The coyote is a highly adaptable canid that has successfully expanded its range across North America, thriving as both a predator and an opportunistic scavenger. The question of how much weight this animal can move is complex because the coyote rarely lifts heavy objects. Instead, their methods of transporting food involve pulling and dragging, leveraging their unique physical structure to move surprisingly large amounts of mass. The limits of their strength result from their evolutionary specialization for endurance and rapid consumption.
Coyote Physical Profile and Strength
The coyote’s physical build is optimized for speed, stamina, and efficient hunting of smaller prey. An average adult coyote weighs between 20 and 45 pounds. The muscle structure in their limbs and back is built for loping over long distances and delivering quick bursts of energy, not for the vertical lift required for carrying heavy loads.
The skull and jaw structure support their feeding strategy, featuring a bite force effective for their typical diet. This jaw strength is designed for slicing and tearing, allowing them to rapidly dismember and consume a carcass. The animal’s anatomical design favors the swift movement of smaller pieces over the heavy transport of a whole animal.
Differentiating Carrying, Dragging, and Caching
Coyotes employ three distinct methods for moving food, dictated by the size of the item. Carrying involves lifting an object completely off the ground and is limited to small prey like rodents, rabbits, or birds. This method is the least common for moving significant weight, as the coyote’s low-slung body is not built for bearing heavy loads vertically.
The primary method for moving larger kills is dragging, which utilizes powerful neck, shoulder, and chest muscles to haul a carcass along the ground. Their low center of gravity allows them to apply full body weight and strength parallel to the ground, maximizing the force exerted. This is an efficient way to move a heavy food source a short distance to safety or a hidden spot.
The final transport behavior is caching, the act of moving food a short distance before burying it for later consumption. This behavior is a direct response to a food surplus, requiring the coyote to drag or carry the item just far enough to prevent immediate detection by scavengers. The food is then consumed in small portions over time.
Observed Limits of Transported Weight
When observing a coyote’s true strength, the focus must be on the weight they can drag rather than the weight they can carry. Ecological studies have analyzed the relationship between a coyote’s body weight and the size of the prey they select. Research indicates that coyotes actively select and consume prey that yields a predator-to-preferred prey mass ratio of approximately 1:2.
This means a coyote weighing 30 pounds is capable of preying on and moving a kill weighing up to 60 pounds. This ratio reflects a practical and sustained ability to process a food source significantly heavier than themselves. For instance, a small group of coyotes can successfully kill and move parts of a deer, which typically weighs 100 to 200 pounds, by dragging the carcass or tearing off large sections of flesh.
The maximum weight they can move is not a fixed number but is proportional to the individual animal’s size and the number of animals working together. The physical limit is less about raw lifting strength and more about the friction between the dragged object and the terrain, demonstrating their specialized strength for horizontal pulling.