Sask. community offers coyote bounty priced at $20 per set of paws

A bounty on coyotes, offering $20 for each set of paws, was recently introduced in the RM of Weyburn.

“Over the last few years, the coyote population has been growing and of course, with the pelt prices being way down, there's been less people trapping them,” said Norm McFadden, Reeve of the RM of Weyburn. “So it’s been getting out of hand a little bit.”

McFadden said safety was also a big reason why the bounty was put into place.

“Some people have seen packs as many as 10 or 15 coyotes wandering which you normally don't see,” he said. “We do have a few acres in the surrounding area. Even people within the city of Weyburn have seen the odd one when they're walking at night, so safety concern all the way around.”

He said to take part in the bounty, people would have to first get permission to go on anyone’s property. There is a form either out of the RM office or online that people would have to fill out, providing the name and phone number of the landowner.

“We're just asking for the paws so that if anybody wants to get them and keep the pelts for when prices do rebound … they have that option, and we're just asking them to take [the paws] to the RM shop, not the RM office,” McFadden explained.

McFadden said the response so far has been mostly positive.

“There's been a number of phone calls to the office, people picking up forms,” he said. “We haven't had anything turned back in yet, but the weather hasn't been great either. So I think once the warm weather hits and the snow starts melting, I think that'll pick up.”

Ray Orb, president of the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM), said there have been more coyotes in some places than others, which likely depends on where the areas are that have received more snowfall.

“I think it's a bit worse this year than we've seen for a while and I think that's why some of the RMS particularly I've noticed in the southeast part of the province have put bounties on coyotes to try and control them,” he said.

Orb said the RMs of Weyburn, Cymri, and Estevan currently have bounties set in place.

“When the bounty is controlled, I think more of a controlled hunt … people have to abide by the rules that have been set so I think that's a good thing,” he said.

While there has been an increase in coyote sightings, Jordan Ignatiuk, executive director with Nature Saskatchewan, said a coyote bounty is not a good idea.

“There's been a lot of research done over a number of years that indicates that the big bounties never actually work. In a lot of cases, they actually can create the reverse,” he said.

Ignatiuk said killing the alphas could lead to the opposite goal since there is a dominance hierarchy of breeding animals.

“If you take out the alpha male, the alpha female, it then allows all of the other juveniles or the subdominant ones below them to breed,” he explained. “So then you're actually getting more breeding than you were when it was just the leaders of the pack that are doing it.”

He said the other thing a bounty can do is change the behaviour of the animals, as the subdominant animals have been following the lead of the older individuals.

“They've been sort of shown or trained their food sources, ground squirrels and rabbits and mice, as opposed to deprecating on livestock and particularly the calves in lambing season. Once they're gone, again, that sort of opens the door for the young ones to go out on their own and create their own new behaviours,” he said.

While this is the first time a bounty on coyotes has been introduced in the Weyburn area, there was an overall Saskatchewan bounty in 2009. Ignatiuk said there were higher losses of livestock because of that bounty.

“The government then created a depredation program for livestock in the case of whether it be tigers or wolves or bears or the odd cougar attack, so they can actually now claim insurance on the wildlife depredation of their livestock. So that was a change that was implemented,” he said.

There has not been a provincial bounty on coyotes since 2009.

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Orb said going forward, one thing they hope to do is to start the wildlife advisory committee meetings on a more regular basis to get a better sense of what is happening out there.

“Just actually less than a week we did meet with the environment minister and some of the staff here in Regina, and so we talked about the coyote issue as well,” he said.

McFadden said since they brought their bounty out, there have been a few neighbouring RMs that are looking to implement their own.

“I know there's some, they're still talking about it. So it's not it's not just a problem in the RM of Weyburn and it's I think it's a problem almost border to border within the province,” he said.

There is no set timeline for the RM of Weyburn’s bounty, and McFadden said they’re just going to see how it goes before a date is set.

“If we get a pile of uptake in this, it could end at any time,” he said.

McFadden said they are not looking to wipe out the coyote population with this bounty.

“We're just looking to just to kind of thin it out a bit,” he said. “We do realize coyotes play an important role in our environment too, [but] absolutely not in these kind of numbers."