A couple of weeks ago, a coyote climbed the fence into my mother’s backyard and attacked one of her dogs, Cujo. The coyote only stopped its assault when Zoey, the 40+ lbs doberman puppy chased it off. My mother is convinced Zoey was just trying to play.
Several weeks ago, her 50lbs collie mix died from internal trauma and now my mother is convinced the injuries were caused by a coyote attack.
Cujo, a smallish dog who has experienced a great deal of trauma in his life, and when he first came to live with my parents, was overly aggressive and left my mother with fresh tooth holes in her hand several times. Over the years, my mother has been able to develop trust, and as a result, he has become loving. He can still be volatile, but he is much more predictable. The coyote left Cujo with injuries to his neck, including a small puncture in his trachea. Hopefully, he continues to make progress and recover quickly. My mother said he is tentative to go into the backyard to “potty.”
This experience is certainly harrowing and unfortunate. While I am concerned about the wellbeing of Cujo, as an environmental anthropologist who studies human-wildlife relations, I am interested in the factors that facilitated the coyote attack.
My parents’ house is in a small city in central South Carolina, in a fairly well-off neighborhood. They’ve lived in the house for more than 15 years and have never had issues with coyotes before. They knew the coyotes were around because they could hear them singing some evenings. Despite being in the area, coyotes rarely visited backyards. Neighborhood gossip of outdoor cats going missing circulated from time to time, but nothing much else. That seems to be changing.
So why is Cujo’s experience becoming more common in this upper-middle-class neighborhood? The neighborhood has changed.
When my parents moved from North Carolina to South Carolina after I left for college, the section of the neighborhood where their house was located was close to a wooded area known as the clay pit. The clay pit is what it sounds like—a pit where clay was harvested. The house was sandwiched between a pine forest just to the north and a forested riparian environment to the south. The creek flows to the east and ends in a lake.
However, many of the trees have been removed in the name of development and progress. With the loss the the trees, the rabbits, squirrels, and mice that coyotes love to eat lost their homes. With the loss of prey animals and the safety of the forest, the ever-wily coyotes have been forced to adapt to the new circumstances and take food however they can get it. Unfortunately, sometimes our pets seem like solutions to coyotes’ rumbling bellies.
My research focuses on ways humans and wildlife find ways to co-exist. My doctoral research investigated human-javelina relations in Texas and how Texans and javelinas find ways to get along. Once I finish my first book, my next project will investigate Texan perceptions of wolves and the barriers to Mexican gray wolf reintroduction in the state.
Ultimately, I’m interested in how we can live alongside wildlife who are a little more difficult to live around than birds and other critters that we hold in high regard. Javelinas, coyotes, wolves, skunks, raccoons, and many other species are contested because they sometimes cause problems for people like the coyote did for my mother and Cujo.
My first recommendation—and one that is the hardest to implement—is to rethink how we design urban and suburban spaces. Clear-cutting trees and removing habitat is a primary driver of human-wildlife conflict. When wildlife has nowhere else to go, they end up in our yards, whether we want them there or not. Business-as-usual is not working. We need to design anthropogenic spaces with the local environment, not try to totally re-engineer spaces to meet some ideal expectations about what the environment ought to be.
Historically, the main approach in the US has been to wipe out predator species. The US spends more than $100 million each year “controlling” predators. This is mostly done in defense of ranchers, who view predators as threats to their livelihoods. However, livestock depredation results in minimum losses, especially compared to issues like illness, disease, weather, and birthing problems. Furthermore, taking key predators out of food webs has cascading effects that often devastate ecosystems. Just as we need to design our spaces with the environment, we need to plan our ranching practices with native landscapes and wildlife in mind. As the band Puscifer says, “No direction but to never fight her flow.” We need to live with the environment, not try to make it something it isn’t.
My second recommendation is to anticipate risks and act accordingly. When my daughter was born, we baby-proofed the house. This involved moving things that could be risks when curious little hands reach onto shelves, adding plug covers to the electrical outlets, removing choking hazards, and loads more. We need to take similar approaches to living with potentially problematic wildlife. This requires always keeping in mind that the wildlife is nearby.
Keeping an eye on small dogs when outside is a necessity. This is not just to avoid coyote conflict; a hungry hawk will see many little dogs as prey as well. While my parents have a 4-foot-tall chainlink fence, coyotes can easily climb over it. If we want to exclude wildlife from space, we need to design our fences with specific wildlife in mind. For instance, my research collaborator, who had a ranch in the Texas Hill Country, had an 8-foot-tall fence surrounding his vegetable garden to keep out the javelinas, deer, and rabbits. He wanted them around, he just didn’t want them eating his veggies. So he built his garden with that in mind. The dig-proof fence mitigated the possibility of conflict with wildlife who might like to raid his garden.
Since coyotes can climb, installing fencing that prevents or discourages coyotes from entering the yards is important. These include things like electric wire over the top of the fence, rollers along the top of the fence that prevent coyotes from getting a foothold, or extensions of the fence that slant outward. My mother plans to install rollers (which are also good for keeping out feral cats and thus protecting birds).
This is a DIY coyote roller I found on a blog. There are also commercially available rollers.
My hope is that we take the steps necessary to live alongside wildlife. It may take a little work, but I believe that we have the ingenuity to get there. The world is best when it is full of species. When living with difference, conflict is inevitable. However, learning to live with difference and putting systems in place to promote biodiversity and mitigate conflict is necessary. We need to start seeing wildlife as neighbors – sometimes irritating, but neighbors nonetheless. They have equal claim on our neighborhoods, but we have to leave them spaces to live and discourage them from coming into our intimate spaces unless invited.
None of this diminishes poor Cujo’s experience or downplays his suffering. Both Cujo and the coyote suffer. Cujo was hurt badly, while the coyote was homeless. Both are the consequences of bad human decision-making. We can’t keep destroying ecosystems on the back of urbanization, capitalism, and “progress.”
“In wildness is the salvation of the world” (Leopold, 1949).
Disclaimer: I’m not saying that you shouldn’t defend your pets. I am saying that you shouldn’t be killing wildlife you deem “pests” because they might be an issue at some point.
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I leave you with a short essay by the ecologist Aldo Leopold. In “Thinking Like a Mountain,” Leopold recounts his experience of killing a wolf as part of US predator removal initiatives and watching the green fire die in her eyes. This caused him to reflect on the effects of indiscriminate predator killing by considering what the loss of the wolves means to the mountain.
“Thinking Like a Mountain” by Aldo Leopold, in Sand County Almanac (1949).
A deep chesty bawl echoes from rimrock to rimrock, rolls down the mountain, and fades into the far blackness of the night. It is an outburst of wild defiant sorrow, and of contempt for all the adversities of the world. Every living thing (and perhaps many a dead one as well) pays heed to that call. To the deer it is a reminder of the way of all flesh, to the pine a forecast of midnight scuffles and of blood upon the snow, to the coyote a promise of gleanings to come, to the cowman a threat of red ink at the bank, to the hunter a challenge of fang against bullet. Yet behind these obvious and immediate hopes and fears there lies a deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself. Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.
Those unable to decipher the hidden meaning know nevertheless that it is there, for it is felt in all wolf country, and distinguishes that country from all other land. It tingles in the spine of all who hear wolves by night, or who scan their tracks by day. Even without sight or sound of wolf, it is implicit in a hundred small events: the midnight whinny of a pack horse, the rattle of rolling rocks, the bound of a fleeing deer, the way shadows lie under the spruces. Only the ineducable tyro can fail to sense the presence or absence of wolves, or the fact that mountains have a secret opinion about them.
My own conviction on this score dates from the day I saw a wolf die. We were eating lunch on a high rimrock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When she climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails and playful maulings. What was literally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled in the center of an open flat at the foot of our rimrock.
In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks.
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers.
I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades. So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf’s job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea.
We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.
