Poisoned Horses on the Horse Heaven Range: How One Sheepman Went to War With Coyotes
A Yakima County sheep raiser buys up 26 cayuses, shoots them, laces the carcasses with strychnine and arsenic, and reports that dozens of coyotes have already taken the bait.
D. G. Goodman, a prosperous sheep raiser of Yakima county, recently adopted a method of ridding his sheep ranges of coyotes. During the winter his sheep graze in the Horse Heaven country, between Prosser and Kiona, and out of about 6,000 sheep last year he lost about 100 by depredations of coyotes. During the lambing season he lost 10 big lambs one night. These were worth $2 each.
Mr. Goodman bought 26 cayuses from the city pound at Yakima and from Indians as he passed through Yakima. The horses he shot at different points on his range and poisoned the carcasses, using about a half ounce of strychnine and about an ounce of arsenic to each horse. This was done about a week ago, and reports from the neighborhood show that dozens of coyotes have already found the bait.
A number of sheep men are adopting this plan. It serves a double purpose. First, it gets rid of the coyote in the cheapest way. Second, it gets rid of a few cayuses, which are almost as big a nuisance as the coyotes. The coyotes will kill sheep directly, while the cayuse makes war on the sheep by eating the grass so closely the sheep cannot exist in the winter, and hence have to be fed. — Tacoma Ledger.
“Second, it gets rid of a few cayuses, which are almost as big a nuisance as the coyotes.”
The Horse Heaven Hills between Prosser and Kiona are now wine country and wind-farm ground, but the argument is uncannily current: which animals get to eat the grass, and who decides. Modern Washington still fights over feral horses on public range and over lethal predator control, with the same tension between the cheapest method and the wider cost. What reads here as thrift — a poisoned carcass and a cleared range — is a reminder that the Valley's working landscape was made by hard, unsentimental arithmetic.
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