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Comment by doug-moen | Hacker News Reader

If the coyotes breed, then attacks on humans will begin as the coyotes will instinctively defend their cubs from humans who get too close to the den, even unwittingly. It would be better to remove the coyotes before this happens.

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I've seen this exact pair of coyotes three times now. I have a few blurry photos of them. They're about the size of my dog, who is roughly 60 pounds, so they are sizable and could hunt a small dog or child. However, they're very cautious around people still, and appear well fed. The wildlife in central park is highly adapted to the presence of people and stays away, except to dig through the park trash.

If you have plentiful prey (rats outnumber humans in NYC) , this is not likely to happen

As the other post mentioned they can be aggressive to protect cubs then it is not about hunger..

Coyotes are all over socal and they really don’t go for people at all. Small dogs maybe.

Generally true but there are exceptions.

>>Small dogs maybe.

A judge in Brooklyn recently ruled[1] that dogs are (now) classified as "immediate family members". I wonder if the this might push the Central Park Conservancy to step up considerations for eradication of the coyotes to avoid potential emotional damages in light of the ruling if such a situation were to occur.

[1] https://www.nonhumanrights.org/blog/dogs-family-members/

if we're lucky maybe the coyotes will take out this judge?

> Coyotes are all over socal and they really don’t go for people at all.

From four days ago:

* https://globalnews.ca/news/11267424/nobelton-coyote-attack/

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

No one is saying that it doesn’t happen. One-off stories don’t prove anything one way or the other.

Smaller children are at risk for coyote attacks. A 12-year-old boy does seem a bit unusual, but he wasn't paying attention to his surroundings. It may depend somewhat on whether the animal was rabid, or how hungry/desperate the animal was for food.

> A 12-year-old boy does seem a bit unusual, but he wasn't paying attention to his surroundings.

What a strange accusation... are 12 years old supposed to walk in fear? Looking in all directions? We're talking kids here?

It's much better to kill the coyotes until they learn to walk in fear.

They are (statistically) rare, but not one-off:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote_attack

Currently (in Toronto) the attacks are generally against dogs/cats, but chasing of humans has been reported:

* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-coyote-action...

* https://www.hawkeye.ca/blog/toronto-coyote-increase

"One-off stories" is plural. You might argue that it is then an oxymoron in the absence of context, but the person you are replying to is clearly contrasting one-off stories with a general pattern.

Small pets and small children are at risk.

IME(living in almost rural area, coyotes live in/near stormwater ponds and are abundant) they will follow you if you get too close to the den to try to drive you away, but won't engage.

Coyote pups are adorable though. A couple of them made a lair in a drain about a month ago but have relocated since. Still see one of them around the neighborhood with his distinctive tail.

Probably biggest human coyote interaction risks in Central Park will be the bikers and dog walkers.

Or a couple of decades of lost human lives until enough voters realize that the underlying ideology (that celebrates Coyotes next to playgrounds) absolutely values human life lower than what should be acceptable.

Coyotes have been breeding near human settlements, at scale, for thousands of years. Attacks happen, but are very rare.

I'd speculate that there has been considerable selective pressure against the "not highly avoidant of attacking humans" trait in coyotes.

Coyotes are tiny critters. Surely they don’t attack humans?

They do on occasion, and there have even been a couple of deaths. But to your point, the rate is very very low.

Edit: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote_attack

> Coyotes are tiny critters. Surely they don’t attack humans?

Perhaps adult humans are less likely, but child humans the risk could be higher as a coyote may think they can 'take' them; from a few days ago:

* https://globalnews.ca/news/11267424/nobelton-coyote-attack/

It sounds like you're on the west coast, where coyotes are tiny. East coast coyotes are much larger, on the order of a good-sized dog.

That said, I welcome coyotes in urban spaces, and have admired from afar the few bold urban coyotes I've come across. Humans need reminders that they're a part of nature and not apart from nature, especially in the city. In terms of actual danger, coyotes kill approximately infinity times fewer people than cars do, so let's focus infinity times more energy on solving that problem first.

On the east coast the coyotes interbreed with wolves and form coywolves which are really huge and can be nasty. Look at the picture on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_coyote. It's only a matter of time before something bad happens to a small child. They've already killed a lot of small dogs.

They're expanding/evolving into the niche that wolves occupied. The superabundance of deer is facilitating that.

Dingoes are a good percentage smaller than Coyotes on average and maximum (Dingoes 22 – 33 lbs, Coyotes 20 – 46 lbs). Dingoes are small, to the point where "Dingoes ate my baby" was a common and sarcastic joke after a reported attack - And yet that attack was extensively proven[1].

Yes, a small group of Coyotes could easily corner or snatch a small child and pose a danger to such. Is it likely? No. Is it reasonable to relocate the coyotes? Absolutely. It might also be reasonable to manage and not relocate the coyotes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_Chamberlain-Creighton#Ev...

They're the size of a medium size dog, only not friendly. If we don't accept off-leash dogs in public I don't understand why coyotes are tolerated in human cities.

They are tolerated because there is no human you can yell at to keep them on a leash.

What do you mean tolerated? How many coyotes have you personally eradicated? If not you then who?

Department of animal control usually.

The ones I've come across in the southwest portion of the U.S. are pretty small, and from Wikipedia: "The average male weighs 8 to 20 kg (18 to 44 lb) and the average female 7 to 18 kg (15 to 40 lb).".

My Pyrenees/husky mix absolutely dwarfs them and they give her a WIDE berth the few times I've seen them while hiking.

At least when it comes to coyotes on the Pacific Northwest, they're not tiny at all. I've seen specimens that easily had the size of a largish German shepherd, many times. 30 to 40 kilos isn't rare, and that's not a tiny critter at all. It's definitely a threat to a kid or nearly any dog and could give even an adult male human a run for their money if the coyote actually got aggressive enough to lunge (that at least isn't likely, since they're fantastically cowardly when confronted by any aggression from adult humans, at least in my experience)

Sssh. They don't want to hear it. It won't bother those of us who don't live there and they'll figure it out in a few years.

Humans are a bigger risk to coyotes than coyotes to humans.

> It would be better to remove the coyotes before this happens.

following this logic, we should just kill all coyotes. We did this to lotsa other species, I hope we've stopped that.

In cities where parks are the few places kids can play outdoors yes that is a reasonable idea.

I wouldn't worry about this; pretty rare that today's parent lets their kid farther away than arms length!

> we should just kill all coyotes

At least relocate them out of cities. Why would you ever want a predator that large living inside a city?

Let a dog, a domesticated animal that we trust to live in our homes with our children and babies, off-leash in a city and people lose their minds. But coyotes move in and everyone's chill? Wtf

Where I live you can shoot coyotes in any season with a hunting permit. That's chill? OK then, let's be chill about off-leash dogs and apply the same rules to them.

That's not what the story is about. But you sound like you want to shoot dogs.

Do I?

You sound like you think it's OK to let your dog run off-leash.

My suggestion was relocating the coyotes, not shooting them. I'm ok applying that rule to off-leash dogs and in fact, that's what happens. They're trapped and taken to a shelter for the owner to reclaim. They're eventually put down if unclaimed.

You suggested shooting dogs. Seek help.

Where do we relocate the off-leash dogs to? This interests me.

We catch a dog off-leash in a park and the dog gets relocated to...where?

I updated my comment because I figured a troll like yourself would ask. And I was right.

Dogs kill orders of magnitudes more humans than coyotes. Orders of magnitude more children are killed by dogs than by coyotes.

Chill, dude.

I don't know if we should kill dogs. That's not my call. But at least relocate them out of cities?

Would you ever want a predator as large as a dog living inside a city?

I wouldn't, I'm a cat person.

Cows kill the same order of magnitude humans as dogs. And they don't even live in cities, near people. Time to end cattle farming?

I'm ok with dogs in cities, even if they're predators. They're man's best friend.

Are off-leash dogs in your part of the world a consistent threat to your safety, or an annoyance? There's obvious recourse since dogs have owners, but maybe you should shoot them too?

>> Are off-leash dogs in your part of the world a consistent threat to your safety

Killed people here, yeah. What's the recourse when a pit bull kills you, skeeter2020? Can you tell me that? When you're dead from a pit bull attack, what's your recourse?

I'm really interested in the answer.

>> At least relocate them out of cities.

Ah yes, make it someone else's costly problem and let me feel good about myself because it's such a humane solution.

> make it someone else's costly problem

Move them to a national forest and they'll be the local wildlife's problem.

> let me feel good about myself because it's such a humane solution

Yeah actually because it is humane and I do feel good about myself.

A lot of cities have stray dogs roaming around

Coyotes are already slaughtering pets in places where their population reaches saturation levels thanks to access to so much easy food. It's not a hypothetical, it's something that actively happens and in such places, attacks on little kids are not a miniscule risk.

No, you don't have to kill all coyotes to control a specific population of them in a particular place in way that actually re-balances a completely unnatural saturation in their numbers.

There's nothing grotesque about recognizing the reality of these being urban spaces in which it might just not be a good idea to have many thousands more 40-kilo predators wandering around than would ever be natural even if the area were totally uninhabited by humans.

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