" It is a maxim among carnivore biologists that the main reason big predators now die is because people kill them. People run them over with speeding cars, they shoot them, trap them, gas them, poison them, and torture them. Laws notwithstanding, they kill them out of sheer spite, then bury the evidence—a practice so routine it has become a barstool commandment in certain rural cultures: Shoot, shovel, and shut up. "

― William Stolzenburg , Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators