Coyotes are sharing space with us just about everywhere these days. Urban centers, rural communities, the occasional NYC construction site, etc… so it’s best if we start thinking of our yards, parks, and streets as places wildlife can exist rather than extensions of our living rooms. Overall our collective future will be better if we start to intentionally rewild our urban centers to a degree. Nature’s already starting to adapt and figure it out, so we’re kinda just playing catch-up atm.
edit; I wasn’t clear at all. I was basically saying, you’re 100% spot on. They can be a threat to our pets, but it’s not like people living in rural areas haven’t been dealing with this for decades. You just gotta be aware and responsible for your pet’s safety.
So he’s out hunting deer - and thought he’d shoot a coyote?
He should have every bit of gear used to hunt confiscated and destroyed - including his truck if he drove there, clothing, tents/blinds, and all guns/ammo. Then add on a 10k$ fine for each dog, jail time, hunting ban and the ability for a civil lawsuit to move forward.
Abusing hunting privileges should result in a complete loss of hunting privileges.
In my experience this is the case. We live right by a cutline through the city (a power line that runs through a forest and has lots of paths and creeks and a river) and this time of year my dog and I see coyotes almost every day. In pup season - should be soon - they’ll follow us on our walk and basically escort us out of the forest, but never bother us.
We’ve had run-in and they’ve met and sniffed, but Ginger is about the same size and they’ve not had a problem and leave each other alone.
My Chiweenie, on the other had, is kept on a leash. A short leash. And you’re a fool if you let your cat roam around outside in these parts. A fool or maybe you just don’t like your cat that much.
That could happen where I live in suburban Portland, Oregon. People are always posting coyote sightings on Nextdoor.
Yes, we have genuine coyotes, we are located on the extreme fringe of Metro Portland, however, I’ll never forget someone posting about seeing a HUGE coyote which was “over 100 pounds” in her backyard.
Apparently a common (and usually legal) thing for deer hunters to do.
Seeing a “coyote” chase after one of the deer he was hunting should have been a giveaway in itself though; coyotes will prey on fawns and the sick or injured but will rarely try to take down a healthy adult.
This (assuming it really was unbelievable incompetence rather than unbelievable maliciousness) is why hunting is a pursuit that requires a license and extensive training in many countries
Absolutely right, and almost eerily similar to a very famous story by the philosopher J.L.Austin:
Here, surely, is just the sort of situation where people will say ‘almost anything’, because they are so flurried, or so anxious to get off. ‘It was a mistake,’ ‘It was an accident’ – how readily these can appear indifferent, and even be used together. Yet, a story or two, and everybody will not merely agree that they are completely different, but even discover for himself what the difference is and what each means.
*You have a donkey, so have I, and they graze in the same field. The day comes when I conceive a dislike for mine. I go to shoot it, draw a bead on it, fire: the brute falls in its tracks. I inspect the victim , and find to my horror that it is your donkey. I appear on your doorstep with the remains and say – what? ‘I say, old sport, I’m awfully sorry, &c., I’ve shot your donkey by accident’? Or ‘by mistake’? Then again, I go to shoot my donkey as before, draw a bead on it, fire – but as I do so the beasts move, and to my horror yours falls. Again the scene on the doorstep – what do I say? ‘By mistake’? Or ‘by accident’?
from “A Plea for Excuses,” in John Austin, Philosophical Papers, 1970. London: Oxford University Press: 184-185.
There are plenty in my neighborhood, and there are the normal reports about neighborhood cats disappearing as a result, but the biggest issue that I personally have been dealing with is that recently my little Papillon seems to think that he’s a coyote. Whenever they’re howling in the middle of the night he joins in and won’t shut up. It’s kinda funny and ridiculous seeing such a small dog give his best impression of a coyote howl but the novelty wears off when you’re trying to sleep.
There is nothing wrong with killing coyotes in the east. They are an introduced, hybrid (interbred with dogs and wolves) species not native anywhere east of the Mississippi river. They are not a natural part of what little ecosystem we have left. They are filling an empty niche, but so would introducing tigers to North America (or hippos to Columbia apparently). Introducing foreign species to fill niches willy nilly has caused a LOT of problems over the years so they are guilty until proven innocent.
Not being able to tell the difference between a coyote and a German Shepard is unforgivable stupidity or literal blindness. Some morons give other hunters a bad name. CT has a pretty rigorous hunter safety program (multi-day, all day course (at least pre-COVID) covering everything from how to do it to do it right to how not to shoot the wrong thing plus you need a permit to buy any firearm or ammunition in CT). somehow this moron slipped through regardless though, perhaps grandfathered in.
They’re not invasive for expanding territory due to the extirpation of competing species, namely the wolves that were/are native to eastern North America. The term for that is responsive.
If we categorize any significant change of habitat of a species as invasive, we miss the mark on representing how the natural world changes & adapts. Even where we are a considerable factor in that change.
We are what made it possible, because we wiped out the wolves (almost!).
Given that the coyotes that moved in also hybridized with the waning wolf population of those times, I’d say the distinction between what we bring in and introduce, and what nature brings in as a response to our radically fucking up, is an important distinction.
They were only able to expand east of the Mississippi because we built bridges over it. Hardly a natural expansion. Sure maybe it will be fine, but they don’t deserve or need special protection.
“ his lawyer described his actions as an accident”
Now, I can imagine a hunter with a rifle seeing some animals at a distance, say 50-100 meters away, and shooting at them thinking they’re coyote. There are frequent sightings here in the U.K. of large cats reported as Puma, black panther, etc, and photos taken, but the animals mostly turn out to be domestic cats and people just don’t understand the difference in scale of what they’re seeing.
Shooting two dogs with a crossbow means he must have been really close to kill both animals, and maybe, possibly say one was an accident, but two? A crossbow is not a repeating, semi-automatic weapon!
Christ, what an asshole.
Even with a rifle at long distance, hunters are responsible for what they shoot. A deer hunter who shoots an elk at distance “on accident” is still resposible for poaching the elk if it’s out of season or if they don’t have a tag.
That goes back to what I wrote earlier about how US game laws work. There is little to no training required to get licensed to hunt or fish, but the responsibility for getting things right is on the hunter. Lack of training, knowledge or experience is no excuse for screwing up and the penalties are pretty harsh.
Pffft. The Mississippi freezes over in many places each winter. With weather extremes from climate change, those ice bridges are even further south than ever. Or does that not count because climate change is anthropogenic?
