Neighborhood on edge after coyote attacks 2-year-old girl in Irvine park

[cobeal]

50. Suspicious story

I have lived in Southern California for 60 years. I have grown up around coyotes, bob cats, and mountain lions. Most of the big cats have been killed or driven away although some have begun to reappear.

The coyotes have stayed with us almost constantly. They are very small. They do hunt small things and I would say that keeping an eye on children is a given wherever you are. Predator humans, predator animals might target your child.

THE SUSPICIOUS PART OF THIS STORY IS THAT A LONE COYOTE SUPPOSEDLY JUMPED ONTO A HUMAN CHILD AND BIT ITS NECK AND DID NOT INFLICT ANY WOUND.

Coyotes are typically very skittish animals. They sometimes hunt in groups and they count on frightening and confusing the prey by yipping in a way that makes the group seem larger and everywhere. The prey panics and runs and gets bitten until it weakens. If the prey is not fast enough to run like that the coyote grabs the neck in a very powerful predator move and kills it.

I have also watched a mother coyote leave a group of pups and go hunting rabbits or cats or anything to feed the pups. They tend to be found in that configuration when the pups are small.

When they grab a small prey item they do not mess around. To do so risks injury or death. They immediately hit the neck and snap the backbone with a single bite or series of extremely fast chomps. The prey is instantly paralyzed and grasped and carried away to a safe place.

If that was a coyote I can not imagine what it was doing jumping on the back of a living child in the presence of other large humans and then failing to inflict any wound.

I might buy the story that something frightened a sleeping coyote so much that it failed to think and jumped up to escape and a child happened to be in the place it landed before it ran off.

It is just entirely illogical and sounds like someone trying to create a scare because they want someone to eliminate what they perceive as a threat.

Coyotes are part of the Southern California ecosystem and are a valuable part of the balance that keeps small rodents and other small animals from getting out of control. They eat rats, mice, rabbits and other small creatures that can breed out of control and spread disease or destruction of crops. Mostly they hunt at night in my experience.

The size of their litters varies with the presence of prey. There is a cycle that happens when rain cycles increase and decrease. More water means more plant life and the number plant eating creatures such as insects, mice, rats, and rabbits increase followed by the size of meat eating predator populations. When the rain is down the opposite is true. All in all it is somewhat of a steady state.

If a person wants to live in a place with no wildlife I would suggest some high rise building with a pool on the top and a gym in the basement so he/she can live a completely sanitary lifestyle and never encounter any wild animal.

This story wreaks. Either the reporter has failed to accurately duplicate the actual information or the persons making the report are mistaken or intentionally misrepresenting this information.

Occasionally people will feed coyotes and acclimate them to humans to the point that they seek out humans hoping that human will provide food but not to eat the human. We have had neighbors come and go who participated in such activities and then when they left the coyotes tended to look closer to other homes for handouts. This requires reverse conditioning until they go back to the fully wild state.

The practice of somewhat taming wild predators is of course dangerous because they are more comfortable around humans and might be in close proximity when some small child is unattended and possibly decide it is no different from any other small prey creature.

Many times in my life from the time I was a small teenager hiking above my parent's home to more recent times when watching out for my cat in the back of the house I have run directly at a group of coyotes who were attempting to cause some prey animal to become disorientated long enough for one to get in and make a kill. With my arms high and voice screaming ferociously, the coyotes ran in the other direction.

They are not very dangerous to humans who understand what they are doing. They are very skittish creatures.

I wish all these people who are the offspring of the people who used to visit California when I was young and ask us how we could live in such a primitive environment would just go back to New York City and leave our wildlife alone.