Columnist against culling cute coyotes

This New York Times op-ed is an interesting yet gag inducing piece of puerile writing. The high-brow snobbery is about what you’d expect. The writer should’ve at least talked to a sheep rancher regarding the value of coyotes but he probably figured they are too backwards to have cell phones or email.

We know coyotes are intelligent, social creatures. They do not enjoy death. No thoughtful human being, considerate of other life, should sacrifice for pleasure or a bet an animal like the one Adolph Murie observed in Yellowstone in the 1930s. Doing so is immoral — not in a religious sense, but in reference to morality’s origins, the evolution of a sense of fairness among members of a social species, which early on came to include a human recognition that other creatures enjoy being alive and that depriving them of life is a very serious matter.

Think this writer is as pro-life for babies too?

Oh, and he left out the whole: "Coyote tapeworm that infects, dogs, humans spreading to cities" thing too.

And that thing about coyotes carrying bubonic plague that is wiping out cute prairie dogs which are necessary for the even cuter black-footed-ferrets to survive ... never mind.

Coyotes are cute and cuddly and play with sprigs of grass, ya'll. That's all you need to know, according the NYT.