Federal Advice Sought to Curb City’s Coyotes

After coyotes killed two more pets over the weekend, San Clemente officials said Tuesday they will seek the help of federal wildlife officials to devise a strategy for destroying the increasingly bold varmints that are hunting their prey in daylight in residential areas.

Gene Begnell, a spokesman for the San Clemente Fire Department, which is in charge of animal control, said the city received numerous complaints from residents unhappy with the department’s decision Friday to call off a coyote hunt scheduled for the weekend.

Begnell said the purpose of the planned hunt was to shoot a number of coyotes whose carcasses would have been sent to the county health department for rabies tests. The hunt, he said, originally was prompted by a coyote attack May 16 that left bite and scratch marks on the back of a 5-year-old girl.

The rabies tests, he said, were intended to help the girl’s family decide whether to have her undergo preventive treatment against rabies.

When the girl’s parents decided Friday afternoon to proceed with the treatment anyway, Begnell said, there was no longer any urgent need for the city to shoot coyotes in the wild--a plan that triggered an uproar of protest from many animal protection groups.

While the city is still interested in learning whether rabies is prevalent among the area’s coyote population, Begnell said, it now hopes to test animals found dead on the highway rather than going after them with shotguns.

But he added that the city nonetheless is determined to eliminate the coyotes that are menacing residents. He said the killing of coyotes will be limited to those found prowling in neighborhoods in the daytime in the northern portion of Forester Ranch, where all of the recent coyote attacks have occurred.

It is unusual for coyotes to be so aggressive as to hunt in residential areas, especially in daylight hours, Begnell said.

“It is a good chance they are second generation domestic feeders whose parents taught them to hunt domestic animals. Once they do that, it is unlikely they will revert back” to hunting in the wild, he said.

One hitch, he said, is that so far city animal control workers have had little luck spotting coyotes among the houses, although residents have reported numerous sightings.

He said on Sunday there were three reported daytime coyote attacks, two of them resulting in the deaths of a dog and cat. In a third attack, he said, the coyote dropped a cat, which was uninjured.

Begnell said the city is consulting with the animal damage control program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture to decide what method to use to destroy the culprits. He noted that shooting could be dangerous in a residential area and the use of leg traps could inadvertently catch a child.