Large Fierce Mammal

The rangy, solitary Eastern Coyote of my youth was not the animal that bears the name today. Hunted, trapped, poisoned, and otherwise hounded out of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the 1970’s, there came an interval of Human forgetting while the Nature of the Coyote and Man’s conceit forged something new.

For in time of strife, the Coyote is built to bear larger litters, so that if one would exterminate their kind, the task demands great efficiency indeed including pursuit to the bitter end, not just some ultimately meaningless line on a map. And then there is that preference of Coyote females for coupling with the largest males they can find. For a population driven northward into habitat already populated by Wolves, even the largest male coyotes will predictably face some, shall we say, stiff competition. Meanwhile, the females will bear abundant litters of an entirely new animal.

The end of the diaspora was announced by the appearance of a new player bent on repopulating ancestral homeland. Homeland festooned with a smorgasbord of prey that had thrived in the absence of a top tier predator. It was bigger, stronger, and faster than its long lost brethren. It had all the wiles of the “lonesome” Coyote of yore, but had embraced the benefits of  living in packs. It still harboured the Coyote’s disdain for Man absent the Wolf’s propensity for avoidance. In its own way, antibiotic resistant bacteria writ large, and as such, an organism unwittingly forged in a crucible of Man’s making. While no recipe was knowingly followed, one was most certainly in play as driving the Coyotes north added a wondrous new ingredient to an interesting experiment in evolution.

Everything in Nature encapsulates as part of its being certain dictates that are beyond its control. These exist first and foremost to facilitate the perpetuation of its kind in keeping with all that is desirable in progressive mutation — the kind that makes something better at what it does, and at sticking around a while longer than everybody else to do it. You see, Nature doesn’t care about individuals, nor does She feel remorse over evolutionary dead ends. In a healthy and stable ecosystem, all the necessary jobs get done, and all the participating species will survive coexisting with each other. Notice I said species, not individuals, because even the best and brightest in any group will die eventually, but more likely after the inferior specimens do.

To Nature then, and at the greatest risk of sounding political, no individual lives matter because She deals exclusively with the BIG picture. However, all deaths certainly do, for the ending of every life improves the lot, the survival, and/or the viability of another.

Think about that.