Howling Mad : Fears About Coyotes Prompt Ban on Feeding Wild Animals

Mike Summers can’t stand the howling of coyotes that wakes him from sleep each night.

He is already angry after losing two cats, apparently carried off in the mouths of the opportunistic predators. And as the father of two young children, he fears for the family’s safety.

“I was going take out a gun and shoot them,” the 46-year-old construction worker said this week. “I was going to kill me a coyote with full hate.”

Coyotes, a visible threat to pet owners living in foothill communities for years, have become increasingly brazen, turning up in back yards to look for food and following some residents home, city officials said.

To avoid a potentially dangerous confrontation between man and animal, the City Council approved an ordinance Tuesday that bars the feeding of wild animals. It was recommended by city animal control officials, who found that some residents have been ignoring the potential threat posed by the predators.

The ban, passed just before the anticipated birth of many coyote pups in the spring, enables the city to fine people who leave food dishes outside for coyotes, raccoons, foxes, skunks or opossums. The exact fine has not yet been determined.

Mayor Robert F. Gentry, who has lost three of his cats to coyotes, said he hopes that the law helps residents avert the loss of “a member of the family, whether two-legged or four-legged, child or animal.”

Laguna Beach is the second city in the county to pass such a feeding ban, though none of its residents have been injured by coyotes. San Clemente, where three children were attacked in 1989, was the first to approve such an ordinance--in 1983.

In recent years, two other attacks on children by coyotes have been reported in Coto de Caza and Yorba Linda. Sightings of the animal are widespread, from Garden Grove to most areas of South County.

“I feel for them,” Summers said of coyotes. “But I’m going to feel for them in someone else’s neighborhood, not mine. . . . They worry me. They could easily attack my children.”

The presence of coyotes has increased dramatically in Laguna Beach since 1987, when construction of homes in nearby Aliso Viejo pushed the animals out of their destroyed habitats and into residential neighborhoods, said Joy Lingenfelter, the city’s animal control officer.

The city has received hundreds of complaints from angry pet owners in the past year. In February, 35 cats were reported missing. And in neighborhoods such as Top of the World, Arch Beach Heights and North Laguna, cat skeletons and collars have turned up, said Lingenfelter, who added that even small dogs sometimes are victims of a coyote’s appetite.

Because of the complaints and the refusal of some people to stop feeding wild animals, Lingenfelter said, she followed San Clemente’s lead by suggesting the ordinance to Deputy Police Chief James Spreine.

Lisa Freeman, a volunteer for the Laguna Beach Animal Shelter, said she felt relatively safe from coyotes with a six-foot-high fence around her back yard. Then last spring, one of them got over the fence and, before her eyes, picked up her small dog in its mouth. The Shih Tzu suffered a severed spinal cord and was later euthanized.

“I knew there were coyotes in the neighborhood,” Freeman said, “but never realized they could jump a six-foot fence.”

Some city residents are already critical of the ban, calling it unenforceable.

Wildlife protection workers, however, favor the ordinance because it keeps undomesticated animals from spreading diseases among themselves through the shared use of a food and water supply.

“It’s a good idea that’s in the best interests of the animals,” said Linda Evans, executive director for Pacific Wildlife Projects in Saddleback Valley. “Feeding animals tends to shift them into areas they don’t belong and are not welcome in.”

Other pet owners agree. Environmental consultant Thomas Miles, 49, who once spotted a coyote in his back yard and pounded on a sliding glass door to frighten it away, said: “Animals should fend for themselves. I think they shouldn’t become dependent on humans.”

His son’s cat, Pickles, never returned to their Mystic Hills home after an outing. “We went looking for him all around the neighborhood,” he said. “We’d been here long enough that the cat could not have gotten lost. We figured it was grabbed by a coyote.”