Thanks for posting this, such a nice story and writeup!
Where I live in Vancouver the coyotes have been very noticeable this year. I love to hang out with them in the park and garden, and hear them howl with the cop cars at night. They are not pets though - I always keep my distance and keep aware of the possibility that they might sneak up on me.
I take care of an outdoor cat in the neighborhood, and yes it's possible that a coyote will eat a cat or small dog. I worry about her but there are many fences, she is smart as well as a good climber. There are many hazards in the city that don't have the positive sides that coyotes do, and I think it's important that we learn to live with them and honour what they bring to our lives. That includes rat control, which we rather need here.
I take care of an outdoor cat in the neighborhood, and yes it's possible that a coyote will eat a cat or small dog.
I live near a trail which also serves as a wildlife corridor, including coyotes that we regularly see on our dog walks. Years ago, we had a feral cat that we would feed and care for (including neutering). He remained outside because he refused to even be brought inside, let alone live with us. This guy was huge, and looked like he had won his share of fights with the scars to prove it. If a cat would survive in the wild, it would be this guy. But even he wasn’t tough enough to hold off (what I assume were) coyotes forever, and one day he just quit coming around.
After that I’ve noticed that we just don’t have outdoor cats in our neighborhood.
(And for context, we aren't out in the boonies; this is within the city limits of Redmond, WA, where the local elementary gets locked down about once a year because mama bear and her cubs showed up off that same trail.)
This isn't such a bad thing. I love cats, but assuming coyotes are native to where you live, having them around is way better than outdoor cats (feral or otherwise) as they kill a ridiculous amount of native species.
Coyotes aren’t native to the northwest, they moved in after European settlers extirpated the wolves. They almost surely are less damaging to natives though.
We just had this a week or so ago. Stray cat was so cautious that at the end of convalescing in our garage following getting fixed (we had to trap him) he stayed in the garage all day after we opened the side door, and even then, near dusk he stood on the threshold and looked out for 11 straight minutes before taking a step out.
Last week coyotes took him (in part of the country quite far from King County) at night right next to our house, right next to his most familiar territory, and not 20-30 feet from a number of structures he routinely climbed on top of but which coyotes would have no chance of following.
I currently can’t help but take a dim view of coyotes at the current moment, for selfish reasons. I hadn’t thought this to be at all likely given the apparent caution the cat took, but I did spent a couple of years building up a good relationship with that sweet guy.
Even more bizarre I fenced in my yard hoping to keep out the rabbits, but they always find a way in. Last winter I went out there and found a dismembered rabbit in the middle of the yard. I went to get a bag to pick it up, and when I got back, all that was left were a couple feet. An eagle maybe? I left the feet, but nothing came to get them :D
We had a house near Matthews Beach, and when we moved in there were many rabbits in the neighborhood and in our yard. We have a terrier-mix mutt, and there weren't rabbits in our yard for long...
We have had the opposite experience: over the years, mama rabbits have had multiple litters in our backyard. We have two pit bull terriers, and they would chase the rabbits (never catching them), so mama rabbit knows there are dogs. My only theory is that the dogs are a known quantity, and the dogs keep the real predators out of the backyard.
My dog definitely caught rabbits. He even brought two kits into the house. He's a sweetheart in every other circumstance, but he loves toys that squeak when he mauls them.
I'm a little too simple to assign moral values like good/bad or win/lose to nature things, all I know is I like cats more because they're cute, so I'll always take them over coyotes.
Humans could be considered invasive too, it's not a huge win if a super predator starts beating us back. At least not from our agreed upon definitions of "win", then again if one starts to play with the meaning of words, one can say the sky is green.
Most natural populations of a given species have density-dependent population regulation. Be it from a reduced food supply, or multi-year cycles where they provide ample food for their predators population to grow to the point they become the food supply being reduced until their predators population shrinks and the cycle begins again. Disease transmission also acts to keep populations in check when density increases too much where food is essentially unlimited. Negative feedback loops are fascinating and were unique in the sense that we’ve managed to short-circuit nearly all of them to virtually every other species detriment.
A huge win to all the birds and smaller mammals that are killed in the billions every year by domestic cats that shouldn't be there. They fuck up the whole system.
You... hang out with coyotes in the park? I live near a park with coyotes and all of us are wary of them. The people who walk their dogs frequently carry sticks. As a parent of a 1 yr old and 4 yr old who likes to let them have some degree of age appropriate freedom running around in the park, I can't help but think of the coyotes. Maybe I'm wrong, but they seem like they might be dangerous around people, particularly children.
Maybe it's HN's demographics speaking, but everyone here is talking about their pets, but what about children? Do coyotes not attack kids?
I live in a rather rural area in King county and we have packs of coyote that hunted down a deer one winter, and is generally weary of humans and dogs (the neighborhood has 2+ dog per household on average).
Then the past weekend we played a round of Golf at Newcastle and a pack of coyote pups pop up in broad daylight and one of them lied down to watch us tee off then left when we're done. It was very cute and we had to fight the urge to pet them like puppies
We have coyotes in our backyard (literally as I write this one is sleeping in our flower beds). They are extremely shy (and not very big). We have cats go through the same yard all the time. That said, coyotes do kill cats. I would be wary if confronted by a coyote and keep children away from. But attacks are apparently extremely rare:
Coyotes are wary of people and can usually be scared off by making loud noises. Coyote attacks on people are very rare. Off leash, escaped, or stray domestic dogs are much more of a threat to children than coyotes.
On the topic of rat control, your comment interleaves two diametrically opposed approaches in the biological solutions space. Providing calorie input to a feral (invasive, nonnative) cat as opposed to merely recognizing the beauty and effectiveness of a species which is native to this continent (although maybe not Vancouver before 1900, TIL). I have an indoor cat so I understand the caretaking instinct. But the consequences for our urban ecosystems of artificially supporting feral cats are severe. They rarely kill rats, especially not when they have easier options like our birds and native small mammals. And with the surplus calorie supply that so many concerned city dwellers give them, they often fall back to their kill and play instincts instead of actually hunting for food, which leads to even less of the desperate “I shall attack a 12 ounce demon with buck teeth” behavior that we fantasize about.
I live in Chicago and had a coyote briefly staying under my deck last autumn when the juveniles leave their dens. They regularly prowl through my neighborhood, traveling north and south on the commuter rail line tracks and ducking off into parks and backyards for hunting. Such a magnificent creature to see up close. That experience motivated me to kill the ornamental boxwood that was in my backyard and start planting native plants which can support native birds, pollinators and small mammals and in turn provide a food supply all the way up the food chain to that coyote. I wish more people in my city spent their money and time on that food chain instead of one that begins and ends at PetSmart.
I grew up in a buffer zone with a lot of coyotes and one day our (small male) dog was lured away by noisy females. The next day all I found was his collar about a km away, chewed through and bloody. They are most certainly not pets and are incredibly smart and resourceful.
In our neighborhood near Boston, coyotes have become very active at night and trot in the middle of roads and between houses. Several times in the morning I have found absolutely shredded carcasses of squirrels and rabbits on our property in locations which are not likely to be attributed to other predators such as owls.
We have also noticed fewer raccoons on our security camera, which we used to see several times per week at night around our fishpond (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33952437) but now only once or twice per month.
Neighbors have also reported missing outdoor cats, which I believe are probably coyote kills (we live on a small peninsula ~1 km^2 so cats are unlikely to wander far from home). About 10 years ago, a nearby relative found the carcass of a cat on his front lawn, which he believes was a coyote. All that was left was the skin/fur and the intestines.
Yes, I used to live on a peninsula in Quincy and there were coyotes that would run past us on the beach from time to time or be seen walking down the sidewalk or hanging out in the back yard.
>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
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.
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.
Sorry- but do you honestly belief that coyotes will hunt rats? In a city? They will eat fastfood leftovers from the garbage cans with the rats. Creatures hunt out of desperation- hunting is energy-expensive, dangerous and often not successful unless it targets the small, old or parasite riddled. That coyote will get diabetes before it gets to even start hunting rats.
Not sure about coyotes, but here in Norway foxes hang around near the garbage bins of restaurants because the garbage attracts rat. They will then leave happily with a huge rats in their mouths.
London, England has a large population of urban foxes.
It seems that their favourite meal is discarded fast-food fried chicken bits, their second choice is "raid the garbage bins for anything smelly and meat-based". But for sure they'd take live prey such as rats. They also eat snails and earthworms.
In other words, a successful urban animal should be nocturnal, fast and agile, clever and above all: omnivorous.
I have webcam footage from my backyard of a Coyote catching and eating a rat. The University of Washington has been doing DNA analysis of the scat of urban Coyotes and they eat a lot of rats (even more rabbits).
Coyotes seem remarkably adaptable to urban environments. The coyotes I’ve seen in Chicago are something else. I’ve seen them trotting down the sidewalk of four-lane roads in broad daylight (they were quite fat too). Even had one run right past me as I was waking down the sidewalk, I thought it was a dog at first.
One of the best Chicago coyote incidents was one around Lincoln Park (I think it was) that walked into a Quizno’s or something on a hot summer day and hopped into the drink cooler.
In North America, Coyotes have almost completely replaced the ecological niche that feral dogs fill in most of the rest of the world's urban environments.
Coyotes are basically wild dogs, they are quite smart and can become tame around humans if they figure out that people don't pose much of a threat and might give them food (tame is different from domesticated however, they are still potentially dangerous).
This being a positive thing in the sense of managing the rodent population feels like in the simpsons when they introduce snakes to eat lizards and then gorillas to take care of the snake overpopulation.
In this case humans didn’t introduce the coyotes. We’ve diminished the populations of most predators like coyotes such that other animals’ populations grow out of control without human intervention. So in this case humans intervened by displacing coyotes previously not by introducing them now.
There have been some hilarious and unfortunate disasters using introduced populations for pest control. But coyotes are not introduced. They are native to the area which means there are many checks and balances in place.
Rat control is not just a nice bonus option to reduce an irritation - we need to take it seriously in light of the Black Death. The fact of the matter is I see people having trouble with rat control in my area and we could use help to manage something that is potentially a lot more dangerous than coyotes.
Coyotes are not native to the eastern US. The eastern US was mostly forest and coyotes don't typically hunt in forested areas. Coyotes only spread to the eastern US after 1900.
Also, eastern coyotes typically also have wolf and dog DNA. Coyotes, wolves, and dogs can and do interbreed. This has resulted in some places in the eastern US in a subspecies that isn't afraid of humans due to the dog DNA, that can hunt in open areas due to the coyote DNA, and can also hunt in forested areas due to the wolf DNA.
Coywolves are also much larger and more powerful than coyotes. It may have been an anomaly, but I had the opportunity to see one close up on the edge of my rural property in PA that was easily the size of a German shepherd.
How effective will a pair of coyotes hanging out in Central Park be for rodent control in the city? It's the rats running in the drains, streets, buildings that are the problem. Rats living in the park are not what the people living in the city care about
That we should be overprotective of dangerous animals--in this case celebrating that they are living in the middle of a very dense city--is a luxury belief. It makes dumb rich people feel good and the costs are borne by others. For another example see the reintroduction of wolves in Colorado.
Honestly, as a curiosum and token wildlife insert I get it. Bit like zoo animals.
But I'm not sure coyotes and mega cities are a good mariage. I see people mentioning rat controll, but imagine the size of the coyote population you would need to make even a small dent in that.
> Coyotes can also help manage the city’s rodent problem and keep other wildlife populations, like Canada geese and raccoons, in check.
Not just wildlife. A pack tracked my wily cat for months. I saw a couple of close calls. They learned that the cat liked to leave the house for a stroll a little before dawn. One morning they waited for him and took him right outside the cat door. It was pretty amazing that he lived nine years as thick as coyotes are around here. I can't bear to keep a cat locked in the house, so haven't had the nerve to get another since then.
I previously lost a cat to a pack of raccoons. But my cats collectively are way ahead of the game in terms of animal biomass harvested.
Our cats go into cat jail in the evening, and don't get released until we wake up. Keeping them inside during the night means fewer fights, less risk from cars, and reduced chance of encounters with wildlife.
Coyotes are small but dangerous. I wouldn't even let a 100lb dog outside off-leash if I've seen coyotes in the area, they just go right for the belly and rip out the innards.
Probably best to keep your cats inside even if you do get another one, considering the devastating effect they have as an invasive species on local wildlife. [1]
This gets trotted right out every time someone mentions their cat being let outside, as if it were some sort of awful sin and thus makes the cat's owner totally wrong in any worry or complaint they have about their cat's safety outdoors. It's ridiculous, particularly when there's a very easy solution to cats hunting local birds: a collar with a little bell. It's nearly guaranteed to ruin their hunting.
That aside, you yourself, as a human, are an invasive species that kills tons of animals indirectly through your habits each year, should you thus be enclosed 24 hours a day? Cats killing off random birds. The ship of human intervention in the ecosystem has long since sailed, and blaming cat owners for a relatively tiny part of it is an absurdity in badly applied blame.
> a collar with a little bell. It's nearly guaranteed to ruin their hunting.
Unfortunately, that's not true. There was a study by some academics in Britain a few years° ago that showed effectively no difference in hunting success rates between belled and un-belled cats. The explanation is that cats are ambush predators, so once they (very quickly) learn how to stalk (they're moving slowly, anyway) without ringing the bell, their quarry doesn't hear the bell until they pounce, when it's (mostly) too late.
They were specifically looking at songbirds, as I recall. Maybe success rates for rodents are different - though that'd hardly be a good thing, because we generally want cats to kill mice and rats!
---
[On reflection]: Based on where I remember I was living when I read it, this was over a decade ago. (Where does time go?) There may have been updates since.
While the misanthropy is compelling, and bell collars slightly reduce hunting success for (invasive, feral) cats, literally nothing else in your comment correct.
Concern for native birds and small mammals which are a keystone part of our ecosystems is not futile. They support literally everything required for human survival (carbon cycle, water, cycle, nitrogen cycle, pollination, sea dispersal, pollution control, etc) directly, and indirectly by their behaviors which have coevolved for millions of years. Invasive, feral cats, just like humans have only been here for a very short window of time, and while there are still native birds and mammals and plants left to care for, we can and should support them by minimizing the wonton carnage and death which we unleash each year. You’re probably aware that in North America alone feral cats kill between 10 and 30 billion native birds and small mammals a year. Euthanasia instead of trap neuter release is not a sailed ship. Planting native (human intervention) and undoing the lawns (human intervention) that have destroyed our native ecosystems is not a sailed ship. There is hope and it is exciting to work towards this in your own community and I hope you come to see that. The results (insects return, the soil enriches and traps carbon, and birds you've never seen before sing on your back porch in the morning) are nearly immediate and heartwarming
>You’re probably aware that in North America alone for all cats kill between 10 and 30 billion native birds and small mammals a year
and how many of those birds and mammals were old and ill and would be killed by other predators in similar situation in non-developed areas? Why didn't you specify that comparative number? May be because that would have shown that the cats are just doing the job of other predators pushed out by humans?
Btw, the cats kill up to 4 billion birds annually. At the same time 3.5 billion birds die hitting glass of the buildings. Cats kill old/ill. The birds hitting building aren't majority old/ill. Thus killings by cats are mostly beneficial to the bird species while glass buildings make tremendous damage to the bird species.
> At the same time 3.5 billion birds die hitting glass of the buildings.
Do you have a citation for this? Are you comparing North American cat deaths to worldwide building collisions? Estimates I'm seeing of North American center around 600 million, a far cry from deaths due to cats.
No, they are about the same. The 3.5 billion is the top estimate similar to how 4 billion is top estimate for killed by cats. The lower estimates in both cases around 1 billion something.
FWIW 3.5 billion is not the top estimate, although I'm not sure how to interpret the way the estimate is stated ("annual mortality may be minimally 1.28 billion–3.46 billion or as high as 1.92 billion–5.19 billion"). What does it mean to have a range for each end of the range? The author only quotes the absolute lowest number from the study in press about it (see https://www.lehighvalleynews.com/environment-science/3-5-mil...), but maybe is just preferring to be conservative.
What evidence do you have that the birds killed by cats are mainly old or ill?
Cats being an invasive species in most places on earth means that most bird species have not evolved with them as a natural predator, and so are at an innate disadvantage.
And yes, birds hitting man made structures is a major problem. There can be two bad things at once. Just because there are two bad things doesn't mean we give up tackling one or the other.
>What evidence do you have that the birds killed by cats are mainly old or ill?
it is well established pattern of predation in the Nature. Again, you specified the total number without providing the old/ill number. The relation of those numbers can completely change the conclusion, and i can only wonder why you didn't provide the old/ill number.
>Cats being an invasive species in most places on earth
What planet "earth" you're talking about? On the 3rd planet from Sun the wild cats are practically everywhere. And in the places where there are no cats, there are still similar predators - ferrets, foxes, etc.
>And yes, birds hitting man made structures is a major problem. There can be two bad things at once.
No 2 bad things here. Predation by cats is natural, and thus mostly good, in the Nature-way, for the species being predated upon. The man made structures are really bad as i described in my previous comment. Yet somehow you want to tackle the first and not the second.
The burden of proof is on the one making the claim.
I claimed billions of birds are killed each year by cats and provided a source (and there exist many more).
> Again, you specified the total number without providing the old/ill number. The relation of those numbers can completely change the conclusion, and i can only wonder why you didn't provide the old/ill number.
You claimed they kill mainly the sick and old birds but provide no sources for this claim, then attack my source for not containing the proof you failed to provide.
> On the 3rd planet from Sun the wild cats are practically everywhere.
So are rats. Would you call them a native species in places like Hawaii? No, neither are cats.
> somehow you want to tackle the first and not the second
Because this thread is about cats, not buildings. This is just changing the subject when your argument won’t stand up to scrutiny.
The word natural is doing a lot of lifting here. I think we are talking past each other because we don’t have the same framework for understanding how ecosystems work. Predation by an invasive species is not natural in the sense that the species did not coevolve. It seems we don’t agree that cats are an invasive species or even on the definition of an invasive species
There is very little natural in the unnatural environment of the human developed areas. That train has long left the station. That includes the natural predators. With those natural predators gone, cats are doing the job of those predators. Whether you call the cats invasive or not - the label doesn't matter in that situation, somebody has got to do the job.
And the main invasive species is humans. The humans invade and change the environment, and the cats are actually natural in that new environment.
You're allowed to let your cat outside and kill nature, but you aren't allowed to be mad when nature fights back. The double standard with which people treat feral dogs/cats (treating kill shelters for overpopulation as an awful sin) versus how they treat snakes and alligators (go into the woods and kill them on sight just for existing) makes me nauseous.
>You're allowed to let your cat outside and kill nature, but you aren't allowed to be mad when nature fights back.
Feel free to smugly tell me that same thing whenever some animal or human you love is killed off by some element of nature. Its also hypocritical: Your comfortable, modern existence is absolutely, wholly the product of a colossal bending and crushing of nature to human will that let you sit at a laptop or on your phone and complain about people who simply recognize this practical reality in a more direct and basic context.
Also, I have no problem with culling feral cats and dogs if their populations can't also be controlled with more humane things like sterilization campaigns. Why let them starve and suffer pointlessly?
>Probably best to keep your cats inside even if you do get another one, considering the devastating effect they have as an invasive species on local wildlife. [1]
You're posting an article by the Smithsonian department employing that felon convicted for animal cruelty toward cats.
Wrt. the article itself - it has pretty much no scientific merits as, not surprisingly given the authors' agenda, the article has an obvious fundamental flaw disqualifying it from science - it doesn't specify how many of that wildlife killed by cats were old/ill who would be anyway killed by other predators if it were a natural setting and not a developed area where the only predators left are cats.
If we to believe the article's total numbers then it would really mean what the cats are just doing the job of other predators pushed out by humans. Killing the old/ill birds, reptiles, mammals by predators is good for those birds, reptiles, mammals species. (and around humans say an old/ill bird not killed by cats would become a dead bird and a food for rats or something like this)
You’re just stating a trait of animal predation. Predation often eliminates the weakest animals in a population. The point is that invasive species by definition of invasive predate in a way that their prey has not had adequate evolutionary space to adapt to because they are introduced. All the words in that sentence have precise definitions in ecology and I don’t think we share the same framework or definitions
If your cat actually eats what they kill (ours did) it's not nicer for the environment to turn forest into farmland to grow corn to feed chickens to turn into cat food. You're just pushing the environmental impact somewhere you can't see it.
> We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually.
I don't understand how to marry the point you're trying to make to this. Cats are an invasive species to most small animals, and should be kept from accessing them.
In addition to the havoc they wreak on local small animal populations, outdoor cats live shorter lives than their indoor counterparts.
Realistically, in much of the US both urban and rural, cats are as much a part of the wildlife as whatever animal purists actually want to call wildlife. You can spay, neuter, domesticate, and indoor them as much as humans are capable of doing; but they breed like, well, cats, and they deeply want the freedom of being outside. Most modern dogs would not survive if humans didn't intervene in their survival; but the vast majority of cats would. Humans don't generally actively participate in inciting cat breeding like we do with dogs; in fact, we try to stop it as much as we can. What you're describing is just... nature. Its harsh, its brutal, but cats are a very natural part of our ecosystem.
Even the term "domesticated cat" is a partial, minor misnomer [1]. They aren't really domesticated in the same way dogs are. They're wild animals, who's wild behavior just happens to be kinda chill and mesh well with humans.
Cats do live longer when you keep them inside. Humans would also live longer if we kept them in a prison for their entire life, feeding them a nutritionally perfect slurry. Not sure why its relevant to the discussion.
They’re willfully ignoring the facts and indulging in emotional projection. Domestic cats aren’t wild animals, they’re pets. Letting them roam outdoors is irresponsible both to local ecosystems and to the cats themselves.
Many dogs will run right out the door if left to their own devices, but somehow this is not ok while the same behavior for cats is. Very strange.
I think they're pointing out also that humans themselves are an invasive species. They've killed wildlife and converted fertile land to monocultures. Letting humans roam outdoors tends to be irresponsible to local ecosystems.
You could try thinking about it. Buying cat food at the store isn't magic. It comes from somewhere.
Cats can eat the wildlife in your yard. Or, you could have wildlife in your yard, and offset the calories by growing them on more farmland somewhere else.
The only difference in the second scenario is that you don't see the extra acre of woods — along with all the lizards and birds that would live there — getting turned into soybeans.
"Feral Cats are wild-living variant of the common pet cat, introduced to Hawai‘i by Europeans. Feral cats have established populations on all eight of the main Hawaiian Islands and contribute to widespread ecological disruptions that threaten native Hawaiian wildlife. Feral cats are one of the most devastating predators of Hawai‘i’s unique wildlife. In addition to direct predation, feral cats also spread a potentially lethal parasite (Toxoplasma gondii) that contaminates terrestrial, freshwater, and marine environments and has been shown to negatively impact birds and mammals – including humans."
Most pet food is made from waste from producing human food. E.g. offal. So I'm not sure pet food accounts for any significant loss of wild land on its own.
A bunch of them live on my property. They have a roll call at night and it’s an eerie screamhowl I’m still not used to after 5 years. We don’t usually see them in daytime.
It is hilarious to me to be reading about city folk being amazed at a few coyotes and an owl. In Nebraska coyotes are vermin and you shoot them on sight if they are on your farm for all the trouble and danger they can cause. We used to go out on the property and call them for target practice.
edit: lol at the downvotes, welcome to the real world?
Exactly. As a European I‘m accustomed to this sentiment by the urban academic caste. Our‘s is celebrating that ruralites are exposed to literal wolves again. Peak elitism on display.
As if there was some kumbaya coexistence in the past that represents nature. You know, you strolling down 5th Ave, sipping on your Starbucks, and the Coyote across the street, giving each other the nod.
The only actual Coexistence being you keeping a healthy distance from them.
I’m a “ruralite“ and I would certainly prefer wolves over human hunters in certain conditions. I would also advocate for expanding these conditions to wherever possible in Europe.
Kindly stop presuming that you can speak for other people you haven’t actually asked for their opinion.
Had the most success with goats and chicken kept behind an electric fence at night.
Everything else ends up eaten by the wolves/coyotes within a year.
Luckily the eagle populations less than 50 miles away have not yet noticed us.
We're more of a target of opportunity for the wolf population due to the abundance of whitetail deer.
Those deer provide an excellent source of inexpensive protein from hunting. We can have one of the local butchers process the entire deer for under $200. The usual agreement is that the meat from the first deer of the season goes to the landowner(they pay for processing). The rest is up to the hunter.
Most years we end up with enough extra that we donate the processed meat to local churches for distribution to their congregation.
We do. We also have wolves about. In the last year there has been a grand total of one sheep in the entire district possibly lost to them.
Wolves, like many other apex predators, have been selectively bred over generations to be avoidant of humans and livestock, as the consequences are typically mortal, and remove those tendencies from the germline.
Same kinda deal as why we no longer have ducks here that aren’t scared shitless of human presence.
Given all the news about elevated levels of human Coyote interactions over the last 10 ~ 15 years, I wonder whether we are witnessing the beginnings of another domestication/speciation event -- new "dogs".
If the coyotes breed, then attacks on humans will begin as the coyotes will instinctively defend their cubs from humans who get too close to the den, even unwittingly. It would be better to remove the coyotes before this happens.
I've seen this exact pair of coyotes three times now. I have a few blurry photos of them. They're about the size of my dog, who is roughly 60 pounds, so they are sizable and could hunt a small dog or child. However, they're very cautious around people still, and appear well fed. The wildlife in central park is highly adapted to the presence of people and stays away, except to dig through the park trash.
A judge in Brooklyn recently ruled[1] that dogs are (now) classified as "immediate family members". I wonder if the this might push the Central Park Conservancy to step up considerations for eradication of the coyotes to avoid potential emotional damages in light of the ruling if such a situation were to occur.
"One-off stories" is plural. You might argue that it is then an oxymoron in the absence of context, but the person you are replying to is clearly contrasting one-off stories with a general pattern.
Smaller children are at risk for coyote attacks. A 12-year-old boy does seem a bit unusual, but he wasn't paying attention to his surroundings. It may depend somewhat on whether the animal was rabid, or how hungry/desperate the animal was for food.
IME(living in almost rural area, coyotes live in/near stormwater ponds and are abundant) they will follow you if you get too close to the den to try to drive you away, but won't engage.
Coyote pups are adorable though. A couple of them made a lair in a drain about a month ago but have relocated since. Still see one of them around the neighborhood with his distinctive tail.
They're the size of a medium size dog, only not friendly. If we don't accept off-leash dogs in public I don't understand why coyotes are tolerated in human cities.
Dingoes are a good percentage smaller than Coyotes on average and maximum (Dingoes 22 – 33 lbs, Coyotes 20 – 46 lbs). Dingoes are small, to the point where "Dingoes ate my baby" was a common and sarcastic joke after a reported attack - And yet that attack was extensively proven[1].
Yes, a small group of Coyotes could easily corner or snatch a small child and pose a danger to such. Is it likely? No. Is it reasonable to relocate the coyotes? Absolutely. It might also be reasonable to manage and not relocate the coyotes.
At least when it comes to coyotes on the Pacific Northwest, they're not tiny at all. I've seen specimens that easily had the size of a largish German shepherd, many times. 30 to 40 kilos isn't rare, and that's not a tiny critter at all. It's definitely a threat to a kid or nearly any dog and could give even an adult male human a run for their money if the coyote actually got aggressive enough to lunge (that at least isn't likely, since they're fantastically cowardly when confronted by any aggression from adult humans, at least in my experience)
On the east coast the coyotes interbreed with wolves and form coywolves which are really huge and can be nasty. Look at the picture on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_coyote. It's only a matter of time before something bad happens to a small child. They've already killed a lot of small dogs.
The ones I've come across in the southwest portion of the U.S. are pretty small, and from Wikipedia: "The average male weighs 8 to 20 kg (18 to 44 lb) and the average female 7 to 18 kg (15 to 40 lb).".
My Pyrenees/husky mix absolutely dwarfs them and they give her a WIDE berth the few times I've seen them while hiking.
It sounds like you're on the west coast, where coyotes are tiny. East coast coyotes are much larger, on the order of a good-sized dog.
That said, I welcome coyotes in urban spaces, and have admired from afar the few bold urban coyotes I've come across. Humans need reminders that they're a part of nature and not apart from nature, especially in the city. In terms of actual danger, coyotes kill approximately infinity times fewer people than cars do, so let's focus infinity times more energy on solving that problem first.
Or a couple of decades of lost human lives until enough voters realize that the underlying ideology (that celebrates Coyotes next to playgrounds) absolutely values human life lower than what should be acceptable.
At least relocate them out of cities. Why would you ever want a predator that large living inside a city?
Let a dog, a domesticated animal that we trust to live in our homes with our children and babies, off-leash in a city and people lose their minds. But coyotes move in and everyone's chill? Wtf
Where I live you can shoot coyotes in any season with a hunting permit. That's chill? OK then, let's be chill about off-leash dogs and apply the same rules to them.
My suggestion was relocating the coyotes, not shooting them. I'm ok applying that rule to off-leash dogs and in fact, that's what happens. They're trapped and taken to a shelter for the owner to reclaim. They're eventually put down if unclaimed.
Are off-leash dogs in your part of the world a consistent threat to your safety, or an annoyance? There's obvious recourse since dogs have owners, but maybe you should shoot them too?
>> Are off-leash dogs in your part of the world a consistent threat to your safety
Killed people here, yeah. What's the recourse when a pit bull kills you, skeeter2020? Can you tell me that? When you're dead from a pit bull attack, what's your recourse?
Coyotes are already slaughtering pets in places where their population reaches saturation levels thanks to access to so much easy food. It's not a hypothetical, it's something that actively happens and in such places, attacks on little kids are not a miniscule risk.
No, you don't have to kill all coyotes to control a specific population of them in a particular place in way that actually re-balances a completely unnatural saturation in their numbers.
There's nothing grotesque about recognizing the reality of these being urban spaces in which it might just not be a good idea to have many thousands more 40-kilo predators wandering around than would ever be natural even if the area were totally uninhabited by humans.
Thanks for posting this, such a nice story and writeup!
Where I live in Vancouver the coyotes have been very noticeable this year. I love to hang out with them in the park and garden, and hear them howl with the cop cars at night. They are not pets though - I always keep my distance and keep aware of the possibility that they might sneak up on me.
I take care of an outdoor cat in the neighborhood, and yes it's possible that a coyote will eat a cat or small dog. I worry about her but there are many fences, she is smart as well as a good climber. There are many hazards in the city that don't have the positive sides that coyotes do, and I think it's important that we learn to live with them and honour what they bring to our lives. That includes rat control, which we rather need here.
I take care of an outdoor cat in the neighborhood, and yes it's possible that a coyote will eat a cat or small dog.
I live near a trail which also serves as a wildlife corridor, including coyotes that we regularly see on our dog walks. Years ago, we had a feral cat that we would feed and care for (including neutering). He remained outside because he refused to even be brought inside, let alone live with us. This guy was huge, and looked like he had won his share of fights with the scars to prove it. If a cat would survive in the wild, it would be this guy. But even he wasn’t tough enough to hold off (what I assume were) coyotes forever, and one day he just quit coming around.
After that I’ve noticed that we just don’t have outdoor cats in our neighborhood.
(And for context, we aren't out in the boonies; this is within the city limits of Redmond, WA, where the local elementary gets locked down about once a year because mama bear and her cubs showed up off that same trail.)
This isn't such a bad thing. I love cats, but assuming coyotes are native to where you live, having them around is way better than outdoor cats (feral or otherwise) as they kill a ridiculous amount of native species.
Coyotes aren’t native to the northwest, they moved in after European settlers extirpated the wolves. They almost surely are less damaging to natives though.
Well, there is a place for both killers. The coyote down on the forrest floor- and the cat up int he tree canopy. Everyone is happy.
We just had this a week or so ago. Stray cat was so cautious that at the end of convalescing in our garage following getting fixed (we had to trap him) he stayed in the garage all day after we opened the side door, and even then, near dusk he stood on the threshold and looked out for 11 straight minutes before taking a step out.
Last week coyotes took him (in part of the country quite far from King County) at night right next to our house, right next to his most familiar territory, and not 20-30 feet from a number of structures he routinely climbed on top of but which coyotes would have no chance of following.
I currently can’t help but take a dim view of coyotes at the current moment, for selfish reasons. I hadn’t thought this to be at all likely given the apparent caution the cat took, but I did spent a couple of years building up a good relationship with that sweet guy.
I'm in cottage lake woodinville, same.
Even more bizarre I fenced in my yard hoping to keep out the rabbits, but they always find a way in. Last winter I went out there and found a dismembered rabbit in the middle of the yard. I went to get a bag to pick it up, and when I got back, all that was left were a couple feet. An eagle maybe? I left the feet, but nothing came to get them :D
We had a house near Matthews Beach, and when we moved in there were many rabbits in the neighborhood and in our yard. We have a terrier-mix mutt, and there weren't rabbits in our yard for long...
We have had the opposite experience: over the years, mama rabbits have had multiple litters in our backyard. We have two pit bull terriers, and they would chase the rabbits (never catching them), so mama rabbit knows there are dogs. My only theory is that the dogs are a known quantity, and the dogs keep the real predators out of the backyard.
That, or rabbits are just that dumb.
My dog definitely caught rabbits. He even brought two kits into the house. He's a sweetheart in every other circumstance, but he loves toys that squeak when he mauls them.
I lived in a semi-rural area with some foothills behind our property growing up.
I distinctly remember that our neighbor had a number of different cats over the years. They were never around that long. He always named them _C.B._
I never thought much of it, maybe he was just a fan of chatting of radios.
I was in my teenager when I finally realized what C.B. stood for in this context: Coyote Bait
"I’ve noticed that we just don’t have outdoor cats in our neighborhood"
Stop neutering cats, encourage alley cats.
poor kitty, but, native predators beating back invasive ones is a huge win
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A huge win to whom?
I'm a little too simple to assign moral values like good/bad or win/lose to nature things, all I know is I like cats more because they're cute, so I'll always take them over coyotes.
Humans could be considered invasive too, it's not a huge win if a super predator starts beating us back. At least not from our agreed upon definitions of "win", then again if one starts to play with the meaning of words, one can say the sky is green.
Most natural populations of a given species have density-dependent population regulation. Be it from a reduced food supply, or multi-year cycles where they provide ample food for their predators population to grow to the point they become the food supply being reduced until their predators population shrinks and the cycle begins again. Disease transmission also acts to keep populations in check when density increases too much where food is essentially unlimited. Negative feedback loops are fascinating and were unique in the sense that we’ve managed to short-circuit nearly all of them to virtually every other species detriment.
A huge win to all the birds and smaller mammals that are killed in the billions every year by domestic cats that shouldn't be there. They fuck up the whole system.
outdoor cat's are an invasive species, they put unatural pressure on birds population so I hate them !
You... hang out with coyotes in the park? I live near a park with coyotes and all of us are wary of them. The people who walk their dogs frequently carry sticks. As a parent of a 1 yr old and 4 yr old who likes to let them have some degree of age appropriate freedom running around in the park, I can't help but think of the coyotes. Maybe I'm wrong, but they seem like they might be dangerous around people, particularly children.
Maybe it's HN's demographics speaking, but everyone here is talking about their pets, but what about children? Do coyotes not attack kids?
I think coyotes can get desensitized to humans.
I live in a rather rural area in King county and we have packs of coyote that hunted down a deer one winter, and is generally weary of humans and dogs (the neighborhood has 2+ dog per household on average).
Then the past weekend we played a round of Golf at Newcastle and a pack of coyote pups pop up in broad daylight and one of them lied down to watch us tee off then left when we're done. It was very cute and we had to fight the urge to pet them like puppies
We have coyotes in our backyard (literally as I write this one is sleeping in our flower beds). They are extremely shy (and not very big). We have cats go through the same yard all the time. That said, coyotes do kill cats. I would be wary if confronted by a coyote and keep children away from. But attacks are apparently extremely rare:
https://tchester.org/sgm/lists/coyote_attacks.html
Union Hill representing. I’m a bit envious! We hear but seldom see ours.
Coyotes are wary of people and can usually be scared off by making loud noises. Coyote attacks on people are very rare. Off leash, escaped, or stray domestic dogs are much more of a threat to children than coyotes.
On the topic of rat control, your comment interleaves two diametrically opposed approaches in the biological solutions space. Providing calorie input to a feral (invasive, nonnative) cat as opposed to merely recognizing the beauty and effectiveness of a species which is native to this continent (although maybe not Vancouver before 1900, TIL). I have an indoor cat so I understand the caretaking instinct. But the consequences for our urban ecosystems of artificially supporting feral cats are severe. They rarely kill rats, especially not when they have easier options like our birds and native small mammals. And with the surplus calorie supply that so many concerned city dwellers give them, they often fall back to their kill and play instincts instead of actually hunting for food, which leads to even less of the desperate “I shall attack a 12 ounce demon with buck teeth” behavior that we fantasize about.
I live in Chicago and had a coyote briefly staying under my deck last autumn when the juveniles leave their dens. They regularly prowl through my neighborhood, traveling north and south on the commuter rail line tracks and ducking off into parks and backyards for hunting. Such a magnificent creature to see up close. That experience motivated me to kill the ornamental boxwood that was in my backyard and start planting native plants which can support native birds, pollinators and small mammals and in turn provide a food supply all the way up the food chain to that coyote. I wish more people in my city spent their money and time on that food chain instead of one that begins and ends at PetSmart.
> I live in Chicago and had a coyote briefly staying under my deck last autum
Wow I misread this as “staying under my desk” a comical number of times before I managed to actually see the right word.
How delightful to imagine, a little pile of coyotes snuggled up under your desk, in the middle of some office building in Chicago!
I grew up in a buffer zone with a lot of coyotes and one day our (small male) dog was lured away by noisy females. The next day all I found was his collar about a km away, chewed through and bloody. They are most certainly not pets and are incredibly smart and resourceful.
In our neighborhood near Boston, coyotes have become very active at night and trot in the middle of roads and between houses. Several times in the morning I have found absolutely shredded carcasses of squirrels and rabbits on our property in locations which are not likely to be attributed to other predators such as owls.
We have also noticed fewer raccoons on our security camera, which we used to see several times per week at night around our fishpond (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33952437) but now only once or twice per month.
Neighbors have also reported missing outdoor cats, which I believe are probably coyote kills (we live on a small peninsula ~1 km^2 so cats are unlikely to wander far from home). About 10 years ago, a nearby relative found the carcass of a cat on his front lawn, which he believes was a coyote. All that was left was the skin/fur and the intestines.
Yes, I used to live on a peninsula in Quincy and there were coyotes that would run past us on the beach from time to time or be seen walking down the sidewalk or hanging out in the back yard.
>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.
> It's good fun to watch and listen to the coyotes until one of them steals a beloved pet away right before your eyes
Shutting cats in at night is recommended where I live, to protect vulnerable native species. Presumably that can work both ways.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/05/opinion/in-zimbabwe-we-do...
People love to celebrate when the population of large predators near other people increases.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707064
> 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 :)
> samples of the interaction function between humans and the >1mm coyotes (often unbeknownst to the humans)
I'm now more worried by the possibility of ≤1 mm micro-coyotes.
> 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
Were they indoor cats?
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.
>> a plague of predators way outside the scope of any natural population
You're talking about humans, right?
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.
And in that case, sorry for misunderstanding.
At a certain point if you keep getting outdoor cats you’re making a conscious choice to keep feeding coyotes.
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.
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.
Sorry- but do you honestly belief that coyotes will hunt rats? In a city? They will eat fastfood leftovers from the garbage cans with the rats. Creatures hunt out of desperation- hunting is energy-expensive, dangerous and often not successful unless it targets the small, old or parasite riddled. That coyote will get diabetes before it gets to even start hunting rats.
Not sure about coyotes, but here in Norway foxes hang around near the garbage bins of restaurants because the garbage attracts rat. They will then leave happily with a huge rats in their mouths.
London, England has a large population of urban foxes.
It seems that their favourite meal is discarded fast-food fried chicken bits, their second choice is "raid the garbage bins for anything smelly and meat-based". But for sure they'd take live prey such as rats. They also eat snails and earthworms.
In other words, a successful urban animal should be nocturnal, fast and agile, clever and above all: omnivorous.
I have webcam footage from my backyard of a Coyote catching and eating a rat. The University of Washington has been doing DNA analysis of the scat of urban Coyotes and they eat a lot of rats (even more rabbits).
https://seattlecoyotestudy.wixsite.com/seattlecoyotestudy/ab...
I see coyotes hunting gophers all the time in the big city I live in. I have never seen one rooting around in a garbage can.
My well fed cat used to hunt rats, and eat them.
As a cat "owner" this seems not true. Cats hunt as a hobby.
Coyotes seem remarkably adaptable to urban environments. The coyotes I’ve seen in Chicago are something else. I’ve seen them trotting down the sidewalk of four-lane roads in broad daylight (they were quite fat too). Even had one run right past me as I was waking down the sidewalk, I thought it was a dog at first.
One of the best Chicago coyote incidents was one around Lincoln Park (I think it was) that walked into a Quizno’s or something on a hot summer day and hopped into the drink cooler.
Edit: here’s a picture of it https://www.reddit.com/r/chicago/comments/tv8y26/today_is_th...
In North America, Coyotes have almost completely replaced the ecological niche that feral dogs fill in most of the rest of the world's urban environments.
Coyotes are basically wild dogs, they are quite smart and can become tame around humans if they figure out that people don't pose much of a threat and might give them food (tame is different from domesticated however, they are still potentially dangerous).
This being a positive thing in the sense of managing the rodent population feels like in the simpsons when they introduce snakes to eat lizards and then gorillas to take care of the snake overpopulation.
Like the introduction of mongooses on some Hawaiian islands to control rats. The mongooses then became a pest.
https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/hisc/mongoose-urva-auropunctata/
but there's no cobra problems on those islands, is there!
Or cane toads in australia which the episode is apparantely based on.
In this case humans didn’t introduce the coyotes. We’ve diminished the populations of most predators like coyotes such that other animals’ populations grow out of control without human intervention. So in this case humans intervened by displacing coyotes previously not by introducing them now.
But the gorillas freeze in the winter. That's the beauty of it
There have been some hilarious and unfortunate disasters using introduced populations for pest control. But coyotes are not introduced. They are native to the area which means there are many checks and balances in place.
Rat control is not just a nice bonus option to reduce an irritation - we need to take it seriously in light of the Black Death. The fact of the matter is I see people having trouble with rat control in my area and we could use help to manage something that is potentially a lot more dangerous than coyotes.
Coyotes are not native to the eastern US. The eastern US was mostly forest and coyotes don't typically hunt in forested areas. Coyotes only spread to the eastern US after 1900.
Also, eastern coyotes typically also have wolf and dog DNA. Coyotes, wolves, and dogs can and do interbreed. This has resulted in some places in the eastern US in a subspecies that isn't afraid of humans due to the dog DNA, that can hunt in open areas due to the coyote DNA, and can also hunt in forested areas due to the wolf DNA.
Coywolves are also much larger and more powerful than coyotes. It may have been an anomaly, but I had the opportunity to see one close up on the edge of my rural property in PA that was easily the size of a German shepherd.
How effective will a pair of coyotes hanging out in Central Park be for rodent control in the city? It's the rats running in the drains, streets, buildings that are the problem. Rats living in the park are not what the people living in the city care about
Give it time. Predators breed until prey numbers are diminished enough that they start starving.
So then there will be thousands and thousands of hungry coyotes in NYC, since NYC is famously full of rats?
except a specialized rat killer will not be much of a threat to humans, and will have a natural population control - or go after ferrets next!
That we should be overprotective of dangerous animals--in this case celebrating that they are living in the middle of a very dense city--is a luxury belief. It makes dumb rich people feel good and the costs are borne by others. For another example see the reintroduction of wolves in Colorado.
Next up: Roadrunners!
Honestly, as a curiosum and token wildlife insert I get it. Bit like zoo animals.
But I'm not sure coyotes and mega cities are a good mariage. I see people mentioning rat controll, but imagine the size of the coyote population you would need to make even a small dent in that.
Remember when kids were safe in Central Park?
I was going to link to The Prince of Central Park [Rhodes, 1975]
But Wikipedia is too flaky to remember the 1975 novel, only the 2000 movie
> Coyotes can also help manage the city’s rodent problem and keep other wildlife populations, like Canada geese and raccoons, in check.
Not just wildlife. A pack tracked my wily cat for months. I saw a couple of close calls. They learned that the cat liked to leave the house for a stroll a little before dawn. One morning they waited for him and took him right outside the cat door. It was pretty amazing that he lived nine years as thick as coyotes are around here. I can't bear to keep a cat locked in the house, so haven't had the nerve to get another since then.
I previously lost a cat to a pack of raccoons. But my cats collectively are way ahead of the game in terms of animal biomass harvested.
Our cats go into cat jail in the evening, and don't get released until we wake up. Keeping them inside during the night means fewer fights, less risk from cars, and reduced chance of encounters with wildlife.
Coyotes are small but dangerous. I wouldn't even let a 100lb dog outside off-leash if I've seen coyotes in the area, they just go right for the belly and rip out the innards.
Probably best to keep your cats inside even if you do get another one, considering the devastating effect they have as an invasive species on local wildlife. [1]
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380
This gets trotted right out every time someone mentions their cat being let outside, as if it were some sort of awful sin and thus makes the cat's owner totally wrong in any worry or complaint they have about their cat's safety outdoors. It's ridiculous, particularly when there's a very easy solution to cats hunting local birds: a collar with a little bell. It's nearly guaranteed to ruin their hunting.
That aside, you yourself, as a human, are an invasive species that kills tons of animals indirectly through your habits each year, should you thus be enclosed 24 hours a day? Cats killing off random birds. The ship of human intervention in the ecosystem has long since sailed, and blaming cat owners for a relatively tiny part of it is an absurdity in badly applied blame.
> a collar with a little bell. It's nearly guaranteed to ruin their hunting.
Unfortunately, that's not true. There was a study by some academics in Britain a few years° ago that showed effectively no difference in hunting success rates between belled and un-belled cats. The explanation is that cats are ambush predators, so once they (very quickly) learn how to stalk (they're moving slowly, anyway) without ringing the bell, their quarry doesn't hear the bell until they pounce, when it's (mostly) too late.
They were specifically looking at songbirds, as I recall. Maybe success rates for rodents are different - though that'd hardly be a good thing, because we generally want cats to kill mice and rats!
---
[On reflection]: Based on where I remember I was living when I read it, this was over a decade ago. (Where does time go?) There may have been updates since.
While the misanthropy is compelling, and bell collars slightly reduce hunting success for (invasive, feral) cats, literally nothing else in your comment correct.
Concern for native birds and small mammals which are a keystone part of our ecosystems is not futile. They support literally everything required for human survival (carbon cycle, water, cycle, nitrogen cycle, pollination, sea dispersal, pollution control, etc) directly, and indirectly by their behaviors which have coevolved for millions of years. Invasive, feral cats, just like humans have only been here for a very short window of time, and while there are still native birds and mammals and plants left to care for, we can and should support them by minimizing the wonton carnage and death which we unleash each year. You’re probably aware that in North America alone feral cats kill between 10 and 30 billion native birds and small mammals a year. Euthanasia instead of trap neuter release is not a sailed ship. Planting native (human intervention) and undoing the lawns (human intervention) that have destroyed our native ecosystems is not a sailed ship. There is hope and it is exciting to work towards this in your own community and I hope you come to see that. The results (insects return, the soil enriches and traps carbon, and birds you've never seen before sing on your back porch in the morning) are nearly immediate and heartwarming
Edit: typo
>You’re probably aware that in North America alone for all cats kill between 10 and 30 billion native birds and small mammals a year
and how many of those birds and mammals were old and ill and would be killed by other predators in similar situation in non-developed areas? Why didn't you specify that comparative number? May be because that would have shown that the cats are just doing the job of other predators pushed out by humans?
Btw, the cats kill up to 4 billion birds annually. At the same time 3.5 billion birds die hitting glass of the buildings. Cats kill old/ill. The birds hitting building aren't majority old/ill. Thus killings by cats are mostly beneficial to the bird species while glass buildings make tremendous damage to the bird species.
> At the same time 3.5 billion birds die hitting glass of the buildings.
Do you have a citation for this? Are you comparing North American cat deaths to worldwide building collisions? Estimates I'm seeing of North American center around 600 million, a far cry from deaths due to cats.
It is in US:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/birds-win...
>a far cry from deaths due to cats.
No, they are about the same. The 3.5 billion is the top estimate similar to how 4 billion is top estimate for killed by cats. The lower estimates in both cases around 1 billion something.
That's an interesting update. I remain a bit skeptical based on the fact that the obvious sources I'd look to for this sort of thing haven't updated on that study (it seems to be https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1676/23-00045), and I'm not really able to evaluate it on my own. USFWS (https://www.fws.gov/story/threats-birds-collisions-buildings...) is citing the previous numbers, as is Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird%E2%80%93window_collisions).
FWIW 3.5 billion is not the top estimate, although I'm not sure how to interpret the way the estimate is stated ("annual mortality may be minimally 1.28 billion–3.46 billion or as high as 1.92 billion–5.19 billion"). What does it mean to have a range for each end of the range? The author only quotes the absolute lowest number from the study in press about it (see https://www.lehighvalleynews.com/environment-science/3-5-mil...), but maybe is just preferring to be conservative.
What evidence do you have that the birds killed by cats are mainly old or ill?
Cats being an invasive species in most places on earth means that most bird species have not evolved with them as a natural predator, and so are at an innate disadvantage.
And yes, birds hitting man made structures is a major problem. There can be two bad things at once. Just because there are two bad things doesn't mean we give up tackling one or the other.
>What evidence do you have that the birds killed by cats are mainly old or ill?
it is well established pattern of predation in the Nature. Again, you specified the total number without providing the old/ill number. The relation of those numbers can completely change the conclusion, and i can only wonder why you didn't provide the old/ill number.
>Cats being an invasive species in most places on earth
What planet "earth" you're talking about? On the 3rd planet from Sun the wild cats are practically everywhere. And in the places where there are no cats, there are still similar predators - ferrets, foxes, etc.
>And yes, birds hitting man made structures is a major problem. There can be two bad things at once.
No 2 bad things here. Predation by cats is natural, and thus mostly good, in the Nature-way, for the species being predated upon. The man made structures are really bad as i described in my previous comment. Yet somehow you want to tackle the first and not the second.
The burden of proof is on the one making the claim.
I claimed billions of birds are killed each year by cats and provided a source (and there exist many more).
> Again, you specified the total number without providing the old/ill number. The relation of those numbers can completely change the conclusion, and i can only wonder why you didn't provide the old/ill number.
You claimed they kill mainly the sick and old birds but provide no sources for this claim, then attack my source for not containing the proof you failed to provide.
> On the 3rd planet from Sun the wild cats are practically everywhere.
So are rats. Would you call them a native species in places like Hawaii? No, neither are cats.
> somehow you want to tackle the first and not the second
Because this thread is about cats, not buildings. This is just changing the subject when your argument won’t stand up to scrutiny.
>The burden of proof is on the one making the claim.
>I claimed billions of birds are killed each year by cats
you claimed it is a bad thing. Where is the proof for your claim?
>provided a source
Smithsonian with that felon convicted for animal cruelty toward cats.
>So are rats. Would you call them a native species in places like Hawaii? No, neither are cats
Hawaii take how much percent of Earth?
The word natural is doing a lot of lifting here. I think we are talking past each other because we don’t have the same framework for understanding how ecosystems work. Predation by an invasive species is not natural in the sense that the species did not coevolve. It seems we don’t agree that cats are an invasive species or even on the definition of an invasive species
There is very little natural in the unnatural environment of the human developed areas. That train has long left the station. That includes the natural predators. With those natural predators gone, cats are doing the job of those predators. Whether you call the cats invasive or not - the label doesn't matter in that situation, somebody has got to do the job.
And the main invasive species is humans. The humans invade and change the environment, and the cats are actually natural in that new environment.
You're allowed to let your cat outside and kill nature, but you aren't allowed to be mad when nature fights back. The double standard with which people treat feral dogs/cats (treating kill shelters for overpopulation as an awful sin) versus how they treat snakes and alligators (go into the woods and kill them on sight just for existing) makes me nauseous.
>You're allowed to let your cat outside and kill nature, but you aren't allowed to be mad when nature fights back.
Feel free to smugly tell me that same thing whenever some animal or human you love is killed off by some element of nature. Its also hypocritical: Your comfortable, modern existence is absolutely, wholly the product of a colossal bending and crushing of nature to human will that let you sit at a laptop or on your phone and complain about people who simply recognize this practical reality in a more direct and basic context.
Also, I have no problem with culling feral cats and dogs if their populations can't also be controlled with more humane things like sterilization campaigns. Why let them starve and suffer pointlessly?
Bad take. Letting your cat experience nature means you need to be ok with nature experiencing your cat.
I guess I invited that. However, it also means letting nature experience the sharp end of man when trying to mess with our kitties.
>Probably best to keep your cats inside even if you do get another one, considering the devastating effect they have as an invasive species on local wildlife. [1]
>[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380
You're posting an article by the Smithsonian department employing that felon convicted for animal cruelty toward cats.
Wrt. the article itself - it has pretty much no scientific merits as, not surprisingly given the authors' agenda, the article has an obvious fundamental flaw disqualifying it from science - it doesn't specify how many of that wildlife killed by cats were old/ill who would be anyway killed by other predators if it were a natural setting and not a developed area where the only predators left are cats.
If we to believe the article's total numbers then it would really mean what the cats are just doing the job of other predators pushed out by humans. Killing the old/ill birds, reptiles, mammals by predators is good for those birds, reptiles, mammals species. (and around humans say an old/ill bird not killed by cats would become a dead bird and a food for rats or something like this)
You’re just stating a trait of animal predation. Predation often eliminates the weakest animals in a population. The point is that invasive species by definition of invasive predate in a way that their prey has not had adequate evolutionary space to adapt to because they are introduced. All the words in that sentence have precise definitions in ecology and I don’t think we share the same framework or definitions
name natural predators supposed to kill all those birds and mammals around humans.
You can always walk your cat on a leash. It's a unique experience and very different from walking a dog.
My SO would occasionally unleash our cat and run alongside it.
If your cat actually eats what they kill (ours did) it's not nicer for the environment to turn forest into farmland to grow corn to feed chickens to turn into cat food. You're just pushing the environmental impact somewhere you can't see it.
From the abstract of the article:
> We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually.
I don't understand how to marry the point you're trying to make to this. Cats are an invasive species to most small animals, and should be kept from accessing them.
In addition to the havoc they wreak on local small animal populations, outdoor cats live shorter lives than their indoor counterparts.
https://www.vetinfo.com/indoor-outdoor-cat-life-expectancy.h...
Realistically, in much of the US both urban and rural, cats are as much a part of the wildlife as whatever animal purists actually want to call wildlife. You can spay, neuter, domesticate, and indoor them as much as humans are capable of doing; but they breed like, well, cats, and they deeply want the freedom of being outside. Most modern dogs would not survive if humans didn't intervene in their survival; but the vast majority of cats would. Humans don't generally actively participate in inciting cat breeding like we do with dogs; in fact, we try to stop it as much as we can. What you're describing is just... nature. Its harsh, its brutal, but cats are a very natural part of our ecosystem.
Even the term "domesticated cat" is a partial, minor misnomer [1]. They aren't really domesticated in the same way dogs are. They're wild animals, who's wild behavior just happens to be kinda chill and mesh well with humans.
Cats do live longer when you keep them inside. Humans would also live longer if we kept them in a prison for their entire life, feeding them a nutritionally perfect slurry. Not sure why its relevant to the discussion.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/ask-s...
> I don’t understand […]
They’re willfully ignoring the facts and indulging in emotional projection. Domestic cats aren’t wild animals, they’re pets. Letting them roam outdoors is irresponsible both to local ecosystems and to the cats themselves.
Many dogs will run right out the door if left to their own devices, but somehow this is not ok while the same behavior for cats is. Very strange.
I think they're pointing out also that humans themselves are an invasive species. They've killed wildlife and converted fertile land to monocultures. Letting humans roam outdoors tends to be irresponsible to local ecosystems.
> Many dogs will run right out the door if left to their own devices, but somehow this is not ok while the same behavior for cats is.
That's not at all difficult to explain. The dog is a nuisance to the nearby humans.
Nobody cares about their pets being a nuisance. They care because dogs are more likely to get lost and not find their way home or get hit by a car.
You could try thinking about it. Buying cat food at the store isn't magic. It comes from somewhere.
Cats can eat the wildlife in your yard. Or, you could have wildlife in your yard, and offset the calories by growing them on more farmland somewhere else.
The only difference in the second scenario is that you don't see the extra acre of woods — along with all the lizards and birds that would live there — getting turned into soybeans.
"Feral Cats are wild-living variant of the common pet cat, introduced to Hawai‘i by Europeans. Feral cats have established populations on all eight of the main Hawaiian Islands and contribute to widespread ecological disruptions that threaten native Hawaiian wildlife. Feral cats are one of the most devastating predators of Hawai‘i’s unique wildlife. In addition to direct predation, feral cats also spread a potentially lethal parasite (Toxoplasma gondii) that contaminates terrestrial, freshwater, and marine environments and has been shown to negatively impact birds and mammals – including humans."
https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/hisc/info/invasive-species-profiles/...
Most pet food is made from waste from producing human food. E.g. offal. So I'm not sure pet food accounts for any significant loss of wild land on its own.
How many birds did the free roaming house cat kill over the years?
I do understand the strong feelings around this but let's not go into that flamewar please.
(Cat and dog flamewars are surprisingly vicious, as are bike vs. car flamewars.)
except unlike bike vs. car where bikes are the obivious right choice, both cats and dogs are cool :)
I train my cats to not predate birds.
A bunch of them live on my property. They have a roll call at night and it’s an eerie screamhowl I’m still not used to after 5 years. We don’t usually see them in daytime.
It is hilarious to me to be reading about city folk being amazed at a few coyotes and an owl. In Nebraska coyotes are vermin and you shoot them on sight if they are on your farm for all the trouble and danger they can cause. We used to go out on the property and call them for target practice.
edit: lol at the downvotes, welcome to the real world?
Exactly. As a European I‘m accustomed to this sentiment by the urban academic caste. Our‘s is celebrating that ruralites are exposed to literal wolves again. Peak elitism on display.
As if there was some kumbaya coexistence in the past that represents nature. You know, you strolling down 5th Ave, sipping on your Starbucks, and the Coyote across the street, giving each other the nod.
The only actual Coexistence being you keeping a healthy distance from them.
How is that peak elitism? Are you active in rural area?
As someone who takes care bit of agricultural area I would prefer pack of wolves to hunters that are supposed to manage deer population.
Yes I am. And therefore I know that…
> * prefer pack of wolves to hunters*
…no single ruralite ever said that.
> …no single ruralite ever said that.
Maybe you are in livestock farming but many in my situation do. My point is that it is not city vs countryside.
I’m a “ruralite“ and I would certainly prefer wolves over human hunters in certain conditions. I would also advocate for expanding these conditions to wherever possible in Europe.
Kindly stop presuming that you can speak for other people you haven’t actually asked for their opinion.
What trouble are the coyotes? We have tons of coyotes in the rural area I live in but no one around here shoots them.
Do you raise animals?
Rural south here.
Goats, chickens, ducks geese.
Had the most success with goats and chicken kept behind an electric fence at night.
Everything else ends up eaten by the wolves/coyotes within a year.
Luckily the eagle populations less than 50 miles away have not yet noticed us.
We're more of a target of opportunity for the wolf population due to the abundance of whitetail deer.
Those deer provide an excellent source of inexpensive protein from hunting. We can have one of the local butchers process the entire deer for under $200. The usual agreement is that the meat from the first deer of the season goes to the landowner(they pay for processing). The rest is up to the hunter.
Most years we end up with enough extra that we donate the processed meat to local churches for distribution to their congregation.
Goats and chickens but they’re fenced in.
We do. We also have wolves about. In the last year there has been a grand total of one sheep in the entire district possibly lost to them.
Wolves, like many other apex predators, have been selectively bred over generations to be avoidant of humans and livestock, as the consequences are typically mortal, and remove those tendencies from the germline.
Same kinda deal as why we no longer have ducks here that aren’t scared shitless of human presence.
>It is hilarious to me to be reading about city folk being amazed at a few coyotes and an owl.
They are amazed at a few coyotes and an own in the city, which is newsworthy.
> edit: lol at the downvotes, welcome to the real world?
Your comprehension is shocking. Again, the downvotes are because of your wild misinterpretation of what people are amazed at. What are you doing.
Grass greener. Im sure new yorkers are similarly dickish to nebraskans who come to the city and rubber neck all the tall buildings like hicks
Given all the news about elevated levels of human Coyote interactions over the last 10 ~ 15 years, I wonder whether we are witnessing the beginnings of another domestication/speciation event -- new "dogs".
I just wish this does not turn adversarial.
Rangers and farmers are no longer culling them.
Coyotes are adorable!
https://youtu.be/UW5Or7bIVJk
If the coyotes breed, then attacks on humans will begin as the coyotes will instinctively defend their cubs from humans who get too close to the den, even unwittingly. It would be better to remove the coyotes before this happens.
I've seen this exact pair of coyotes three times now. I have a few blurry photos of them. They're about the size of my dog, who is roughly 60 pounds, so they are sizable and could hunt a small dog or child. However, they're very cautious around people still, and appear well fed. The wildlife in central park is highly adapted to the presence of people and stays away, except to dig through the park trash.
If you have plentiful prey (rats outnumber humans in NYC) , this is not likely to happen
As the other post mentioned they can be aggressive to protect cubs then it is not about hunger..
Coyotes are all over socal and they really don’t go for people at all. Small dogs maybe.
>>Small dogs maybe.
A judge in Brooklyn recently ruled[1] that dogs are (now) classified as "immediate family members". I wonder if the this might push the Central Park Conservancy to step up considerations for eradication of the coyotes to avoid potential emotional damages in light of the ruling if such a situation were to occur.
[1] https://www.nonhumanrights.org/blog/dogs-family-members/
if we're lucky maybe the coyotes will take out this judge?
> Coyotes are all over socal and they really don’t go for people at all.
From four days ago:
* https://globalnews.ca/news/11267424/nobelton-coyote-attack/
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No one is saying that it doesn’t happen. One-off stories don’t prove anything one way or the other.
They are (statistically) rare, but not one-off:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote_attack
Currently (in Toronto) the attacks are generally against dogs/cats, but chasing of humans has been reported:
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-coyote-action...
* https://www.hawkeye.ca/blog/toronto-coyote-increase
"One-off stories" is plural. You might argue that it is then an oxymoron in the absence of context, but the person you are replying to is clearly contrasting one-off stories with a general pattern.
Smaller children are at risk for coyote attacks. A 12-year-old boy does seem a bit unusual, but he wasn't paying attention to his surroundings. It may depend somewhat on whether the animal was rabid, or how hungry/desperate the animal was for food.
Small pets and small children are at risk.
Generally true but there are exceptions.
IME(living in almost rural area, coyotes live in/near stormwater ponds and are abundant) they will follow you if you get too close to the den to try to drive you away, but won't engage.
Coyote pups are adorable though. A couple of them made a lair in a drain about a month ago but have relocated since. Still see one of them around the neighborhood with his distinctive tail.
Probably biggest human coyote interaction risks in Central Park will be the bikers and dog walkers.
Coyotes have been breeding near human settlements, at scale, for thousands of years. Attacks happen, but are very rare.
I'd speculate that there has been considerable selective pressure against the "not highly avoidant of attacking humans" trait in coyotes.
Coyotes are tiny critters. Surely they don’t attack humans?
> Coyotes are tiny critters. Surely they don’t attack humans?
Perhaps adult humans are less likely, but child humans the risk could be higher as a coyote may think they can 'take' them; from a few days ago:
* https://globalnews.ca/news/11267424/nobelton-coyote-attack/
They're the size of a medium size dog, only not friendly. If we don't accept off-leash dogs in public I don't understand why coyotes are tolerated in human cities.
What do you mean tolerated? How many coyotes have you personally eradicated? If not you then who?
Department of animal control usually.
They are tolerated because there is no human you can yell at to keep them on a leash.
Dingoes are a good percentage smaller than Coyotes on average and maximum (Dingoes 22 – 33 lbs, Coyotes 20 – 46 lbs). Dingoes are small, to the point where "Dingoes ate my baby" was a common and sarcastic joke after a reported attack - And yet that attack was extensively proven[1].
Yes, a small group of Coyotes could easily corner or snatch a small child and pose a danger to such. Is it likely? No. Is it reasonable to relocate the coyotes? Absolutely. It might also be reasonable to manage and not relocate the coyotes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_Chamberlain-Creighton#Ev...
At least when it comes to coyotes on the Pacific Northwest, they're not tiny at all. I've seen specimens that easily had the size of a largish German shepherd, many times. 30 to 40 kilos isn't rare, and that's not a tiny critter at all. It's definitely a threat to a kid or nearly any dog and could give even an adult male human a run for their money if the coyote actually got aggressive enough to lunge (that at least isn't likely, since they're fantastically cowardly when confronted by any aggression from adult humans, at least in my experience)
On the east coast the coyotes interbreed with wolves and form coywolves which are really huge and can be nasty. Look at the picture on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_coyote. It's only a matter of time before something bad happens to a small child. They've already killed a lot of small dogs.
They're expanding/evolving into the niche that wolves occupied. The superabundance of deer is facilitating that.
The ones I've come across in the southwest portion of the U.S. are pretty small, and from Wikipedia: "The average male weighs 8 to 20 kg (18 to 44 lb) and the average female 7 to 18 kg (15 to 40 lb).".
My Pyrenees/husky mix absolutely dwarfs them and they give her a WIDE berth the few times I've seen them while hiking.
They do on occasion, and there have even been a couple of deaths. But to your point, the rate is very very low.
Edit: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote_attack
It sounds like you're on the west coast, where coyotes are tiny. East coast coyotes are much larger, on the order of a good-sized dog.
That said, I welcome coyotes in urban spaces, and have admired from afar the few bold urban coyotes I've come across. Humans need reminders that they're a part of nature and not apart from nature, especially in the city. In terms of actual danger, coyotes kill approximately infinity times fewer people than cars do, so let's focus infinity times more energy on solving that problem first.
Or a couple of decades of lost human lives until enough voters realize that the underlying ideology (that celebrates Coyotes next to playgrounds) absolutely values human life lower than what should be acceptable.
Sssh. They don't want to hear it. It won't bother those of us who don't live there and they'll figure it out in a few years.
Humans are a bigger risk to coyotes than coyotes to humans.
> It would be better to remove the coyotes before this happens.
following this logic, we should just kill all coyotes. We did this to lotsa other species, I hope we've stopped that.
> we should just kill all coyotes
At least relocate them out of cities. Why would you ever want a predator that large living inside a city?
Let a dog, a domesticated animal that we trust to live in our homes with our children and babies, off-leash in a city and people lose their minds. But coyotes move in and everyone's chill? Wtf
A lot of cities have stray dogs roaming around
>> At least relocate them out of cities.
Ah yes, make it someone else's costly problem and let me feel good about myself because it's such a humane solution.
> make it someone else's costly problem
Move them to a national forest and they'll be the local wildlife's problem.
> let me feel good about myself because it's such a humane solution
Yeah actually because it is humane and I do feel good about myself.
Where I live you can shoot coyotes in any season with a hunting permit. That's chill? OK then, let's be chill about off-leash dogs and apply the same rules to them.
That's not what the story is about. But you sound like you want to shoot dogs.
Do I?
You sound like you think it's OK to let your dog run off-leash.
My suggestion was relocating the coyotes, not shooting them. I'm ok applying that rule to off-leash dogs and in fact, that's what happens. They're trapped and taken to a shelter for the owner to reclaim. They're eventually put down if unclaimed.
You suggested shooting dogs. Seek help.
Where do we relocate the off-leash dogs to? This interests me.
We catch a dog off-leash in a park and the dog gets relocated to...where?
I updated my comment because I figured a troll like yourself would ask. And I was right.
Dogs kill orders of magnitudes more humans than coyotes. Orders of magnitude more children are killed by dogs than by coyotes.
Chill, dude.
I don't know if we should kill dogs. That's not my call. But at least relocate them out of cities?
Would you ever want a predator as large as a dog living inside a city?
I wouldn't, I'm a cat person.
Cows kill the same order of magnitude humans as dogs. And they don't even live in cities, near people. Time to end cattle farming?
I'm ok with dogs in cities, even if they're predators. They're man's best friend.
Are off-leash dogs in your part of the world a consistent threat to your safety, or an annoyance? There's obvious recourse since dogs have owners, but maybe you should shoot them too?
>> Are off-leash dogs in your part of the world a consistent threat to your safety
Killed people here, yeah. What's the recourse when a pit bull kills you, skeeter2020? Can you tell me that? When you're dead from a pit bull attack, what's your recourse?
I'm really interested in the answer.
Coyotes are already slaughtering pets in places where their population reaches saturation levels thanks to access to so much easy food. It's not a hypothetical, it's something that actively happens and in such places, attacks on little kids are not a miniscule risk.
No, you don't have to kill all coyotes to control a specific population of them in a particular place in way that actually re-balances a completely unnatural saturation in their numbers.
There's nothing grotesque about recognizing the reality of these being urban spaces in which it might just not be a good idea to have many thousands more 40-kilo predators wandering around than would ever be natural even if the area were totally uninhabited by humans.
In cities where parks are the few places kids can play outdoors yes that is a reasonable idea.
I wouldn't worry about this; pretty rare that today's parent lets their kid farther away than arms length!
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