>I love to hang out with them in the park and garden,
It's good fun to watch and listen to the coyotes until one of them steals a beloved pet away right before your eyes. My family has lost a total of three cats to these things and I know people who've lost smaller dogs. Cases of them attacking kids aren't unheard of either, and the risk isn't something to laugh at when it comes to unsupervised small kids.
As far as i'm concerned, when coyotes reach the population levels that it's easy to see in metro Vancouver, it's a good time to start a culling campaign. This is not an endangered animal.
Coyotes do not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as a lion. And people should celebrate anytime a native predator is able to carve out a niche in an urban environment as long as it doesn’t involve murdering children. Which coyotes don’t do. They eat small mammals and also sometimes invasive feral cats.
The reason coyotes don't eat children is that they're kept separate. Same reason sharks don't eat children. Left to their own devices, coyotes obviously will eat children.
> I used to go for six mile walks in the High Desert for exercise. I routinely ran into coyotes. They never bothered me.
> I did tell my children to not go out alone at night. There had been two or three attacks on children in the previous five years.
Another story that came up on HN was someone describing how he used to adventure through the wild areas near his home, and was never bothered by the lone coyotes he saw, but that on one occasion he met two coyotes together, and they began circling him. I didn't manage to find that one today.
My dad lives in Silverlake LA and there’s a coyote den up the hill a bit from his house. He’s got two huge dogs, but sometimes when you walk em they’ll get super excited to go after a coyote standing in the middle of the street. Thing is, they’re damn smart, and you can be sure that if you see one in the street, there’s another one the opposite way down the street, usually hiding under a car. They 100% know when they have numbers on a larger animal and when they don’t.
Coyotes attacked a small dog in the park near my house last fall (when the juveniles leave the den and try to stake out territory) so I understand the concern. But comparing them to lions in Zimbabwe doesn’t resonate with me and I live in Chicago (we have tons, one was under my porch last year).
Think of all the samples of the interaction function between humans and the >1mm coyotes (often unbeknownst to the humans) in American cities each day. The list of all attacks recorded in modern times has a Wikipedia page. In human-created spaces we make very little separation from the habitats coyotes live in. They choose not to predate the defenseless babies they encounter in backyards because it is not the ecological niche they have carved out.
I will let my older children play unsupervised in my backyard despite knowing there are dozens of coyotes in my city because no creature has made a niche out of killing them. The same is not true for my very young children but that’s because toddlers have made an evolutionary niche out of killing themselves :)
> but that on one occasion he met two coyotes together, and they began circling him.
He must have done something to react fearfully. I've charged at literal packs of 10 to 15 of them, yelling and enjoying myself, only to have them scatter in complete chaos. With children and no adult present, coyotes are a real danger, but when they meet adults that show no fear, they're amazingly nervous. I know of only one North American attack on a human adult in recent history (a rather petite woman) that was fatal.
While walking my dog on leash some years back, we were surrounded and stalked by 5 very hungry coyotes (it was a drought year and they were very scrawny) for about 20 minutes.
They got increasingly more bold, eventually only just out of kicking range. As I would charge and threaten the one or two in front of me, the others would try to approach from behind. We were being hunted.
All this while carrying my dog (they definitely would have killed him if he were on the ground) and wearing flip flops.
This was in Santa Cruz, late in the summer, at dusk. Terrifying. They tracked us all the way back to the car, but once I found a good stick they became much less daring.
putting coyotes in NYC makes as much sense to me as putting a subway train network in a coyote preservation wilderness
they may attack small humans, get rabbies, get hit by cars, generally be stressed and miserable from the hustle and bustle
Generation downvoting reality is at it again. Sorry, i suspect you grew up somewhere where you have to actually interact with "nature" and not its Disney-approximations on tv. I wish i could be the owl on the wall, when these things in some-freezing winter - starved out of common sense, maul some nature idealizing jogger, who "will never be attacked because they are normally scared of humans". Nature expands exponential and if you give up to it, it will demand twice the amount tomorrow.
one was, but liked to sit in the front patio, where the coyote literally grabbed it right in front of my mother, just a foot from the door. The other two were younger and outdoor cats. The dogs I know of having been killed were no more outdoor dogs than any dog is while being walked, sometimes briefly off-leash, in a park or wood, by its owner.
Implying blame on the owners of these pets for a plague of predators way outside the scope of any natural population they would have in an area is also just off the rocker. We live in a modified environment largely of our creation, where many wild animal populations have long since slid from whatever would have in some distant past been natural. Culling coyotes in urban areas, where they can be a real danger to both pets and kids, is not some sort of grotesque ecological sin.
There have been less than 10 (Wikipedia says 2) fatal coyote attacks in recorded history. A conservative estimate of the number of native birds and small mammals killed by feral cats since unix time began counting on 1/1/1970 is 1 trillion. Literally 20 billion a year. That’s a grotesque ecological sin against the ecosystems which keep us alive. Artificially supporting an invasive species which eats your petsmart kibble and then ravages (often as play) whatever vestige of the native wonder that existed in North America before we turned it into lawns is an ecological sin. Not caring for it and trying to leave it a better place than we found it for the next generation is an ecological sin.
And are you proposing that culling coyotes is just the same as killing off humans who overpopulate?
Also, in our case, whatever our sustainable population in a place is, that's our natural population. Seeing as how we're completely a product of nature too, the numbers we can keep alive are natural.
An exaggerated coyote population in an urban landscape on the other hand, isn't natural because it depends on our presence to stay that way.
Any perceived implication is a result of your own projection. I asked a simple, neutral question. I've had an entire litter of labs get eaten by coyotes and was literally just curious about your own predicament.
I’m sorry but if you let your cat outside then don’t be surprised when it’s snatched by a predator higher up the food chain. Your cat isn’t native to the area either and it’s certainly preying on animals lower down the chain.
It's good fun to watch and listen to the coyotes until one of them steals a beloved pet away right before your eyes. My family has lost a total of three cats to these things and I know people who've lost smaller dogs. Cases of them attacking kids aren't unheard of either, and the risk isn't something to laugh at when it comes to unsupervised small kids.
As far as i'm concerned, when coyotes reach the population levels that it's easy to see in metro Vancouver, it's a good time to start a culling campaign. This is not an endangered animal.