"birth rates decrease as populations increase. For example, coyote litter size can increase from three pups when food is scarce to eight when food is abundant. If lethal control reduces a wildlife population, competition for food will decrease and birth rates will increase. Most wildlife populations can recover quickly from any population reduction due to lethal control."(153-4)

"The point at which the population stabilizes is called the biological carrying capacity. It is a characteristic of the habitat and can be viewed as the number of animals which can be sustained by the annual production of food or the number of animals that can find safe places to hide from predators. Th resource (e.g., food or shelter) in the shortest supply acts to limit the size of the wildlife population."(154-5)

"A wildlife population is usually large by the time it causes enough damage that lethal techniques are considered. Therefore, the population is probably already experiencing a high rate of natural mortality. If, by using lethal methods, we are only killing animals that would have died anyway before the next breeding season, then lethal control may have no impact on the population."(155)

"In protected areas, such as in national parks, over half of the coyotes die annually from starvation, disease, parasites, and injuries…. Furthermore, in a heavily controlled population, few coyotes starve to death or die from diseases. Instead, natural forms of mortality have been replaced by human-caused mortality. For this reason, more than 60% of the coyote population must be killed by humans annually before we would expect to see any reduction in coyote densities (Wagner, 1988)."(156)

"Usually, lethal control is compensatory to a point and additive thereafter, meaning that, below some threshold, lethal control has little effect on populations, but as its intensity increases past that threshold, it will reduce populations."(156)

"When lethal means are used in wildlife damage management, it is best to be as selective as possible. The goal should be to stop the damage by killing as few animals as possible because wildlife have high positive values for society. Ideally, we should remove only the culprits from the local subpopulation and leave all other individuals alone."(163)