The Last Coyote

Across the vast stretches of the American West, wildlife was being systematically exterminated, poisoned, shot, trapped, and bounty-hunted, for the profit of ranchers and stockmen, with the full cooperation of government agencies. Hardest hit were the great predators: wildcats, wolves, eagles, bears, and mountain lions. And above all, the coyote.

Shrewd, wily, solitary, and adaptable, the coyote had survived everything the West could throw at it until modern chemistry and federal policy combined to push it toward extinction. Their pelts were nailed to fence posts as trophies. Their deaths were subsidized by taxpayers. And almost no one was writing about it.

Originally published as Slaughter the Animals, Poison the Earth and now retitled The Last Coyote, this book was compared on publication to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the landmark work that launched the modern environmental movement. Like Carson, Olsen documented not just the immediate cruelty but the cascading consequences: by destroying the predators that nature requires, man was poisoning his own heritage, degrading his own land, and eroding something essential in his own humanity.

More than fifty years later, the questions Olsen raised about the power of agricultural interests over public land, the complicity of government agencies, and the true cost of treating nature as an inconvenience have never been more relevant.

New York Times bestselling author Jack Olsen, whom the Philadelphia Inquirer called "an American treasure," brings precision, compassion, and righteous indignation to this environmental classic. Now featuring a new foreword by New York Times bestselling author Steve Jackson.
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