Dustin Hough owns Hough Fur Company, a fur farm in Northwest Minnesota whose mission is “to bring fur into the everyday lives of everyday people.”

As if this wasn’t enough, from Jan. 31-Feb. 1, Hough is organizing his 8th annual coyote killing contest where (hired guns) participants are tasked with shooting-and-killing as many coyotes as possible over a 24-hour period in exchange for cash “prizes.”

There are promises of a cash prize for the highest performing teams, cash prizes for the 10th, 20th, etc. coyotes killed and there will even be assault rifles raffled off.

How many do they have to kill before they can redeem a few brain cells?

To make matters worse, the participants are tasked with bringing their slaughtered coyotes to Mainline Bar & Grill to be officiated. The contest is at a bar. It’s not enough to just be stupid—you apparently need to be drunk, too.

After a quick dive into the Hough Fur Company’s website, rest be assured that it’s just as ugly as the contest. Visitors are overwhelmed with options of gaudy taxidermized knick-knacks—do I want the whitetail deer beer koozie or the beaver earmuffs?

The website also makes the delusory claim that these practices aim to “help control the population of many different predatory and nuisance animals in order to preserve livestock and the ecosystem as a whole.” Huh?

You really put the moron in oxymoron, Dustin, because there is no such world where “preserving” livestock does anything in the way of “preserving” the ecosystem as a whole— it’s a completely antithetical line of thought. Livestock farming is one of the top contributors to climate change, land, air and water pollution, biodiversity loss and deforestation.

Furthermore, the term “nuisance animal” is entirely a human construct borne out of intolerance of wildlife. It’s incredibly ignorant to label a sentient creature as a “nuisance animal” simply because it has learned to coexist with people.

Coyotes are anything but a nuisance. They’re resilient, resourceful mammals who have received a bad rap for far too long.

The 1931 Animal Damage Control Act allowed coyotes to be earmarked for total eradication in the United States.

The irony is coyotes have not only survived, but they have also thrived and expanded.

The coyote’s famous howl allows it to take censuses of surrounding coyote populations and adjust the sizes of their litters accordingly. When the frequency of return howls begins to dwindle, that indicates to coyotes that it’s time to start repopulating.

In the 1920s, coyotes began mysteriously showing up in places east of the Mississippi River. The unrelenting pressure on them from USDA triggered larger litters of pups and colonization behavior that pushed them into new settings everywhere on the outer margins of their core range. Meaning, the more the USDA tried to eradicate coyotes, the more their populations recovered.

Native carnivores, like coyotes, are integral in battling the biodiversity crisis.

This sort of vigilantism raised by the Hough Fur Company is akin to ecological terrorism. Killing contests are a farce.

You can help

This killing contest and the Hough Fur Company are fueled by market demand—the fur trade is valued at around $40 billion. Despite the hard work of groups like FoA and the tremendous progress made in ending the fur trade (in 2019, California became the first state to ban the sale of fur), the market is vast, littered with everything from designer fur to the fur for “everyday people” pedaled by Hough.

Atrocities like this should serve as a stark reminder: fur is not fashion.

Help us STOP this killing contest by contacting Mainline Bar & Grill and ask them to NOT host the event. Their participation in this senseless and deeply irresponsible killing contest is something to be ashamed of.

You can reach them via phone at (218) 789-7610, by email (mainlinebar@gmail.com) or by using this contact form. You can also leave comments on their Facebook or Instagram pages. You can also support our anti-fur efforts by wearing our Flip off Fur t-shirt, our anti-fur buttons, sharing our brochure and making a donation.