Coyote Run

Every morn­ing at dawn I walk down the dri­ve­way with my dog, Zoey, to get the news­pa­per. When we stepped out­side one day a cou­ple of years ago, a coy­ote stood in the front yard. Lean with a dirty gray coat, spindly legs, long snout, and pointy tri­an­gu­lar ears, it low­ered its head, and stared at us with pierc­ing close-set eyes.

I keep Zoey’s leash in a peach bas­ket just out­side the door. She gave out a gut­tur­al cry and sprang for­ward before I had a chance to reach for it.

The coy­ote ran down my dri­ve­way and took off up the street. The hair on Zoey’s back spik­ing into a mohawk, every mus­cle in her body bulging, her teeth bared, she gave chase.

Zoey is an Amer­i­can Bull­dog, two feet tall at the shoul­ders, weigh­ing 70 pounds. The aver­age coy­ote is her height but less than half her weight. When Zoey was young, she would have been more than a match for any coy­ote, but she was eleven years old that day with arthri­tis in her front shoul­ders and an arti­fi­cial back knee, so I wasn’t sure she could sur­vive a fight with this one.

Zoey paid me no heed when I yelled at her to stop. I ran after her. Sev­en­ty-three years old with dou­ble knee replace­ments, I lost ground on her quick­ly. By the time I got to the bot­tom of the dri­ve­way, she was fifty yards up the street with the coy­ote anoth­er twen­ty yards ahead of her. I’d almost lost sight of them when Zoey’s adren­a­line surge wore off, and she slowed to a stiff-legged trot. The coy­ote could have pulled away from her eas­i­ly, but instead it looked back and stopped. This revived Zoey’s flag­ging ener­gy, and she charged ahead. The coy­ote wait­ed until Zoey was almost on it, then hopped off the street, and loped up a steep hill.

Zoey fol­lowed in hot pur­suit. About half-way up, her arthri­tis final­ly got the best of her. She stum­bled and fell, then scram­bled to her feet, bark­ing hys­ter­i­cal­ly, but she was too weak to climb higher.

I clumped along the street, stag­gered up the hill, and grabbed her col­lar. Breath­ing hard, I looked up at the sum­mit. A sec­ond coy­ote stood beside the one Zoey had chased. Nei­ther seemed tired or the least bit fear­ful. While I caught my breath, they watched us close­ly. When I pulled Zoey back down to the street, they trot­ted over the hill out of sight.

Back inside the house, Zoey col­lapsed on the rug in my home-office, and I plopped down in my desk chair. As Zoey lay at my feet, pant­i­ng furi­ous­ly, spent, and exhaust­ed, a grudg­ing respect for the flee­ing coy­ote came over me. It had set a trap for a dog too big to take down alone. It stopped on the street to lure Zoey to the top of the hill where its part­ner was wait­ing. We were lucky Zoey’s arthri­tis broke her down. If she’d been able to scale that hill, she’d have been an easy kill in a two-on-one fight.

Many of my neigh­bors’ pets have not been so fortunate.

My neigh­bor­hood is an eques­tri­an com­mu­ni­ty with large lots and miles of trails wind­ing in between and around the prop­er­ties, all nes­tled up against a fifty-six-hun­dred-acre nature pre­serve. Coy­otes migrate from the pre­serve, set up dens in the brush, and hunt the trails, open fields, and backyards.

Walk­ing my dogs and horse­back rid­ing dai­ly, I’ve seen count­less coy­otes since I moved here, but recent­ly there’s been a change in their behav­ior. The fre­quen­cy of sight­ings has increased. I see coy­otes at all times of the day, any­where and every­where, in streets, neigh­bors’ yards, and home con­struc­tion sites. They shied away from me before. Now, they rarely retreat, even when Zoey and P.D., an 80-pound Pit Bull, are with me. They’re no longer afraid of people.

This absence of fear, referred to as habit­u­a­tion, is a dan­ger­ous phe­nom­e­non. Nat­u­ral­ists Rex Bak­er and Robert Timm, who stud­ied coy­otes in sub­ur­ban and urban envi­ron­ments, observed sev­en stages of esca­lat­ing aggres­sive behav­ior among habit­u­at­ed coy­otes. Coy­otes in my neigh­bor­hood have reached stage 5 – attack­ing pets on a leash or stand­ing near an own­er. If Bak­er and Timm’s study is an accu­rate pre­dic­tor of coy­ote aggres­sion, we need to reverse the progress of habit­u­a­tion before it reach­es Stages 6 and 7, threat­en­ing actions toward chil­dren and adults.

The prob­lem of habit­u­a­tion is not unique to my neigh­bor­hood. No one knows how many coy­otes there are nation­wide, but esti­mates reach into the mil­lions. In Cal­i­for­nia alone, nat­u­ral­ists think there could be as many as 750,000, and the pop­u­la­tion is grow­ing. Coy­otes are fierce­ly ter­ri­to­r­i­al. As their num­bers increase, they spread out to estab­lish new hunt­ing grounds. As a result, they are ubiq­ui­tous. They live in vir­tu­al­ly every rur­al, sub­ur­ban, and urban area from the Arc­tic Cir­cle to Pana­ma, from New York City to down­town Chica­go, San Fran­cis­co, and Los Angeles.

Habit­u­a­tion has reached Stage 5 in count­less neigh­bor­hoods and reports of attacks on pets are com­mon­place, but thank­ful­ly, attacks on peo­ple are rare. Bak­er and Timm’s study found 367 report­ed coy­ote attacks on humans over the four decades from 1977 through 2015. About half occurred in Cal­i­for­nia. Chil­dren com­prised 40% of the vic­tims, adults 60%. Many of the attacks on small chil­dren appeared to be preda­to­ry and occurred dur­ing the mat­ing and pup-rais­ing sea­son from March through August when coy­ote mates, who are monog­a­mous for life, are some­times des­per­ate for prey to feed their young. Attacks on adults often involved peo­ple try­ing to defend their pets from a coy­ote mauling.

In anoth­er study of coy­ote attacks by Lynsey White and Stan­ley Gehrt, about half result­ed in minor bite wounds. Preda­to­ry attacks and rabid coy­otes account­ed for most of the seri­ous injuries.

There have only been two report­ed fatal coy­ote attacks in North Amer­i­ca. A lone coy­ote killed a three-year-old girl in front of her house in Glen­dale, Cal­i­for­nia, in 1985, and a pack of coy­otes attacked a young woman on a hik­ing trail in Cana­da in 2002.

Coy­ote stud­ies show that there are no easy ways to reform aggres­sive behav­ior once coy­otes become habit­u­at­ed. Exter­mi­na­tion doesn’t work. About 400,000 coy­otes are killed annu­al­ly, 80,000 by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment alone, but coy­ote pop­u­la­tions con­tin­ue to explode, large­ly because coy­ote biol­o­gy is primed to com­bat exter­mi­na­tion. When the rate of killing increas­es, females pro­duce larg­er lit­ters, and new­born coy­otes mature faster and quick­ly fill the habi­tat vac­u­um cre­at­ed by the killings.

Relo­cat­ing them is also inef­fec­tive. They usu­al­ly return to their orig­i­nal ter­ri­to­ry, and when they don’t, oth­er coy­otes move in and take over.

The most effec­tive alter­na­tive to pro­tect pets and peo­ple seems to be “haz­ing,” reviv­ing a coyote’s nat­ur­al fear of humans. The sim­plest way to haze is to wave your arms and yell at a coy­ote, but that alone is often inef­fec­tive where habit­u­a­tion has tak­en hold in the coy­ote pop­u­la­tion. Coy­ote experts rec­om­mend blast­ing airhorns, shak­ing plas­tic con­tain­ers filled with rocks, bang­ing pots and pans togeth­er, throw­ing rocks, turn­ing water hoses on them, and pep­per spray.

Bak­er and Timm believe that haz­ing may not work once a coy­ote has reached Stage 5, attack­ing pets in the pres­ence of their own­ers. They rec­om­mend more dras­tic mea­sures along with haz­ing to deter aggres­sion at that stage, such as removal of mem­bers of the local coy­ote pop­u­la­tion through exter­mi­na­tion or relo­ca­tion, to send a mes­sage to the remain­ing pack.

Oth­er stud­ies con­clude that haz­ing can cure a severe coy­ote habit­u­a­tion prob­lem if all the peo­ple in a neigh­bor­hood con­sis­tent­ly haze every coy­ote they con­front. They rec­om­mend com­mu­ni­ty out­reach and edu­ca­tion to achieve an effec­tive haz­ing program.

I’m against killing coy­otes and in favor of haz­ing. Coy­otes are not evil. They are wild preda­tors, try­ing to make a liv­ing, and impor­tant mem­bers of the eco sys­tem, help­ing to con­trol the rodent, small mam­mal, and rep­tile pop­u­la­tions. In my neighborhood’s case, they were here first. We moved into their nat­ur­al habi­tat. I feel strong­ly we should try to coex­ist with them.

I real­ize, though, that I might not hold that view if the flee­ing coyote’s trap had worked a cou­ple of years ago. If the coy­ote and its part­ner had killed Zoey. If I’d heard her death wails. If she’d died in my arms. Some of my neigh­bors have lost their pets that way. They dis­agree with me, and I can’t blame them.

Mean­while, I moved that peach bas­ket inside my door. I snap on the leash before we go out­side. And I haze every coy­ote we meet on the trails.

Post Script: All the pho­tographs of coy­otes dis­played here I took in my neigh­bor­hood over the last cou­ple of years before I start­ed haz­ing them. As you can see, they were almost indif­fer­ent to my presence.