Thursday, April 2, 2009

Coyotes in the Hood

Here's a nice article reminding us that we aren't outside of nature, we are in nature, and sometimes nature decides to get into what we consider our world:

A coyote ambling into a Chicago sandwich shop or taking up residence in New York's Central Park understandably creates a stir. But even here on the high plains of Colorado, where the animals are part of the landscape and figure prominently in Western lore, people are being taken aback by rising coyote encounters.
Thanks to suburban sprawl and a growth in numbers of both people and animals, a rash of coyote encounters has alarmed residents.

Wildlife officials are working to educate the public: Coyotes have always been here, they've adapted to urban landscapes and they prefer to avoid humans.

"Even though they live in urban areas and figure out how people work ... it doesn't mean they're necessarily becoming more aggressive toward us," Gehrt said.

They also haven't changed their diet. Gehrt expected to find urban coyotes eating a lot of garbage and pets. But their scat shows rodents are still the meal of choice, followed by deer, rabbits and birds.

Coyotes view pets such as cats and dogs as competitors, not food, Gehrt said. Most coyotes are submissive toward dogs, though some will stand their ground — especially during breeding season, when they may see dogs as rivals for mates. Mating season peaked in February, when some of the Denver-area incidents occurred.


I've personally had experiences with the effects of coyotes living on a nearby golf course. The city had them caught or killed due to some disappearing pets and the usual alarmist "they're gonna eat our kids" rhetoric. Subsequently, we were overrun by rabbits, who apparently bred like crazy in the absence of their primary predators, and proceeded to completely destroy all the neighborhood gardens. It didn't take long however for that (now) prime predator real estate to attract new tenants, and soon we had a healthy group of coyotes living on the golf course and eating rabbits. Apparently we weren't the only people to experience the futility of getting rid of coyotes.

Reducing the number of coyotes doesn't work, Rosmarino said, because the animals breed more and have bigger litters when their population declines. The U.S. Agriculture Department's Wildlife Services killed more than 90,000 in 2007 to stem livestock attacks.

8 comments:

alex said...

I hope you'll find this comment of mine more thoughtful than my previous ones. There might not be a right or wrong answer:

If the dam of a beaver is part of nature, and we humans aren't outside of nature, then would that make a man-made dam also part of nature?

ScienceAvenger said...

Alex, I think that's a fabulous question and it's an issue I wrestle with frequently. Too many people toss around terms like "natural" and "designed" without really being clear about what they mean. One of the reasons I find arguments for Intelligent Design so unpersuasive is that they inexorably would lead to categorizing a beaver dam, or worse, spider webs and beehives, with snowflakes as "undesigned" and not with Hondas, lawnmower engines and bacterial flagellum, which are supposedly "designed".

However, I've never seen an argument for design that applied to a flagellum that didn't apply to a spider web. One could certainly argue that a spider web or beaver dam isn't really "natural" as a flagellum or Honda isn't but that doesn't really help matters. In the end they either have to endow spiders with souls, or admit that order most certainly can arise from the disorder of a spider's brain.

So yeah, back to your original question, if "nature" is defined so broadly as to include us, then anything we created would be "natural" as well. There's merit to this position obviously, since we are biological beings. A lot of the rules that apply to the rest of them are going to apply to us too. We all bleed and get diseases, so a lot of what makes animals sick is going to be bad for us as well. However, we are also able to do some things, if not uniquely, certainly orders of magnitude greater than any other species can. Ergo it also makes sense that sometimes the rules would be different for us. The recognition of legal rights to please the rightwingers, and the concern over global warming for the lefties, are examples of this.

The arguments we should be having are over which situation deserves which treatment, because it isn't always clear. We don't need to spend nearly as much time as we do arguing about whether either situation can exist, as many seem determined to.

ScienceAvenger said...

BTW Alex, if you don't mind my asking, how old are you? I'm 44 going on 28.

alex said...

I'm a little younger.
With /both/ numbers.

If you liked my question, then you might like to share an article from Nature magazine:

"Your Editorial ‘Handle with care’ (Nature 455, 263–264 2008)2 notes that many people define ‘nature’ as a place without people, and that this would suggest that nature is best protected by keeping humans far away. You question the value of this negative definition, arguing that “if nature is defined as a landscape uninfluenced by humankind, then there is no nature on the planet at all”.
This may be true. However, if we define nature as including humankind, the concept becomes so all-encompassing as to be practically useless."1 ...
"In this case, an atom bomb becomes as ‘natural’ as an anthill.
A dilemma therefore arises. If nature is somewhere that humans are not, we lose sight of the fact that we are just another species intimately intertwined in the complex web of biological systems on this planet. However, if we place ourselves within a definition of nature, the definition then becomes essentially meaningless by extending to everything on Earth."
Her letter ended with: “Is there a better definition of nature?”
------------------------------------------------
1. Fern Wickson, “What is nature, if it’s more than just a place without people?”, Nature 456, 29 (6 November 2008) | doi:10.1038/456029b.
2. Editorial, “Handle with care,” Nature 455, 263-264 (18 September 2008) | doi:10.1038/455263b.

alex said...

Hi S.A.,

If this is too long to post, that's OK. If you want to post part of it, that would be okay with me, too.

> Alex, I think that's a fabulous question and it's an issue I wrestle with frequently. Too many people toss around terms like "natural" and "designed" without really being clear about what they mean.

I know what you mean. LiveScience, who obviously takes a case against design, uses the term all the time. (Example from today: http://www.livescience.com/culture/090403-hn-cooperation.html -- "TITLE: Single Parents: Not What Nature Intended. EXCERPT: humans were simply not designed to bring up children all on their own.") Uh, does that mean they were designed for something else?! And does Nature "intend" anything?

> One of the reasons I find arguments for Intelligent Design so unpersuasive is that they inexorably would lead to categorizing a beaver dam, or worse, spider webs and beehives, with snowflakes as "undesigned" and not with Hondas, lawnmower engines and bacterial flagellum, which are supposedly "designed".

I don't think that's accurate. I think that ID would say that both the spider web was designed (by the spider) just as they'd say the spider was designed. Then they might say it takes intelligence (not necessarily a soul as you mention later) to design something as complex as a web or a spider.

> However, I've never seen an argument for design that applied to a flagellum that didn't apply to a spider web. One could certainly argue that a spider web or beaver dam isn't really "natural" as a flagellum or Honda isn't but that doesn't really help matters. In the end they either have to endow spiders with souls, or admit that order most certainly can arise from the disorder of a spider's brain.

Am I really stuck with only two choices? I think not. Who says that a spider's brain is disorderly? Surely not the ID folks who say it's designed.


> So yeah, back to your original question, if "nature" is defined so broadly as to include us, then anything we created would be "natural" as well. There's merit to this position obviously, since we are biological beings. A lot of the rules that apply to the rest of them are going to apply to us too. We all bleed and get diseases, so a lot of what makes animals sick is going to be bad for us as well. However, we are also able to do some things, if not uniquely, certainly orders of magnitude greater than any other species can. Ergo it also makes sense that sometimes the rules would be different for us. The recognition of legal rights to please the rightwingers, and the concern over global warming for the lefties, are examples of this.

Funny, I would've thought that more /left/wingers would be pleased by the recognition of legal rights.

ScienceAvenger said...

Alex said: "I don't think that's accurate. I think that ID would say that both the spider web was designed (by the spider) just as they'd say the spider was designed. Then they might say it takes intelligence (not necessarily a soul as you mention later) to design something as complex as a web or a spider."

But that's not what they say. They can't, because their whole argument is that design => intelligence => god. I know for PR purposes they try to dress it up differently, but I'm interested in what they actually do, not what they say they are doing. If they admit to a designing intelligence that doesn't require a soul or a human-like intelligence, then their whole argument falls apart. We could claim some spider made the flagellum then. They have to (and do, I've challenged them on this) rationalize that spider webs and beaver dams are not sufficiently complex to invoke the design argument.

alex said...

Huge difference.
We can SEE that spiders make webs and beavers make DAMS so it is reasonable to posit that they did so in the past. We can't SEE that molecules evolved into man.

I don't know who the "they" are in "They have to," but I suspect it was a non-leader in ID, because you prefer to challenge non-leaders.

ScienceAvenger said...

Non sequitor. We are not discussing whether or not molecules evolved into man, nor whether spiders and beavers did what they do in the past. We are discussing whether spider webs and beaver dams are sufficiently complex to warrant counting beavers and spiders as "designers" in the context of ID.

I say they are, but the IDers deny this because if they allow for the possibility of a subhuman designer, then their argument for the necessity of Designer(tm) falls apart. They'd have no retort to "well, maybe a spider did it". Perhaps you should go actually read the arguments IDers make, rather than speculating as to what they might be.

As for your comment about me challenging nonleaders, it is completely baseless, as this entire blog testifies. I've criticized Dembski, Behe, and the writers at the DI on numerous occasions. I hope you know who they are. That comment is also completely out of bounds, and as a result your comments will now be deleted without perusal for one week. Go find somewhere else to play until next Sunday, and when you return, keep your comments substantive, supported by something other than your imagination, and on topic.