Lemon Martini Productions announces that the award-winning, feature length documentary on coyotes, American Bolshevik, is available across on major streaming platforms including Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, VUDU, and Google Play.
Over the past several decades, coyotes have expanded their range to every part of the United States. What has driven that expansion? What does it mean for our relationship with this animal? Can we learn to coexist with them in these new habitats? We made this film to answer these questions, and to provide a foundation for coexistence with these intelligent and adaptable creatures,” explains director, Julie Marron.
American Bolshevik tells the story of the coyote’s expansion into New England long after the slaughter of the native wolf species, and the attempts of modern day New Englanders to adjust to their new neighbors. The film follows a century of abuse, attempts to malign the coyote as a useless vermin and dangerous predator, and decade after decade of escalating attempts to eradicate the species.
Each year, an estimated 500,000 coyotes are slaughtered in the United States in the name of “wildlife management,” often through inhumane killing contests and practices such as leg hold traps, aerial shooting, and poisoning.
Lethal control, however, is not only ineffective, but helped drive the coyote’s expansion to every part of the United States. “Killing coyotes has never, and will never work to manage them,” states conservation biologist Chris Schadler, Co-Founder of the New Hampshire Wildlife Coalition, who recounts her years of successfully farming sheep amidst coyotes. The film explores the complex biological responses of coyotes to persecution and killing which make lethal control an ineffective and counterproductive management tool. The good news is that there are evidence-based strategies for successful coexistence with the coyote which require some minor adjustments to human behavior, a conclusion of the ground-breaking Narragansett Bay Coyote Study, a years-long project conducted in Newport, Rhode Island and surrounding towns.
The coyote’s current plight is told against the fraught history of their relationship with humans by historian Dan Flores, the New York Times best-selling author of Coyote America. Other interviewees include Camilla Fox, the Founder and Executive Director of Project Coyote, who notes that coyotes and other predators are important contributors to a diverse and balanced ecosystem.
Despite the adversity facing coyotes, the film is ultimately a tale not only of survival, but of triumph for the often misunderstood “American Songdog.”
The feature length film is available in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and select international countries.