's true they were coy dogs, they were new and people didn't want them to and so no season was ever really established we actually in the last 10 years have had I think 69 reports of predation and as mentioned they're mostly during the breeding or when those pups are kicked out in the fall, when the pups are kicked out and they're learning to hunt the pups of those now because farmers tend to handle it on their own and I always try to provide farmers with other alternatives you know if you change your husbandry practices you know get a dog but if they have a problem with coyotes, if coyotes have figured out that these animals are easy pickings you cannot change that behavior, you really have to remove those coyotes and certainly the problems that are occurring in suburbia today are of concern to us and I will just say that these are just some headlines from May, the month of May, across the country and I'm not saying that we have a suburban environment here in Vermont but I do believe that this season does act as an aversive conditioning method and we use aversive conditioning on many of our species, we use it on bear we use it on geese I mean where we have problems with people and wildlife we start with aversive conditioning because that is one way to sort of try to protect these animals from getting killed but you can just see some of these I mean $210,000 for a coyote management program this is a June, this is one from June more recently, mother 4 year old son attacked by coyote in park coyote warning in Kirtland after women in German Shepherd are attacked coyotes are considered a nuisance animal in Ohio, that's what we want to avoid we don't want people to think of these animals as nuisances or vermin we want people to respect them we want people to care about them because if you don't care about them you're not going to do anything to protect the habitat keep an eye on pets, coyotes are fast and they can snatch an animal and be gone with it in a blink of an eye we have real problems here in Pennsylvania with coyotes being predators on deer family pets and other types of livestock our bottom line is, this is a warning from some Alaska airport I think our bottom line is that the public does not value or conserve pests and there's not a lot of studies about this there's probably some because we do know that people, coyotes are a very polarizing animal and people tend to either love it or hate it but what we have found is when you have a bear on your back porch, you love bears but you have a bear on your back porch you want them out of there but when you have a beaver flooding your driveway or your trees you want them out of there so our job is to try to make sure folks could you just please keep your talking down it may not sound loud to you but it's pretty hard for more members to hear during the presentation thank you you can speak up I'm almost done also some of people have brought this up coyotes are very resilient you can harvest a high high number of these animals and it will actually simulate increased reproduction sometimes there have been many regional control efforts and they really haven't worked in most cases I'd say that they can if you could keep it up take a huge number of the population out and keep it up for many years but in most cases it's way expensive and just not productive and I will see that our season is not an attempt to eradicate coyotes that's not what we're trying to do we respect and appreciate the role that they play the season is an opportunity for people to utilize an animal or hunt an animal and connect in whatever way they want and then this is just another 16 western states we know this they killed more than 97 coyotes and had a lot of money for a lot of money with no real success so it's not something that Vermont has ever supported but we're not really following in the system there's at least 39 states with no open season with no closed season and 6 additional ones where the season is only open or closed on some state land or certain wildlife management units so there's essentially almost 45 states out of the 50 that have an open season right now and in fact there's 3 or 4 more that have incentive programs for killing coyotes which I don't think our department has ever supported or would support so we are pretty much in line with many of the other states around the country so what is our goal and how do we see the management of coyotes we first and foremost want to ensure long term sustainability of this population because they are here to stay they play a role yes they have sort of they don't exactly play the role of wolves but they do play an important role that rules vacated probably even as importantly is that we work really hard to maintain habitat for many species through acquisition of land through the private lands work that many of us do with private landowners and through our regulatory process protecting deer water in areas through Act 250 that is where we put our effort and that's that because that's really one of the major threats to many of these species we want to maintain public support for all these animals because if you don't have it like I said you're not going to get support for anything else and provide opportunities for anybody who's interested to enjoy the animals the way they want to so in summary we think predators are important for the landscape we have no interest in eradicating predators we don't find them undesirable we think they contribute to healthy game population and so the question is how do you build bridges around a topic like this one and I have to end by just saying that I think besides the threats there are there are many threats facing our wildlife populations you know we've got loss of habitat we've got habitat fragmentation we've got climate change we've got invasive species these are coming down the pipe and we need to focus collectively as a group on these threats and when we focus on issues that have no real consequence to a population it takes the focus away from some of these other issues and more critically it creates polarization amongst groups of people that all should be working together towards the same goal and I really worry that this type of process is creating polarization that is not going to be repairable and we are not going to be able to move forward on the issues and the topics that really matter to most of us in this room and I in a quandary is it how to how to deal with it so anyway and this isn't the only issue we have every every few months now we have another topic that is creating polarization and flash of values and so I wish you all the best of the world thank you very much thank you perfect for the reason you just saw it doesn't support a change and will guide your recommendations and happy to discuss that more perfect that would be our position to not support a change thank you both word means good take the department's recommendation I do I talked to you earlier as far as Essex County goes we've had our low gear numbers and we've tried to get the gear numbers up in my county kind of just to not grow and in response to our goals and expectations where we actually lowered them to meet where they're at and that ground used to be some really good deer hunting back in the day and it's some of the paper mill companies so there's a lot of turnover some of the research out there is that when deer populations hit down too low, per square mile that predation has an issue that has an effect on that growth and we are at as far as our bear populations essentially high from where our goals are whether or not predation is an issue as far as growth in Essex County and you have plenty of evidence that are your winner here there's more of an observation on this whole process especially with Kim talking about how can the department help to change public perception about a species like coyotes that kind of got a bad name and when I look at what Kim is talking about tonight it seems like it's a social issue it's not a wildlife management issue and it's too bad that we can't legislate ethical hunting behavior because when I look at an open season when people hunt coyotes it's mostly in the wintertime and at least in my experience when I've heard from constituents or their problems it seems to be mostly in the winter if there were close season and it were around when when they were rearing pups that would not be when most people hunt and I also so I feel like bad hunter behavior is responsible for a lot of the polarizing emotions that we have and I don't know how too bad we couldn't legislate the use of social media but we can't but I think everyone needs to think about it's so easy to post something or do something and not realize what the ramifications are in this day and age and I would agree with you Kim we have all of us in this room care about wildlife but it's the social issues around it that are polarizing us and I applaud both petitioners for taking a stand and wanting to either make a change or keep things the way they are but I see social issues as the real problem here and that's just my two cents. I'll turn that over to Kim who's been doing this for a long time we have spent some time and some energy and some effort educating people about coyotes the fact of the matter is we have one and a half biologists working on 16 or 17 species and time doing that is time they're not working on Lynx, Bobcat, River Otter and Martin it's a balancing act to figure out how much time we want to devote to which of the species in that portfolio because we're not getting more biology time but I'll turn it over to Kim anything that we have done I hear you I think that is part of the issue and I think we through Hunter Ed we understand that this is a problem and through Hunter Ed it's harder to step up when it comes to having these kinds of discussions I think but I myself try to get out to Bruce and talk about the role coyotes play, the value they have I think when Nick gives a deer talk he probably he certainly doesn't bash the animal and if he gets questions he probably says the same thing I do we talk about are we in agreement here and we are but as the commissioner suggests how you magnify that is really the question and actual media although I don't like social media I don't use social media myself I don't know that it's appropriate to try to do it through social media because I just think that there's too much misinformation already on social media so do you do it the old fashion way by just going out and giving talks I mean you know I will keep trying to do that but if you have some suggestions I'm really open to hearing what you might have to offer and I'm not I certainly wasn't criticizing the department in any way because I know it was more a con if I was a landowner and someone came through my yard and killed an animal in my yard and I'm upset and if the public perception is that these animals don't matter that's not a good thing and I don't know what the solution is but we live in a changing world and we have all got to figure out how to move forward together that's how you can work the hunting community has a whole majority of us are ethical honest hunters and would not stand for any type of behavior like what we heard about here tonight that's not who we are in the hunting community unfortunately people like that give us a bad hunting season for coyote I think it will get understaffed underfunded department first of all we'd have to sell hunting licenses I mean you're going to have to have more enforcement I think it will create a legislative lawmaking issue at this time I personally was one of the biggest reasons right there and I don't think the hunting season anything to basically change the population of coyote I just have to say just the ethics of it that type of behavior that we heard about here tonight nobody can notice or at least very few of us could know and we don't like to hear about it unfortunately give us a bad we deny the petition on the table is there a second? it's a discussion teaching our licensing and responsible for the unethical people I would say believe that by creating a statute or a law you can control anybody I don't believe that there's anything that we can do that is going to eliminate the possibility of people behaving in an atrocious manner there's lots of laws out there that are millions of people out there these things happen it's against the law to walk into a school and shoot a whole bunch of people it's against the law to drive the wrong way in the highway and kill a bunch of young people it's not just coyote hunters I've seen slaughter hunters I've been hunting all my life in many different states I've run into a few of them by and large to agree with Brian those instances are very, very few but an enormous emotional impact upon people and I believe to agree of course with Johanna as well it is a social issue but I think that the social issue is not as it's been stated here I think that the social issue is that do we start creating legislation or statutes that are going to change something that seems to be working statistically and biologically working just fine are we going to do that to satisfy a group of people who merely have an ideological difference on it and I think that's a really bad precedent to set or to set because we need to make all of our decisions based on science and if we say oh well science says it can go either way does that mean we should make everybody in the state all of a sudden change the way they do things because of some people who have moral issues that are not scientific issues so I guess it should be about the science I'm rebuttal to that we pass rules laws to control people's behavior to traffic and it's not necessarily all based on science we've got it to all of our rules and regulations it's based on what you can use for a right for an implement to shoot something we can control that and we do some of that for those types of people out there that will try to bend the rules like they're bending the rules now that we are in control on coyotes they're abusing them because of our openness the science supports that abuse I think we have a responsibility to control because we do it with other traffic we do have laws against using lights we do have laws against high capacity magazines for money coyotes are not completely carte blanche they still we're rebutting the camera rebuttal we do have basic safety laws that are not affecting coyote you have to be 25 feet out off of the travel portion or road or really scenario there's certain weapons that are allowed to be used in taking of any animals there are certain methods of taking that are not acceptable I think there's already a bunch of statutes that say how you're supposed to do things one of which is I saw you be affected today when somebody was talking about people trespassing into their yard and killing a coyote we have laws against trespassing on posted lands legally posted land that statute already exists so why would we go through the whole rigmarole of trying to further regulate any of our outdoor participations by hunters I think we already got that covered unless you have some recommendation was coyote specific well I think the recommendation by the petition has been made for the period of time from October through March which is turning there and that's when the pellets are worth the most but they're not worth anything they're only understanding otherwise people don't normally hunt those in the summer that was stated today as well so by just the token of when they become alone it takes some control but right now you don't I can't say something I mean I will say something you will say something the petition was very well prepared and I think it took a lot of time and I really hope that you got a really awesome grade on that we were both it was really good we should be proud of yourself for putting that together but with that said I'm really not so sure that this is really quite the time to establish a structured season for our coyotes I mean it's really clear of their screen and all data that the species is definitely not in peril I don't really see that the structure current structure is severely affecting the species and I really do think that it's a social perception issue you know it stems from social media but that's just a product of the evolution of our society so it's so important we're going to have to kind of adapt to that evolution of our society and I'm not quite sure what that step is right now I know before I would even entertain changing a season I would definitely like to know as a first step of how many people are hunting coyotes in this state that information that we have so I mean I think there's a lot of work that could be done before considering closing a season could someone from law enforcement here tonight just put in their two cents about what a closed season would entail for them sure major George Kremner I'm sorry the question is what would a closed coyote season mean for law enforcement in the wardens I mean extra work as far as handling complaints and stuff like that they can delve into it deeper but I don't think it would be no I think that's fine I mean you know it's all a question of priorities what do we want to prioritize biological time in the warden time and that's something that the department ultimately decides but the large part of it is based on what regulations and rules are in place so we don't have wardens sitting around twiddling their thumbs not doing anything if you don't have biologists sitting around twiddling their thumbs that choice is a choice that we make all the time where we put prioritization of work a few years ago we passed a law in the legislature establishing a protection for threatened and endangered species habitat in the state a commitment by us that that work should take precedent over other work by biologists who work on threatened and endangered species same thing um so I've done a lot of reading a lot of research prior to this just to kind of give as much information as I could and there are a lot of states there are a number of states that are doing a lot of research on coyotes a lot more people a lot more funding um and some of these states the driver was um issues with predation and how to address the issues called predation and one common denominator they all seem to have is that there's no way you're going to be able to eradicate coyotes not that they're advocating for it anyway but that's just the common thing but the big thing was is that if you were trying to protect any species as a result of predation the biggest timeframes are is to address the predators themselves just in timing with the fawning and or um livestock birthing and that's just something to keep in mind so if there was a proposal of um some type of close season you know this proposal was specifically in the march uh but most of the fawning and livestock are in this state occurring the next three months thereafter um and I think if we were at a point of we had some concerns I think it's imperative that we at least protect those three months is because they do correspond with fawning and livestock so I don't know that there's a whole lot much going on between July, August, September but um but I just think it's imperative whatever you can these are different states this is everything from Wyoming Montana to the deep south to even Maine right now is the north was in Maine they're they're trying to address this as an issue as well and it's their population has pitted down and they're believing that it is a result of predation as well those are the three months that are key um the rest of the year they all did the same thing you could do a lot of hunting in the winter pellets are worth more uh but as a result of transient coyotes they quickly backfill that population base and they could do it within three weeks so it's very fast you got a short window to try to if you're gonna have issues with um predation and not just coyotes it could be anything but those are the windows you got to try to protect your out game the argument can be made either way is that is it successful um someday some states have got some research to show that uh they've been able to help um some of these game mills fell back when they were struggling so the board is do we want either one of these petitions to move forward get our mindset around move that petition forward that's something that's going to come to us and in the open meetings hopefully I just need to speak to that so we we don't have a good mechanism for getting an accurate count without uh without tags without uh separate license we really don't have the ability to give you an accurate assessment of what any pressure is uh at this point it would take I would expect quite a bit of effort and quite a number but quite a length of time to work. Personally it might feel like there's a very little coyote hunt going on to my August after dark and try to kill a coyote because I know the game Black Lives Matter doesn't know. I'd like to ask Lewis a question what would it take to sell an annual coyote tag so that we could get an idea of numbers and it would take what two years to get it instituted? Yeah um I would expect I don't know if we would need legislative changes in order to do that would we need legislative changes for the board to do that Catherine? Yes. We need a legislative change in order to institute a tag. To get a tag. That's what I wanted. That's what I wanted. And what we know from tags that don't cost anything is you don't get accurate numbers because everybody signs up. I spent a lot of time on it. It's an interesting discussion to have and to think about I personally don't hunt coyotes specifically I have shot a few but probably less than five in my entire life so I don't specifically hunt them and I think about most of the people I know are the exact same way I don't know people that go out specifically to target them I just don't know I'm not saying there are obviously there are and I don't like hearing stories about bad behavior that would upset me that would upset my friends and family things like that happen to them that would totally upset me and it should but I do not believe that creating a season would change that behavior most of the stories I hear about that bad behavior occur right now during the season that they want to be created so that wouldn't change in addition I think again I don't know many coyote hunters I've seen a few but very very few people are doing it in the summertime and if it is it's my understanding that it's typically done in a defensive property situation so creating a close season isn't going to change the amount of coyotes harvest in my opinion you're still going to have the ability to defend the property and so I just don't see it with the departments the commissioners statement that the resources are thin that coyote population is doing just fine the way that it is I personally would like to see the bridges built as Kim said in other areas I just don't see this changing anything creating a season changing anything except creating more work if we legislate that behavior that's before it I don't appreciate I don't hate the coyote either I think I've grown over the years to be more fascinated with the coyote I was younger my dog was attacked 10 feet off our porch I don't despise the coyote for being a coyote but he was a wonderful dog 39 inches tipped to tail and 8 inches high he didn't die if I were to attack my dog an old age would find you got him I don't hate the coyote for being a coyote I just I don't like bad behavior but I don't think creating a season is going to do anything to change unfortunately that's my view you have emotion on the table my understanding was to deny the petitions and take no action that is correct that was the commissioner I suggested is there any more discussion we're going to start with Mr. Colson so a yes vote would be to deny the petitions and take no action changing the current coyote scene or structure yes yes no I'm going to say no yes yes yes no yes passes 8 4