States targeting animal pests with night hunting

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — A growing number of states are taking aim at animals deemed destructive or dangerous by allowing night hunting.

North Carolina is proposing new rules that would allow hunters to kill coyotes and wild hogs at night, says Brad Howard, a state wildlife biologist. In December, Arizona opened night hunting for mountain lions, says Jason Bruce, president of the Indiana-based National Predator Hunters Association. Last year, it allowed night hunting for coyotes, he said.

Tennessee last year marked wild hogs for eradication and allowed landowners to hunt them at night on private land, according to its wildlife office.

Hogs are blamed for crop and property de- struction. “They get into garbage and bird feeders and pet food,” says Carolyn Rickard, a spokeswoman for the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission.

Howard says coyotes and feral swine adapt to hunting fast and “go nocturnal.”

Night hunting is allowed in 42 states, says Bruce, whose association was founded in 2009 and connects with 80,000 people a week.

Some landowners, even those with wild hog problems, are not so sure about night hunting.

“I wouldn’t say I am opposed to it because it would help us control the overpopulation of wild hogs in residential areas, but I am a little cautious that having a bunch of residential property owners going around shooting in the nighttime in close proximity to neighbors might open another door of problems,” says Colleen Carey, who lives on Hogback Mountain in Tryon, N.C. She had a pack of wild hogs in her back yard last year.

Bruce says night hunting accidents are rare and some landowners welcome more hunting. He says hunting is better than governments spending public money to kill or trap hogs and coyotes.

Camilla Fox, executive director of the Northern California-based Project Coyote, says night hunting of the species is “ethically indefensible and ecologically reckless.”

She says night hunting poses a danger to endangered species such as the red wolf, which is hard to distinguish from a coyote even during the day, along with people and household pets.

Hunting doesn’t control coyotes because they’ll produce at least enough offspring to fill any decline in population, she says. Ostendorff and Chávez also report for the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-times