Dan Flores

"Optimal Foraging Strategy models... have asserted that what appears to be "conservation" among hunting peoples was (and is) actually a by-product of attempting to maximize hunting efficiency and use of time. Thus hunter-gatherers ignored depleted habitats and placed taboos on certain species not to achieve conservation but in search of maximum yield for minimum effort. As wildlife populations shrank, this hypothesis argues, hunters actually hunted more, and they range farther afield."

"I actually tried to find some other analogy around the world in modern history that provided an example of any country that had killed this many animals in a short period of time of only a hundred years, and came to the conclusion that in American history between 1800 and about 1920 we engaged in the largest destruction of animal life discoverable anywhere in world history. We take out 30 million , 15 million s, probably between a half-million and a million gray wolves, a hundred thousand grizzly bears once ranged across the west. They were down to fewer than 500 by the end of the 19th century. I mean, and this story happens over and over again with every animal you can think of. We drove grizzlies into the mountains, drove off the plains into the mountains, wiped out all the bighorn sheep that were in the bad lands and canyons of the great plains, all gone by 1906. And so its this slaughterhouse that takes place. And it takes place, interestingly enough, at the same time that the conservation movement is creating these big game parks in Africa, in Kenya, in what becomes Tanzania, in South Africa. And yet, on our own great plains we dont do it... because the great plains becomes the part of the west that we privatize with homesteads and with ranches, and everyone who settles on the great plains basically regards all these animals as an annoyance that we need to get rid of..."

"The humanities have usually left evolutionary nature to the biologists. But some of the other questions here are... posed by the multidisciplinary field known as ."

"Southwestern Hispanos... have long said that the only thing smarter than a coyote is God."

"But the conventional narrative is lumpy, a story that glosses what passes for quiescence to focus on "events": the appearance of Lewis and Clark and [Father Jean Pierre] DeSmut, the removal of the native Salish people, the arrival of the railroads, irrigation and logging and town-building, booms in sheep, busts in apples. Settlement, local politics, participation in the nations wars, schemes to make money. And now the resources are tourism and real estate based on scenery and an amenity lifestyle in a mountain paradise. These seem to be what we think of as history."

"In one of the myriad ways humans and coyotes eerily mimic each one another, like us coyotes are cosmopolitan species, able to live in a remarkable range of habitats."

"Chaco unquestionably had coyotes in town; coyote bones are common in the archeological sites of the inner city."

"Like Wilson and a slew of other authors working on what was once called "sociobiology" but is now usually called "evolutionary behavior" or "evolutionary psychology," I am convinced that there is a biological and universal human nature, and that it appears manifest in the human record.The question is, how might that insight... be folded into the narratives that give our immediate history meaning and power?"

"I write this sitting in my hand-built adobe-style home looking out on the ... Its a place where the "Old" West and the "New" confront one another daily in often bazarre ways. ...Im sort of a New Westerner myself. Because of relatively recent inventions like solar panels, satellites, cell phones, composting toilets, and four-wheel drive vehicles, Im able to live where no one has since the Salish had the valley. ...perhaps it all just seems new because the prism through which were accustomed to view the history of the region has only recently been polished sufficiently to gain the deep view."

"[T]he human past... belongs not only to (say) the Blackfeet or the Mormons, but to all of us. ...[W]e humans cannot be considered as separate from the earth of our evolution. We, too, are "natural.""

"The ancestral canids that would eventually produce coyotes sprang from North American stock, a line of animals that evolved in the American Southwest. That ancient coyote line spawned animals that migrated to Eurasia and eventually to Africa to become Old World s. In North America, archeological sites from the late Pleistocene have yielded coyote remains from as far east as Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and genetic evidence indicates that coyotes thronged eastward out of their core range in the American West in at least two swarms, roughly between three hundred and nine hundred years ago. The truth is, roaming coyotes have probably been swimming the Mississippi River to eastern America during most decades since there have been coyotes."

"Their colonization of our cities, from the small burgs... to the biggest, loudest, and most frenetic of our metropolises, has become the wildlife story of our time. It deserves some explanation."