A wildlife advocacy group says coyotes can help control chronic wasting disease, a fatal illness in deer. Deer with the disease have recently been spotted close to Indiana’s borders with Michigan and Illinois.

The Center for Wildlife Ethics says to keep Indiana’s deer population healthy, the state should ban coyote hunting contests.

Officials with the Indiana Department of Natural Resources say it can be hard to tell if a deer has chronic wasting disease just by looking at it. But Laura Nirenberg with the Center for Wildlife Ethics says coyotes and other predators often target sick deer because they’re easier to catch.

“You’d think that we would want to use every tool in the tool chest to try to combat these things if this is the eminent threat that they’re cautioning the public about,” she says.

According to the DNR, coyotes historically only existed in Indiana’s prairies. Now they’re found all over the state, including urban areas.

Nirenberg says if the state banned coyote hunting contests, farmers would still be able to get a nuisance permit to kill a coyote that threatens their livestock.

“By law, you target the individuals, you target the wrongdoer. You don’t go after populations,” she says.

At least two coyote hunting contests are taking place in Indiana in 2019. An organizer for one of the contests, Coyote Crush, declined to comment, but did say money from the competition is donated to veterans. Other contest organizers and DNR officials were unavailable.

Indiana Environmental reporting is supported by the Environmental Resilience Institute, an Indiana University Grand Challenge project developing Indiana-specific projections and informed responses to problems of environmental change.