[jhide]

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.

[thaumasiotes]

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.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

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.

[jhide]

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 :)

[Y_Y]

> 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.

[southernplaces7]

> 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.

[smartaz42]

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.