The government isn’t the only one going after coyotes. Hundreds die each year in weekend hunting “competitions,” often for prizes or gambling pots, that are promoted as a way to attract young people to hunting. Their victims are not only coyotes but the very image of rural America, tarnished by widespread photos of beefy, middle-aged men in camouflage, with guns in hand and dead animals no one is ever going to eat piled up in the backs of pickups.

Coyotes are not endangered, and they don’t need our help to survive as a species (though recovering populations of wolves, which are often mistaken for coyotes during hunts, could use it). But there is something perverse in the government, and society, marking a species for death, setting it outside the bounds of even our wildlife protection laws.

We know coyotes are intelligent, social creatures. They do not enjoy death. No thoughtful human being, considerate of other life, should sacrifice for pleasure or a bet an animal like the one Adolph Murie observed in Yellowstone in the 1930s. Doing so is immoral — not in a religious sense, but in reference to morality’s origins, the evolution of a sense of fairness among members of a social species, which early on came to include a human recognition that other creatures enjoy being alive and that depriving them of life is a very serious matter. Over 2,000 years ago, the philosopher Bion of Borysthenes elucidated why modern, competitive hunts for coyotes are an absolutely abominable idea: “Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs die not in sport, but in earnest.”

Killing an animal that for five million years has had an important role to play in nature is an act of adolescence. As long as urbanites keep their dogs and cats inside at night, coyotes pose no unique or overwhelming danger, certainly no more than other wild predators. So why do we continue to mark them as targets for our blood sports?