It Could Be Worse

Old people have always ranted about how the world is going to hell in a hand basket, and now that I'm old myself, I think I know why. What's really going to hell in a hand basket is us but, due to some obscure principle of physics, it appears from our perspective that we are just fine and it's everybody else that's screwed up. We lived through the Vietnam era, just like our parents lived through the Great Depression and World War II. To them, those were the good old days. "Sure, times were tough back then but, by God, it made a man out of you (If it didn't kill you). The trouble with kids nowadays is that they have it too easy. They would have never survived like we did, with all their long hair and ridiculous clothes. I don't know what the world's coming to!"

If you think it's tough working for a living today, look up "The Battle of Blair Mountain". I found out about it from a lady who grew up in that region, and people in those parts are still bitter about it. Labor relations were like that during the whole late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Another interesting story is the tale of Coxey's Army, which developed out of the Panic of 1893, the worst of a long series of "panics", which is what they called economic downturns in those days. Then, of course there was the Great Depression, which made all the other panics look trivial by comparison. Have you read "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck? Some people say that it was greatly exaggerated, but I've never heard anybody claim that nothing like that ever happened.

You said once before that this is a good time to be retired, and I agree, but I also think that our working years were not so bad compared to what our predecessors went through. The kids starting out today will probably have a tougher time of it than we did, but not nearly as tough as it was before we came along. When you think about it, we were the Lucky Generation, we reaped the benefits of the sacrifices that our ancestors made, and we got out just in time. Of course that doesn't mean we can't rant and rave about how the world is going hell in a hand basket. Isn't that what old people are supposed to do?

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Coyotes do not live in highly socialized packs like wolves do, but they are not solitary like bears either. In the summer, mommy and daddy coyote are raising their pups and teaching them how to hunt. Sometimes we hear them howling at night, the parents start it out and then the kids all join in with their yippy puppy voices. These guys can't pull down a healthy adult deer, but they take a toll on the young fawns. They used to mostly live on snowshoe hares and, since the hare population crashed, we don't hear from the coyotes nearly as often. There seem to be more small predators around, like foxes and raccoons, which indicates that the coyotes are not as plentiful as they used to be.

In the winter,  unrelated coyotes sometimes form temporary hunting packs and do indeed pull down adult deer, especially when the snow gets deep. Deer have a hard time getting around in deep snow and, being herbivores, they will collapse from exhaustion in a matter of hours if they are chased hard enough that they don't have time to stop and eat something. Feral, and even domestic dogs can be hard on the deer too for the same reason.

Coyotes are also scavengers. Anything they find dead, at any time of year, is fair game to them. They are not above raiding garbage cans either, and are also fond of kitty cats and small dogs. At our previous residence we had a sheep farm next door to us, and the coyotes would pick one off a couple times a year. When that happened, the farmer would call in his friends who hunt coyotes with hounds. The hounds would pick up the track at the carcass and run the offending coyote for hours. They seldom caught it, but they must have put the fear of God into it because my neighbor wouldn't lose any more sheep for months after that.