Wildlife killing contests abandon fair chase and science in favor of spectacle and cruelty | Hatch Magazine

Killing native wildlife, defined by the ecologically challenged as “varmints,” is a popular American tradition, especially when organized into social events in which guests compete for cash and prizes to determine who can dispatch the most and biggest.

“Varmints” targeted at wildlife killing contests include coyotes, bobcats, foxes, wolves, cougars, porcupines, skunks, crows, badgers, rabbits, beavers, raccoons, opossums, ringtails, and prairie dogs.

Equipment consists of folding chairs, high-powered rifles, tripods to stabilize the rifles, telescopic sights, night-vision gear, electronic calls, and plenty of the right ammo. There’s no “thrill of the chase” because there’s no chase.

One issue that fair-chase hunting and animal-welfare activists agree on is that wildlife killing contests need to be banned.

Speaking for animal-welfare activists is Animal Wellness Action president Wayne Pacelle: “[Wildlife Killing contests] are a particularly despicable form of animal cruelty masquerading as hunting. Contest hunts reduce hunting to mass killing purely for entertainment, with the participants and contestants doing their best to amass the largest body counts.”

And speaking for the fair-chase hunting activists is outdoor writer and avid big-game hunter David Stalling who, despite having plenty of hunter allies, makes this complaint about mute outfits representing fair-chase hunters: “Even groups I support and respect, including Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, and National Wildlife Federation are ignoring and avoiding this clear violation of science-based wildlife management and our North American Model of Wildlife Conservation they claim to uphold and defend — I can only assume as to not upset their membership base.”

The Boone and Crockett Club was founded on fair chase. By the late 1800s, market hunting — commercial harvest of wildlife for meat markets — had crashed populations of wild ungulates and waterfowl. But in 1918 fair-chase hunters Theodore Roosevelt, George Bird Grinnell, William Hornaday, Congressman John Lacey, and other members of the Boone and Crockett Club got market hunting banned.

As hideous as market hunting was, at least the wildlife didn’t go to waste. Victims of wildlife killing contests are left to rot.

What’s more, wounded and dead victims are impregnated with lead-bullet fragments that poison, sometimes fatally, at least 130 predator and scavenger species including eagles, hawks, vultures, and even killing-contest targets that elude the rifle barrage like foxes, coyotes, wolves, badgers, bobcats, ringtails, and raccoons.

Copper bullets are a non-toxic alternative. They were developed by ammo companies not to save wildlife from lead poisoning but because they kill more effectively.

I polled the most experienced big-game hunters I know about copper bullets: Bruce Farling, former director of Montana Trout Unlimited, replied: “It’s been at least a dozen years now since I switched to copper, and I can confirm that it’s superior ballistically to lead. In terms of effectiveness, especially on elk, I have found copper has superior stopping power, even using lighter loads.” And from four celebrated journalists who serve with me on the Circle of Chiefs of the Outdoor Writers Association of America: Jim Low, “Highly accurate, sturdy, excellent expansion and weight retention.” Matt Miller, “I’ve found copper superior in every way.” Scott Stouder, “Nothing but stellar performance.” Larry Stone, “Accurate, hard-hitting.”

But copper bullets are marginally more expensive (for premium big-game loads, something like $2.25 more per box of 20). So wildlife-killing contestants insist on using lead. The lead-core “Varmageddon bullet” is a favorite. According to the manufacturer, Nosler Inc., it delivers “high velocities and exceptional terminal performance on varmints at all practical ranges.”

In addition to cash, wildlife-killing-contest prizes have offered door prizes like hunting paraphernalia and coyote urine.

Organizers of the West Texas Big Bobcat Contest effuse as follows: “For the 3 contests combined in 2024, we had a total of 1,836 teams entered, paid out $421,280 in prize money, gave away some pretty awesome prizes from our sponsors, and we had a heck of a good time doing it. That brings our all-time total payout (since 2008) to $3,961,020. That brings our all-time total payout (since 2008) to $3,961,020.”

A truck bed littered with bobcat carcasses at a 2019 killing contest (photo: Project Coyote).

Prairie dogs are a keystone species. Pull out the keystone in the arch, and the whole ecosystem tumbles down around your feet. At least 150 species depend on prairie dogs. For example, critically endangered black-footed ferrets prey on prairie dogs and use their tunnels. Black-footed ferrets can’t survive outside large, healthy prairie dog towns.

Some wildlife-killing contestants, especially those who target prairie dogs , belong to the “Red Mist Society,” so named because targets explode in red mist when hit by high-powered rifle rounds. Red mist provides participants with a high they call “IG” — instant gratification.

Rich Grable, better known as Mr. Dog, is a legend in wildlife-killing-contest circles. He earned his nickname by killing 452 prairie dogs in a day, 8,635 in a year.

On a morning Mr. Dog planned to compete only with himself, he invited me to observe his prowess on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. Every time he blew up a prairie dog he punched his dashboard-mounted kill counter with his thumb. He never got out of his truck. His weapon of choice was a Remington .222 that he rested on a styrofoam pad on the edge of the window.

Crack. A prairie dog exploded in red mist, its hindquarters cartwheeling into the air. “Dead,” shouted Mr. Dog. Two babies stood beside a burrow, one with its paws on its sibling’s shoulders. Crack. Both exploded in red mist. “Can ya hear it go plop?” he yelled. Crack, crack, crack, crack … Dozens of other prairie dogs exploded or dragged themselves into their burrows, minus body parts. “I done something to him,” shouted Mr. Dog. “I done something to him, too.” I smelled the styrofoam pad melting under the barrel heat.

Participating in and acquiring lessons from the February 2024 Southwest Texas Youth Varmint Hunt were 119 children. They were given prizes for knocking off coyotes, bobcats, foxes, raccoons, and rabbits.

Then there’s the Albemarle, North Carolina Coyote Classic, Central Texas Varmint Extreme, Sonora, Texas Sergeant R Varmint Hunting Competition, Cresco, Pennsylvania Annual Coyote Contest, Limestone County, Texas Predator Hunt, Teague, Texas FFA Varmint Hunt, Athens, Texas Conway Farms 2024 Predator Hunt, and Cambridge, Ohio Deerassic Park Coyote Tournament, to mention just a few.

Wildlife-killing-contest promoters claim their events provide valuable public services by removing predators, thereby saving livestock and game species. The way to save livestock from predators is to fence it in and/or protect it with guard dogs. Killing predators to protect free-ranging livestock is like bailing a boat with no bottom.

The health of game species depends on natural predation. Wildlife-killing-contest websites and predator-killing forums are rife with vain attempts to legitimize this wanton waste. “Save a fawn. Shoot a coyote,” is their shibboleth.

And from Bass Pro Shops: “Predator hunting contests can be beneficial by training new hunters, protecting the local wildlife by taking out coyotes, bobcats, raccoons, and other predators.”

More “varmints” (photo: © Melissa Groo).

Nature doesn’t work that way. The fantasy that game can be improved or permanently increased by eliminating predators is as old and discredited as alchemy. As the Inuits declare, “The wolf makes the caribou strong.” The same realization dawned on Aldo Leopold later in life when he denounced his early 20th-century work as a federal predator-control agent. This predator killer turned ecologist is today recognized as the father of wildlife management. In his essay “Thinking Like a Mountain,” Leopold reported the devastation deer do to wildlife habitat, including their own, when humans remove wolves.

Persecution of wolves and cougars in the East has resulted in gross overpopulation of malnourished, stunted, and diseased white-tailed deer. Other results include deer-vehicle crashes that annually kill some 200 Americans and injure at least 10,000 others, an epidemic of human, dog, and wildlife diseases spread by deer ticks, loss of native wildflowers, and elimination of birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians that depend on forest understories.

Dr. Robert Crabtree is the nation’s leading researcher on coyotes (the species most targeted by wildlife killing contests). He found that virtually all coyote “control” results in more, not fewer, coyotes. Reduction is possible only if 70 percent of a population is killed, something Crabtree notes “rarely if ever” happens. In populations unmolested by humans the average litter size at birth is five or six. But competition in summer reduces pup survival to 1.5 to 2.5. So when humans kill coyotes, reduced competition results in higher survival.

There’s progress. Americans are beginning to grasp the fact that if the whole of nature is good, no part can be bad.

While wildlife killing contests are still legal in most states, condemnation by environmental and animal-welfare groups, biologists, fair-chase hunters, legislators, and mainstream media is starting to limit them. On December 22, 2023 New York State outlawed wildlife killing contests. Other states that have banned or restricted wildlife killing contests are Arizona, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Mexico, Vermont, and Washington. And on May 22 legislation was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives to prohibit wildlife killing contests on 500 million acres of U.S. public lands.

“Varmints” targeted by animal killing contests (photo: © Gillian Byck Overholser).

Among the more effective (and humorous) condemnations of wildlife killing contests is a popular song composed by folk singer and former Wyoming resident Tom Rush. In the introduction he offers at concerts, he claims to have found the song on the jukebox while lunching at the “Squat and Gobble” and that he then had to look up the word “paean” — “a song of praise or exaltation,” pronounced “peeing.” Here’s his song: “A Cowboy’s Paean to a Coyote.”

And from Melissa Groo, an internationally celebrated wildlife photographer and advisor to the National Audubon Society: “I’m fine with hunting for food, but these wildlife killing contests are wanton waste, not hunting… At a time when so much of our wildlife is in peril, I think we should look at these animals differently and understand that they have families, feelings, and relationships. Let’s honor them by celebrating their lives instead of their deaths.”

Nature doesn’t require human oversight. She knew what she was doing when she equipped critters with natural predators.

Why do state game and fish agencies permit and excuse wildlife killing contests? Why aren’t their information-and-education officers teaching lessons learned by the Inuits, Leopold, Crabtree, and thousands of other scientists, including those the agencies employ?

Photo: Project Coyote.

The answer is that wildlife-killing contestants must buy state hunting licenses. When I was a game and fish agency bureaucrat in the 1970s I learned that because I and my colleagues were fed and clothed by license buyers, “information and education” meant telling sportsmen what they wanted to hear rather than what they needed to know. Instead of defending their long-term best interests, we indulged their short-term appetites like allowing them to compete to see who could blow away the most and biggest coyotes. So except for the few state game and fish agencies financed mostly by tax dollars, curricula resemble that of schools at which students write teachers’ paychecks.

The same state bureaucrats who permit and excuse wildlife killing contests simultaneously gush about “The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation” which operates partly on these principles: “Wildlife is held in trust for all citizens,” and “wildlife may only be killed for a legitimate, non-frivolous purpose.”

Wildlife killing contests fling down and dance upon that model.

Ted Williams is a regular contributor to Hatch Magazine. His last piece — “It’s Time for America to Outgrow Shark Tournaments”— appeared July 27 (). For more information on wildlife killing contests go to Project Coyote and the National Coalition to End Wildlife killing contests.