Recently South Carolina legislators proposed the Coyote Harvest Incentive Program. To encourage coyote harvesting, anyone who killed one of 16 coyotes that were caught and tagged with identifying information would receive a $1000 reward and a lifetime hunting license. The law was vetoed by SC Governor Haley, but the veto was overridden by the legislature and lawmakers continue to advocate for this method.

Research shows that when you hunt a population of coyotes the population might decline temporarily, but the population destabilizes. Coyotes other than the alpha males breed. Coyotes from nearby regions move in. More available food leads to more mating pairs and higher litter rates. One study showed that even if you killed 75 percent of a coyote population every year for 50 years, the population would not be eradicated.

If we want to effectively control the coyote population, using bounties to encourage hunts will likely have the opposite effect. Instead, we need to rehabituate coyotes to fear humans through “hazing,” techniques to scare and retrain them.

We urge South Carolina lawmakers to stop creating bounty programs for coyote killings, since they simply do not work.