that's a step that we probably should take in going from talking about 

 predator control to predator management. There are people that object 

 to managing predators and it's hard for me to understand. Many of the 

 same people say it's fine to hunt deer but you shouldn't be out doing 

 something with coyotes which have three times as high a reproductive 

 capacity as the deer do. This kind of boggles my mind. I would like 

 to just say a little bit about research we've done through the unit and 

 some of the things that I've learned about predation in recent years 

 that I wouldn't have possibly believed 20 years ago. And one of those 

 is that controlling the individual coyote, the animal that's doing 

 damage, is damn near impossible. Everybody subscribes to it. It 

 sounds great and I really like the idea but I wish I knew how to do it. 



This 1080 collar probably has the best potential for that of 

 anything that has come out yet. A few years ago we were doing some 

 research on a ranch where I was paying for the lamb so that he 

 wouldn't do any control and we could let predators do their thing and 

 document some things. And my budget was going pretty bad. I 

 budgeted $30,000 to pay for lambs the first year and I ended up 

 spending $38,000. I pulled some money out of everything. So I 

 budgeted $50,000 the next year and about two months into the season I 

 was almost out of money so I figured I'd do some selective control--look 

 at efficiencies of control and so forth, I'll turn this research around 

 and maybe save my budget. I learned things about selective control. 

 It doesn't work, you can't do it. We used everything in the books. 

 We'd go out there where we were losing three or four lambs a night in 

 a pasture and we'd hit it at sun-up in the morning with a chopper and 

 kill six or eight coyotes and the next day we'd have the same number 

 of lambs killed. And we'd go out there after a rain, after we'd run 

 with the chopper and we'd find where coyotes had gone out under the 

 fences and so forth. I decided selective control just isn't selective. I 

 suppose a chopper is as selective as you can get without the poison 

 collar. 



The other thing I learned is that I don't think anybody in his 

 right mind should try to predict what's going to happen with predators. 

 We had situations in which two ranchers, five miles apart, were 

 managing their sheep exactly the same way and one of them was just 

 getting slaughtered. He was losing 20 and 30 percent of his lambs a 

 year and the guy down the way was watching the coyotes out there 

 catching mice in the sheep pasture and having no problems at all. We 

 were looking for a place to use Komondorik dogs to see how they would 

 do in alleviating predation. And incidentially , the Komondorik dog was 

 the only thing that was ever used on the Cook Ranch that stopped 

 predation. They worked great until they started killing sheep. 

 Anyway, there was a small ranch with just a couple hundred of sheep 

 and these were trained sheep. They came in every night and they 

 shut them up in the barn. All the sheep that didn't do that got killed 

 so they had a pretty selected herd of sheep and the guy was keeping 

 them mostly for leafy spurge control. It was more of a nuisance than 

 anything else but they had them there. One year he got almost 50 

 percent of his lambs taken in about a three week period. I have never 

 seen coyotes hit anything so hard in my life. And the government 



