Coyotes will do what coyotes will do and we just need to get used to it.
Most of the carcasses I leave get cleaned up by birds in no time. Picture below was one week and I bet it looked about like that after only a couple of days. Skinning them speeds up the process a good bit from what I've seen.
Some of them get eaten by other coyotes too. Have seen that a lot. Last year, I put about a dozen coyotes in the cab of an old truck out on the desert. Came back a month later and never seen so much coyote sign in my life as around that truck. Had to tip toe around to avoid stepping in coyote crap. Tracks on top of tracks coming, going, all directions. Bones of the dead coyotes all scattered and gnawed littering the ground all around that old truck.
Camped a hundred yards from the truck that night and coyotes howling all around all night long. Killed the crap out of them the next morning
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Buddy that does control work for a living, always finding new ways to mess with coyotes and observe. For years he'd put road kill deer out for coyotes and observe how soon the coyotes would feed, what times of day, how they approached etc. He found that the position of the deers body totally effected how soon coyotes would feed on it. The more natural position he put them in, the sooner coyotes would feed on them. But when he put the deer in unnatural positions, it took much longer and sometimes the coyotes wouldn't ever touch them. He found that exactly where he put the deer, in relation to certain terrain features, had similar effect. Some spots prompted quick feeding, other spots consistently caused the coyotes to take a long time before starting to feed or to not ever feed on that carcass at all.
I believe that some individual coyotes are so nouveau phobic that they are actually spooked by carcasses too.
Funny critters. Coyotes.
- DAA