The Case for Urban Coyotes.

[Cattledog]

On a Tuesday afternoon in late November, a San Francisco woman reported a dog owner’s worst fear: A coyote had attacked her pit bull near Pine Lake in Stern Grove. The San Francisco Police Department had to clear a path to the dog with batons, as it was whimpering and stuck in a bramble thicket after the encounter.

“We want to remind the public that there are coyote sightings in the grove,” police spokesperson Sgt. Michael Andraychak said about the attack. “Especially if you have smaller dogs, coyotes will go after them.”

However, a different story emerged when the dog was examined by Animal Care and Control. The owner had assumed the attack was by a coyote, despite not seeing one. But the nature of the injuries indicated something else.

“The scratches and injuries to the dog appeared to be from a raccoon,” Deb Campbell of Animal Care and Control tells SF Weekly.

For Jonathan Young, who helps monitor the current pack of five collared coyotes in the Presidio in his role as Lead Wildlife Ecologist, the impulse to blame a coyote comes as little surprise.

“Social media can spin these coyote stories out of control,” he says. “I regularly see people without any kind of source say there are hundreds of coyotes in San Francisco when — knowing their social dynamics and the limits of habitat, food, and water — it’s much more accurate to say their numbers range in the dozens. And even that varies with seasons and droughts.”

But fear of coyotes predates social media. A closer look at the thousand-year history of coyotes in urban areas reveals a story of adaptation, predation by humans, and, ultimately, grudging co-existence.

According to Dan Flores, author of Coyote America, coyotes have been living near humans for at least 1,000 years, with rodents being the common denominator for both parties. It’s a simple food chain: human trash tends to attracts rodents, and the rodents attract coyotes. Coyotes are opportunists and omnivores — like us — but they do not survive off a diet of pets.

Entire article at:

http://www.sfweekly.com/news/news-news/the-case-for-urban-coyotes/

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. That is a really good article. Thank you for posting it.

We need to learn to live with them.

I agree with San Francisco's attitude towards coyotes. They are taking the responsible and humane path.

Good for them!

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

2. First off, I thought pit bulls were not small dogs.

And secondly, I didn't know that raccoons would attack like that. Least of all adog that is not a small dog.

[The_jackalope]

3. My partner had an interesting encounter with an urban coyote in LA.

Late one night she was standing on a hillside in the moonlight. On the hill were a coyote and a small deer. They all saw each other and stood motionless at the points of an equilateral triangle watching each other (I assume she measured the angles with a protractor to be sure that it was an equilateral triangle. She was persnickety about such things...). After about 5 minutes the coyote blinked first and slunk off. Whereupon the deer just suddenly vanished. She swore no psychotropic substances were involved.

Until she told me, this boy from the Great White North had no idea that coyotes live in human-infested terrain like LA.