Feeding a coyote

Sometimes fate arranges the perfect metaphor. If only I felt I could take advantage of it!

When I talked with Marie a week ago, she was solemn and worried and upset and frightened, all over the deportations that the Administration has recently started enforcing. Mind you, Marie is a natural-born citizen. Her parents were natural-born citizens. She looks White, though apparently if you go far enough back one ancestor was Chippewa. In other words, there is about as much chance that she'll be deported as there is for Melania Trump. But that doesn't stop her from worrying. I've mentioned before that Marie suffers from TDS somethin' terrible, so naturally she believes the very worst it is possible to believe.

What does Marie know about immigration? She is friends with two different families who both think they have to leave the United States proactively before they are deported. In one of these families, the husband in English and the wife is Canadian; their son is a natural-born American. In the other family, the husband is American and the wife is Mexican, though you wouldn't guess it unless she told you. In both families, all the paperwork is in order and has been for many years. Again, these people are not the targets of any deportation effort. But try telling them that.

So I spent our weekly call a week ago trying to talk Marie down from what seemed to be—figuratively or emotionally speaking—a very high cliff.

When we talked yesterday, she was in a much better mood. It seemed that she had forgotten her earlier worries. But buried in her chit-chat about what had gone on the previous week was the news that she had seen a hungry coyote.

Marie lives in the suburbs. This is not normally coyote country. There are wild areas within driving distance, to be sure. But for a coyote to wander all the way into Marie's neighborhood, it must be either desperately hungry or else really bad at directions.  

And Marie has been leaving out food! What's more, she has seen the food disappear. So while she can't be intellectually certain that it's the coyote who has eaten it all, nonetheless she is morally certain that she has saved the coyote from starvation!

I asked her how long she plans to keep leaving out food? She didn't give a date, but in general she wants to keep him alive until he learns to hunt for himself.

Really? How's that going to work?

In an email later that day, Marie wrote:

The food I put out for the young coyote was gone (no way of knowing what ate it, of course), so I shall put out a little more when I finish writing you.  You asked what the end game was, and I never exactly answered; I just don't want it to starve while it learns to hunt well enough to feed itself. I don't anticipate feeding it forever, and certainly don't expect either gratitude or tameness from it!

That evening, I wrote her to say:

Apparently I don't know very much about coyotes, because I can't help but wonder: why would the young coyote bother to learn to hunt if you feed him? Of course you won't keep it up forever, but it might be a dirty trick to feed him during the summer (when wild bunnies are plentiful) and then withdraw the food in winter (when they no longer are).

Naturally it would help if the coyote spoke English so you could explain your plan. But I guess most of them don't. Anyway, I worry that feeding him for a while may turn out to be far crueler than outright neglect would be.

It's been 24 hours and I haven't heard a reply yet. I don't really expect to hear one. And of course my remarks about the coyote speaking English are purely goofy, intended to lighten the mood a little.

But my concerns are in dead earnest, and I did not even begin to express them all. They amount to the following:

• If she makes life easy for the coyote, he will come to expect that treatment forever.
• Therefore he will never learn the skills to provide for himself, because he will depend on her.
• Therefore when she finally withdraws her support, it will come as a complete surprise to the coyote. She will not have communicated the plan to him in any way he can understand, so he will have had no way to predict it.
• In the context of Marie's relationship with the coyote, for her to discontinue feeding him (without warning!) will therefore constitute betrayal, pure and simple.
• Once Marie betrays the coyote in this fashion, he will have two possible choices:
• One is to starve, in which case Marie will be responsible for his death.
• The other is to turn to a "life of crime," by which I mean a life of preying on people's pets and perhaps even their unattended children. In that case, Marie will be indirectly responsible for his depradations.

It would have been so much simpler not to start feeding him in the first place. But feeding him makes Marie feel good about herself.

Back at the beginning of this post, I talked about fate arranging the "perfect metaphor." What did I mean?

Well, Marie was recently worried about deportations. While her fears extended to the fear that ICE might deport anyone who had ever even made fun of the God-Emperor Trump, in practice this means that she wants to be kind to illegal immigrants.

But wait! What if illegal immigrants are kind of like coyotes? Does the same logic apply?

• If life is made easy for them when they arrive, they might indeed come to expect that treatment forever. 
• This could well mean, in turn, never learning the skills to provide for themselves. (After all, we all know that in America, the streets are paved with gold.) 
• Therefore when the country finally gets tired and withdraws its support, that withdrawal will come as a complete surprise.
• Will it? Or will immigrants understand that their support has an end-date?
• I think this is a cultural expectation. Immigrants who have the same cultural expectations as the American people as a whole—this means immigrants from England, the Netherlands, Germany, or Scandinavia—will understand that any support is temporary, and will prepare accordingly.
• But immigrants from any other part of the world cannot be expected to understand the same implicit message. This means they need to hear the message explicitly—which more or less suggests that they have come across the border legally, so there is someone to talk to them—or else they are going to be surprised through (so to speak) no fault of their own. (This is the equivalent—when discussing humans—of the regrettable fact that coyotes don't speak English.)
• Therefore illegal immigrants who do not come from the Germanic or Nordic countries can be forgiven for feeling betrayed when their support ends.
• And once they are betrayed like this, they have two choices:
• One is to starve.
• The other is to turn to crime.

Once again, it would have been so much simpler not to start feeding them in the first place. But feeding them makes Marie feel good about herself.

And no, in case you were about to ask, I don't plan to explain this logic to Marie. It would upset her deeply. But I wish I could.