Nobody in the community was cool with what happened, but they also weren’t cool with outside individuals coming into our community and attacking members of our community”

Tyler Smith, 31, a derby participant raised in Sublette County who now lives in Green River.

JACKSON — The carcasses began to arrive a few hours after sunset.

It was about 8 p.m. on Saturday and participants in the “Song Dog Shootout” — dubbed a “coyote derby” by participants and a “coyote killing contest” by detractors — had started to bring their quarry to a trailer parked behind the Waterhole #3, a bar that shares the name of a James Coburn western.

As teams trickled in with a coyote or two in hand, the competition’s organizer Amy Busselle weighed their kills. Bar owner Bill Cowley stood on a bathroom scale nearby and took each animal from Busselle, calling out his and the animal’s combined weight. Between Cowley, his cowboy boots and a coyote, the numbers he called out were close to 250 pounds.

Busselle, who was recording the weights by headlamp, had forgotten to figure out a better way to conduct the weigh-in. In the days leading up to the shootout, she had been distracted by phone calls and text messages threatening to kill her or burn down the bar, where she slings drinks, because of the derby.

“Maybe it is Western out here,” Busselle said. “I get where they’re coming from because it is a competition.”

The parking lot was empty besides Busselle, Cowley, and whichever team was having their kill weighed. Competing teams were more interested in kicking off a night of snakebite shots, pool and drinking games than lingering in the cold to ogle at other hunters’ bounty.

“This was just supposed to be a get-together for people to bring business in and also take care of the population,” Busselle said.

However, almost a year ago, Daniel resident Cody Roberts allegedly hit a wolf with his snowmobile and paraded it around the Green River Bar with its mouth taped shut before killing it.

The incident drew international attention to Wyoming’s methods of managing animals that state statute deems predators: coyotes, red foxes, skunks, raccoons, porcupines, jackrabbits, stray cats and wolves, in most areas. Sublette County residents were inundated with threats.

Last week, wildlife advocates once again trained their digital outrage on Sublette County and Marbleton, in particular, an insular community unaccustomed to attention from the wider world. Critics were enraged to see the community promoting an event geared toward the mass killing of wildlife.

Before the shootout began, the debate that unfolded on Facebook left little room for nuance. Sublette residents were portrayed as “barbaric, uneducated folks,” said Brandy Cowley, Bill’s wife. Wildlife lovers were cast as “crazy, bleeding-heart liberals,” out of touch with the realities of living off of the land, said Kristin Combs, executive director of Wyoming Wildlife Advocates.

Over the course of two days, Busselle and many of the 45 men participating in her shootout told the News&Guide that large-scale coyote hunting is necessary to protect cattle and wildlife including mule deer and pronghorn. A derby like last weekend’s, in their mind, offers the community an opportunity to cull coyotes together.

On the other hand, wildlife advocates blasted the event, arguing that the gamification of a derby is incompatible with ethical predator management.

The science of predator management also paints a complicated story.

The News&Guide attended the shootout to get a better picture of a controversial practice in western Wyoming. Cowley banned people from taking photos of coyote carcasses because he said images are “triggering” to people.

The hunt

The three-day event in Marbleton began with a Friday evening check-in at the bar, followed by two days of hunting with weigh-ins on Saturday and Sunday evenings.

The bar opened at 5 a.m. for the weekend, six hours earlier than usual, so that Busselle could serve up breakfast burritos and coffee to hunters. Most derby goers opted to embark from home in the morning and save the hanging out for the evening, leaving Busselle and chef Geo Burns to smoke cigarettes, drink Coca-Cola and entertain idle, hungover news reporters with stories of bottle-fed pet raccoons and goats breaking into homes.

Teams paid $50 to join, creating a winner’s pot of $600. There were also $20 side pots for the smallest, largest and mangiest coyotes.

Participants were able to use thermal imaging for night hunting and snowmobiles to access their prey, though they were not permitted to strike coyotes using snowmobiles — a practice recently greenlighted by the Wyoming Legislature, despite efforts to ban the practice after the Daniel incident. Busselle and several other participants said they find “coyote whacking” unethical.

“You’re causing them trauma by running them over, I don’t know how else to say it,” Busselle said. “Like now they’re suffering and no, that’s not what this is about, not at all.”

Several Sublette County residents said they were still shaken by the attention brought about by the Daniel incident.

“Nobody in the community was cool with what happened,” said Tyler Smith, 31, a derby participant raised in Sublette County who now lives in Green River. “But they also weren’t cool with outside individuals coming into our community and attacking members of our community.”

Sublette County residents similarly rallied around Busselle in response to the derby controversy. An additional five teams registered after catching wind of the online outrage.

“Derbies are a term, in a sense, to just go hang out with your buddies,” Smith said. “Everybody gets together, we bring the community together and we all hang out.”

Most teams opted to take the tactical disadvantage of traveling as a pack rather than splitting up to cover more ground. Some heavy nighttime drinking killed dreams of nighttime hunting using thermals or early morning wake-ups.

The winning team of four split up on snowmobiles, killing 26 coyotes on Saturday and 22 on Sunday on private ranches. Four teams that stuck together and travelled by car killed one or two coyotes each on Saturday. Seven teams were “skunked,” unable to kill a single canine.

The debate

Opponents of the derby don’t understand that it’s necessary to protect livestock during calving season, which is coming up in the spring, Busselle and other participants said. In their minds, the goal of the derby is not to exterminate coyotes.

“It’s just keeping the populations in check so they’re not causing us more issues,” said Zachary Flint, who has lived and worked on ranches in the county for the past five years. “We’re not here to try to eradicate them or try to torture them or anything.”

Coyotes can be good for ranches, in small numbers, Busselle said.

“Generally, if you get one on a ranch, and it’s the only one that hangs out, you’re probably in good company,” she added. “He’s gonna clean up the gut piles, or the afterbirth if the mom’s not cleaning that up, and generally they’ll keep other coyotes away.”

That’s a reason not to kill coyotes indiscriminately in a derby, said Franz Camenzind, a retired wildlife biologist who spent six years studying coyote behavior in Jackson Hole.

“If you kill randomly, you’re probably not really taking care of anything,” he said.

Because coyotes are territorial, if a ranch has coyotes that aren’t causing problems, they’ll keep potential troublemakers at bay, Camenzind said. When ranchers oust their local coyote leadership, other coyotes move in to fill the power vacuum. And less established populations are worse at hunting and more likely to kill livestock. Other scientists agree.

“If you haven’t had issues with the current cast of characters, your best bet is to leave (them) there,” said Joe Holbrook, a professor of carnivore and habitat ecology at the University of Wyoming. “They’ll kick out young males that might come into the area and start getting into trouble.”

Camenzind, who grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, said that he is not against killing problematic coyotes, especially ahead of calving or lambing season.

“You’re probably going to have a safer lambing season by doing that because it takes awhile for coyotes to fill that space,” he said.

Resilient, to a point

KJ Christoffersen, 32, had a late start to the hunt on Saturday afternoon after getting waylaid delivering a breech calf in the morning.

He played John Denver and Zach Bryan tunes as he off-roaded around the ranch he manages in his shiny F-350, with his 9-year-old daughter, Makenna, and two hunting rifles in tow, plus a pistol in the center console.

Christoffersen was one of the participants who joined the derby in solidarity with Busselle. He had shot a handful of coyotes on the ranch in the past week, so he figured he’d encounter some more while going about his day.

For most of the year, he doesn’t feel strongly about coyotes.

“Other than calving, I really don’t mind them,” he said.

It’s best not to hold on to anti-coyote sentiment year-round, because coyote numbers can only really be suppressed for short periods of time, according to Holbrook.

Their populations tend to be stable and resilient over time, despite hunting and management, because they breed more when humans kill them en masse. This fact is often cited by wildlife advocates to illustrate the futility and senseless violence of killing coyotes.

Though that’s been proven in scientific studies of large coyote populations moving around entire ecosystems, killing coyotes in a localized area, like a ranch, will temporarily keep them away.

“Scientists are like, ‘Well, (hunting is) not effective,’” Holbrook said. “We’re sort of coming at it from two different lenses.”

Culling coyotes can mitigate depredations for a short period of time, such as during calving season, but the effects won’t last even a year.

“Short of poisoning, (coyotes) just tend to exist,” Holbrook said. “They live in downtown Chicago and the high mountains of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem during the winter.”

In addition to calf depredations, participants also noted the importance of wild game to their diets and fears about predators limiting that community food source.

“If you don’t manage predators you ain’t gonna have no prey animals,” said Cam Thomas, 21, who grew up in the county and came home from St. George, Utah, to participate in the derby. “It’s a circle of life kind of deal, you’ve got to keep everything under control.”

The idea that coyote management is necessary to maintain adequate pronghorn, deer and elk populations is not corroborated by research because adult female survival is the backbone of ungulate populations, Holbrook said. Coyotes aren’t good enough at killing adult pronghorn or mule deer to make a difference.

Derby alternatives

After missing three coyotes on Saturday, Flint went to the Big Piney Shooting Range on Sunday morning to check that there was nothing wrong with his guns.

“[The coyote advocates] can feel better, ‘cause I can’t hit anything,” he said.

He hypothesized that his scope was slightly off and messing with his aim. He missed another coyote that afternoon.

Even if coyote hunting is an effective management tool to protect calves, that’s not justification for a derby, according to Combs, of Wyoming Wildlife Advocates.

“Killing anything shouldn’t be made into a game, for me that’s the issue that pulls the ethics out of it,” she said.

Combs would like to see ranchers try less-lethal methods to limit calf depredations, like using herders and guard dogs, or bringing lambs or calves into protected areas.

“There’s a whole toolbox of tools that are not getting used by most people,” she said. “If you were using all of those and still having problems, that’s when an animal should be taken out.”

Her qualm is that Sublette County’s first go-to is, “We’re going to kill all these things.”

Derby supporters don’t take killing animals lightly, according to Cowley, the bar’s owner.

“Most sportsmen have remorse every time they take a life,” he said.

“I’ll go and spend a week, 10 days, hunting and could kill however many and never pull a trigger, because I just don’t feel it that day,” he continued. “It’s not about the kill, it’s not. Is a derby about the kill? Yes it is. But it is there for a reason. It is management.”