A blanket of snow covered the ground as a group of hunters, bundled up from the cold, gathered around a scale in a Northern Nevada parking lot.

One by one, dozens of freshly killed coyotes were weighed, their blood streaking the snow. After being weighed, their bodies were tossed into the back of a pickup truck.

The January 2023 event was a coyote calling contest, one of more than a dozen held throughout the state each year. The competitions reward participants with prizes — sometimes thousands of dollars — for reaching certain targets such as killing the most coyotes, or snagging the largest.

At least 150,000 coyotes are thought to live in Nevada. They live in the state’s most remote areas, preying on rodents and roadkill. But they are highly adaptable and have a high tolerance for humans, and also call agricultural and suburban areas home. In those more urbanized areas, they prey on livestock and household pets.

Viewed by many to be pests, coyotes are listed as an “ unprotected ” species in Nevada. Coyotes can be hunted year-round without a license, and there is no limit on how many can be killed.

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This lack of protection makes it easier for ranchers to protect their livestock — thousands of cattle are killed nationwide each year by coyotes — but also renders the canines defenseless against coyote calling contests.

The events can be a test of skill to lure the canines in, proponents say, with hunters imitating their howls or the sounds of wounded prey, such as rabbits.

Proponents describe them as family-friendly events with deep roots in rural areas that help control coyote populations and provide economic stimulus.

“I have never joined any kind of a wildlife contest,” Larry Johnson, president of the Coalition for Nevada’s Wildlife, a nonprofit group that describes itself as “the issue, policy, and lobbying arm of Nevada’s sportsmen and women,” told The Nevada Independent. “At the same time, I don’t look down my nose or deny the people who do. There are entire families that look forward to these contests.

But opponents to the contests take a different view.

“There’s a fundamental disagreement on what these are,” said Rebecca Goff, Nevada state director for the Humane Society of the United States.

In 2023, an undercover Humane Society investigator attended coyote calling contests in Nevada. Rather than a test of skill, the investigator observed participants with mechanical devices to assist in the calling and assault rifles fitted with night vision and thermal imaging scopes.

Some participants flaunt the large number of dead coyotes on social media — posts that have a majority of Nevadans turned against the concept and spurred multiple as-yet unsuccessful efforts to ban them statewide.

“This is the indiscriminate killing of unprotected fur bearing species … It encourages killing large swaths of animals for cash and prizes,” Goff said. “It just sounds prettier when they frame it the other way.”

A push by some animal activist groups such as the Humane Society has led to several states banning the competitions, but in Nevada, whether or not the competitions should continue has been a source of debate throughout the last decade.

The issue has come before the Nevada Wildlife Commission, a nine-member, governor-appointed board that directs the Nevada Department of Wildlife’s management policies, multiple times.

State lawmakers have also brought forward bills to end the competitions, although those bills have gone nowhere.

Now, the Nevada Wildlife Commission has tasked a subcommittee — which met for the first time during the last week of September — with studying the issue of coyote calling contests. Its goal is to make a recommendation to the full commission in November.

“I think sportsmen are very aware if they don’t do something, they’ll be dealing with it at the Legislature again,” Commissioner David McNinch, who is chairing the subcommittee, told The Nevada Independent.

Coyotes in Nevada

The Nevada Department of Wildlife manages nearly 900 species in the state. Of those, about 70 are available for sportsmen to pursue — including coyotes.

There are anywhere between 150,000 and 175,000 coyotes in Nevada, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.

“Everybody talks about killing all these coyotes — you kill 1 percent of what’s out there, not even 1 percent,” Justin Pace Saxton said at a September meeting in Elko to discuss the contests.

That’s because coyote populations in Nevada are “tremendous,” Johnson said. “Coyotes and cockroaches will survive mankind.”

Coyote calling competitions are a decades-old answer to the coyote overpopulation problem, according to proponents of the contests. Often held in rural communities, proponents say the events attract out-of-area visitors, who spend money in the small towns, and protect local livestock.

In 2015, almost 3.9 million cattle and calves were lost nationwide due to various causes, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. While predation caused only a small fraction of those deaths — just 2.4 percent — coyotes were the leading cause, resulting in approximately 17,000 cattle deaths nationwide that year and accounting for around 127,000 calf losses.

Proponents of the competitions worry that restrictions on coyote competitions could negatively affect livestock even more. But restrictions on or eliminating coyote competitions would not “prevent a rancher from killing every coyote that comes on his property,” McNinch said.

Coyotes are problems in urban areas as well.

Early on a Monday morning in September, Nevada Department of Wildlife game wardens were called to the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center. A worker at one of the center’s many tech hubs had been removing tools from his vehicle when he felt something bite his left leg. Turning, he saw a coyote.

It wasn’t the only incident involving a coyote that morning at the site — a second worker was also bitten, although that bite did not penetrate the worker’s skin.

Three coyotes — habituated to humans because several workers were allegedly feeding them — were euthanized at the site that day.

Later that same day, members of citizen advisory boards to manage wildlife — groups that advise the Nevada Wildlife Commission — met across the state, discussing the effects of coyotes on livestock and other topics such as the state’s declining mule deer population.

“The more we can do to take the predator off the land, the more wildlife we’re gonna save,” Henry Krenka, who operates a guide service, said at the citizen advisory board meeting in Elko. “And that’s what we’re here for is wildlife.”

But at a 2021 wildlife commission meeting, former Nevada Department of Wildlife Director Tony Wasley said it’s a myth that the contests make a dent in controlling coyote populations. The contests also do not protect or preserve mule deer or other large game populations — species that have seen their numbers decline in portions of the state during the past couple of years due to heavy snowfall and harsh winters.

The contests are, however, “ethically upsetting … for most members of society,” he said.

A binary issue

During the last decade, the state’s wildlife commission — composed of five sportsmen, one conservationist, one farmer, one rancher and one member of the public — has voted three times not to outlaw coyote calling competitions.

Following the most recent vote by the commission in 2021, the Clark County Commission and Reno City Council passed resolutions supporting banning the competitions; multiple rural county commissions responded by passing resolutions supporting their continuation.

The issue has also come before state lawmakers.

In 2019, a bill was brought forth that would have outlawed the contests, provided a penalty for participating in them and required anyone who injured a coyote during a competition to transport the animal to a veterinarian. The bill never received a hearing.

Last year, Assemblyman Howard Watts (D-Las Vegas) and Sen. Melanie Scheible (D-Las Vegas) proposed another bill, led by the Humane Society, again targeting coyote calling competitions.

Last year’s bill had a narrower focus — prohibit wildlife killing contests while ensuring landowners could still protect their livestock or property from predators such as coyotes — but the bill never moved out of the Assembly Committee on Natural Resources.

In March of this year, the Humane Society went back to the state wildlife commission for a decision, but at the suggestion of McNinch, withdrew its petition.

“I just didn’t see the votes there to get it approved,” he said.

But with the next legislative session approaching, pressure from animal advocacy groups and residents are mounting.

The Humane Society of the United States currently has no plans to bring legislation to the 2025 session, Goff said, but that could change depending on how discussions in Nevada play out during the next several months.

“It’s probably a binary issue — they either exist or they don’t,” McNinch said. “I’ve been encouraging people to look for compromise, but I don’t know what that would be.”

What the Humane Society of the United States is proposing is a compromise, Goff said — it’s not pushing for the end of coyote killing in the state.

“It’s only asking for the end of killing animals for cash and prizes. It will still allow people to protect their property and protect their livestock,” Goff said.

The Coalition for Nevada’s Wildlife has countered with a compromise suggestion of its own — rather than outlaw the competitions, the commission could draft regulations outlining parameters for the competitions such as requiring coyote calling participants to have a hunting or trapping license and establishing a defined season for the competitions. State of Nevada game wardens would be charged with enforcing any regulations.

Proponents of the contests agreed some regulations could work.

At the Elko citizen advisory board meeting, contest proponents spoke in favor of requiring hunting licenses for participants, as well as creating a season and bag limit (a limit on how many coyotes could be harvested by a person in one day.)

Wyatt Mesna, a member of the Elko citizen advisory board, said a bag limit could help with public perception of the contests.

“I feel like most of the bad hoopla comes from the unfortunate folks that do all the social media stuff and see piles of dogs,” he said. “If you had something like a bag limit … you aren’t seeing this mountain of animals that naysayers are glomming onto so hard.”

In Utah, another state with plentiful coyotes, a bounty is offered for the canine’s pelts.

Utah’s Division of Wildlife Resources provides financial incentives, paying as much as $50 for each properly documented coyote killed in Utah.

In 2023, 388 participants turned in 3,798 coyotes, earning nearly $190,000. Just over half the participants submitted more than five coyotes; less than 3 percent turned in more than 50 carcasses.

But regulations such as those would require changing the Nevada Administrative Code to reclassify coyotes as a fur bearing mammal, similar to foxes, from their currently unprotected status.

Former Republican state Sen. Warren Hardy, now a lobbyist for the Humane Society, said formally recognizing the contests in state code “is going to make it worse.”

“I would rather have the status quo than the compromise that will legitimize the contests,” he said during the September subcommittee meeting to discuss the contests.

And regulating or eliminating calling contests could be the start of a slippery slope, some proponents worry.

Jim Cooney, chair of Elko County’s wildlife citizen advisory board, worried the regulations and restrictions “could be farther reaching than just coyote calling contests,” a sentiment echoed in the county’s 2021 resolution supporting the competitions.

“Eliminating ‘killing contests’ would be the camel’s nose under the tent that could eventually threaten such wholesome family events like fishing derbies,” the resolution said.

Rurals versus urban views

Thus far, eight states — Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, Colorado, New York, Massachusetts and Maryland — have banned fur bearing and small-game killing contests. Two additional states — New Mexico and Vermont — have banned coyote killing contests.

A poll commissioned earlier this year by the Humane Society and conducted by the bipartisan Remington Research Group measuring public sentiment found that nearly three-quarters of 1,000 people surveyed across Nevada’s four congressional districts support banning wildlife killing contests in the state. That support extended across political parties.

At the Nevada Wildlife Commission’s subcommittee meeting Sept. 26 in Las Vegas, members of the public weighed in on the issue for nearly two hours. The overwhelming majority of those speaking were against the contests.

Wasley, the former NDOW director, made a similar statement to wildlife commissioners in 2021.

With less than 3 percent of Nevadans holding hunting tags, sportsmen are already in the minority, he said.

“Hunters need to be conscious of the public image we project and the way in which the public perceives us,” Wasley said. “If it’s not good for the image, it’s not good for the future.”

And negative public perception or sportsmen and their activities could lead to an erosion of support for wildlife conservation, McNinch told The Nevada Independent.

“It’s issues like this that erode that support,” McNinch said. “We have to adapt, just like sportsmen have done for 150 years … to changing social norms.”

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This story was originally published by The Nevada Independent and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.