Coyote America

Description

Coyote America follows an animal whose history repeatedly unsettles the stories people tell about wilderness and national expansion. Dan Flores traces the coyote’s biological development across roughly five million years, then examines its changing place in human imagination, from a powerful figure in Native American religions to a perpetually frustrated cartoon adversary. In the American West, settlers and governments treated coyotes as obstacles to be destroyed, yet sustained campaigns against them failed. The species instead spread eastward, reversing the familiar direction of continental expansion and adapting to farms, suburbs, and metropolitan landscapes. Combining natural history with environmental and cultural analysis, the book uses the coyote’s resilience to reconsider conquest, coexistence, and the boundary between wild nature and human territory.

Themes