San Clemente Officials Call Off Weekend Coyote Hunt : Wildlife: The move comes after the parents of a girl who was attacked opted to have her undergo rabies treatment.

City officials said Friday evening that they have called off the coyote hunt they had scheduled for this weekend near the neighborhood where a 5-year-old girl was attacked in her yard last Saturday.

Jack Stubbs, spokesman for the city Fire Department, which is in charge of animal control, said the plans were changed because the girl’s parents decided to have her begin preventive treatments for rabies Friday.

Previously, the parents of Natalie Carrick had said they were reluctant to go ahead with the treatments because of possible side effects. In that case, Stubbs said, it was important to determine if the coyote that attacked her was rabid.

He said the city had intended to shoot eight to 10 coyotes in the area and send their brain tissue to the County Health Care Agency for rabies tests. While city officials acknowledged it would be “close to impossible” to identify and kill the coyote that attacked Natalie, they wanted to know if rabies was a problem in the local coyote population.

Stubbs insisted that the city’s decision not to hunt coyotes was not influenced by the deluge of calls that city officials have received from animal rights activists statewide.

“Whether they liked it or not, what we were planning was not illegal,” Stubbs said. He added that if more coyotes are sighted the city might begin killing them.

“We don’t want to wait for another child to get bitten to see if there is a need or not,” he said.

Stubbs admitted that the city had backed off from its plan to distribute dead coyote carcasses in the wild to scare off live coyotes after learning that this “is not a proven effective method.”

Some state and federal wildlife experts said that the carcasses might instead attract more coyotes, which are sometimes cannibalistic.

Earlier Friday, City Manager Michael W. Parness had said he hoped that the proposed coyote rabies tests would allay the fears of the Carricks and other residents in the Forster Canyon tract where there have been three coyote attacks in two weeks.

Natalie’s back still bears bite and scratch marks from the attack. The other two attacks were on dogs, one of which was killed.

But Lori Carrick, Natalie’s mother, decided not to wait for the hunt results. She took Natalie for the first of five preventive rabies treatments Friday afternoon. She said the shots will be administered at intervals over the next month.

Ronald Thompson, state director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture animal damage control office in Sacramento, said it is generally a good idea to find and kill a coyote that has become aggressive enough to attack humans.

Far from being an endangered species, he noted, the state’s estimated population of 350,000 to 750,000 coyotes seems to be steadily increasing despite encroaching development. Adaptive to almost any habitat, he said, coyotes are “very inventive, very intelligent predators.”

Each year, Thompson said, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, at the request of local governments, kills about 7,000 coyotes in California, mostly to protect sheep and other livestock.

Coyote attacks on humans are rare, he said. According to Thompson, there has been only one recorded fatality in the country from an unprovoked coyote attack: the 1981 death of a small girl in Glendale whose family had been luring coyotes to their yard by feeding them.

Kim Sturla, western director of Fund For Animals, an animal rights organization based in Vacaville that claims 200,000 members, was among those who called City Hall to blast San Clemente’s earlier decision to kill coyotes.

Sturla said that spring, the time when coyotes give birth, is a particularly cruel time to shoot the animals.

“It would be a great tragedy for up to a dozen coyotes, including possibly nursing females, to be blown away,” she said.

Larry Sitton, wildlife management supervisor for the state Department of Fish and Game, agreed that people who live on the fringes of wilderness should learn to live in harmony with nature, including such predators as coyotes.

The first line of defense, he said, is to refrain from attracting them into yards by setting out pet food or water or leaving small pets outside.

San Clemente’s animal control workers for the last week have been going door to door in the Forster Canyon area passing out leaflets with advice about how to make homes less hospitable to coyotes.