NAHANT— More than a dozen residents showed up at Nahant Beach Sunday morning to protest the Select Board’s decision to hire sharpshooters to eliminate coyotes that have caused safety concerns amongst town officials and residents.
On Dec. 7, members of the Select Board authorized the payment of federal agents from USDA Wildlife Services to shoot coyotes that have inhabited the area, making the town the first municipality in Massachusetts to do so.
In a press release published on the town’s website on Dec. 8, Board Chairman Gene Canty stated that hiring sharpshooters to eliminate the coyotes was the only logical solution for Nahant at this stage.
“The Town of Nahant, like many other communities, has been dealing with habituated coyotes with multiple documented cases of aggressive behavior toward residents,” said Canty. “Mass Wildlife has authorized our community to dispatch the problem coyotes but our legal options of ways to do that are limited, ineffective, and not practical.”
Those that participated in Sunday’s rally however, don’t see it that way.
According to Francene Amari-Faulkner, who was one of the organizers for the rally, the reason that coyotes have become so bold towards residents in town is a result of humans indirectly feeding coyotes by leaving food outside in or around the garbage. This makes coyotes feel comfortable around humans and they are more likely to approach them looking for food, said Amari-Faulkner.
She also stated that a coyote expert from California has agreed to come to Nahant for one week, free of charge, to work with the coyotes to discourage them from harassing residents through aversion training techniques. She believes this is a much better alternative than resorting to violence.
“This is what we’ve proposed to the Board of Selectmen is let us come in and do this,” Amari-Faulkner said. “The Board of Selectman has said no because Mass Wildlife has told them if they do that it’s going to make it harder for the sharpshooters to get the coyotes. Which tells you that the aversion techniques will work.”
Amari-Faulkner further explained that killing the coyotes won’t solve the problem because they have no way to identify which coyotes are approaching people, and that if they don’t eliminate all of the coyotes, they will become more aggressive, and the cycle will continue each pupping season.
“Taking out the coyotes is not going to help anything, it’s only going to set us back and create more rogue behavior if they don’t get them all. “It’s going to be a massive bloodbath for coyotes, and in the end, we’re not accomplishing anything because the coyotes eventually within the next pupping season will reproduce.”
In the release, Selectman Josh Antrim said that people need to be educated on how to deal with coyotes, but said that when these encounters present a severe risk to residents, the town needs to consider all courses of action.
“Mass Wildlife officials have taught us that the focus of our response to an increased population of coyotes in our Town has to be education,” said Selectman Josh Antrim. “However, when coyotes become habituated and present a major significant public safety risk, we have to consider all legal means to eliminate that risk.”
Amari-Faulkner also believes that it is about educating residents, but also believes that misinformation and fear is driving the decision to hunt down the coyotes.
“It’s got to come down to public education, teaching people correct hazing techniques,” she said. “There’s so many simple things people just have to learn how to do, but instead all this misinformation is just creating more fear and more hysteria in people that is not based on anything factual.”
