Contestants can earn tens of thousands of dollars for killing coyotes, bobcats, and foxes.
This story was published by FairWarning, a Los Angeles-based news organization focused on public health, safety and environmental issues.
Standing in a West Texas sporting goods store parking lot on a recent Sunday morning, Margaret Lloyd felt like she’d wandered onto the set of a gory movie. The lot was packed with trucks full of dead coyotes, foxes and the occasional bobcat; one pickup had a cage welded to its bed, and it was crammed with carcasses. “It was one wave of fur, tails on top of ears and ears on top of tails,” she said. “It was just horrifying.”
Around back, participants in the West Texas Big Bobcat Contest were weighing their kill in a competition to see who had shot the biggest bobcat and the most coyotes, gray foxes and bobcats in a 23-hour period. Some $76,000 in prize money was at stake—more than $31,000 went to the team that bagged a 32 pound bobcat. Other jackpot winners were a four-man team that killed 63 foxes, a team that killed 8 bobcats, and another that killed 32 coyotes.
Lloyd, a retired lawyer who lives in Galveston and stopped to take pictures of the bobcat contest while driving from New Mexico back to Texas, grew up in the South among hunters and says she’s not opposed to killing animals for food or to protect a herd.
“This is not hunting,” she said. “This is a blood sport, plain and simple.”
Contests like these—often called coyote calling contests, varmint hunts or predator hunts—have become popular events, especially in the Midwest and West. The website CoyoteContest.com lists 21 states with upcoming or recent killing contests, including Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, South Dakota and Utah.
Source: These Gory New Hunting Competitions Have Taken the Country by Storm | Mother Jones