Howl of the Wild

It comes as no surprise that whenever urban life begins going to hell, we look around for something to kill. Often it’s drug dealers, sometimes it’s gang members, other times terrorists. Today it’s coyotes.

I see it as a reaction to events that have us all ducking for cover on our way to school, work or the supermarket, never knowing when random violence will pluck us like chicken feathers and cast us to the cosmic winds.

We get awfully tired of the danger after awhile, but since it’s too risky and complicated to take on anything that shoots back, we scratch around for something to kill that’s, well, more cooperative.

Coyotes, of course, have nothing to do with urban violence. They do not pack automatic rifles or handguns (though the National Rifle Assn. would welcome their membership) and do not deliberately seek out anything they can’t eat.

Nevertheless, a cry has gone up once more in the teeming smog belts of the San Fernando Valley to trap and kill the hapless Canis latrans.

The anti-coyotians want to end a six-month city ban on trapping the animals and go back to capturing and “eradicating” them, a term applied to soften the impact of killing a living creature.

The coyotes, their detractors howl, are coming out of the mountains and into the foothills and canyons at the edges of the high ground, eating their cats and their puppies and threatening their children.

A woman who recently lost a kitten asked me, in high dudgeon, how I would like to be grabbed from my porch, killed and eaten by a pack of howling beasts? I had to admit I wouldn’t like that at all.

However, there are 25 million cats in the United States and not nearly as many newspaper columnists, so goodby, kitty, kitty, kitty.

*

I asked around why so many people were suddenly up in arms about coyotes.

Wildlife conservationists say it’s because coyotes are being driven into new areas where they can, in their terms, “support themselves.” Sort of like looking for work in Portland.

Housing developments, drought, floods and the recent fires have driven mountain rats into the lowlands, and the coyote is following. An average coyote meal, I am told, is 25 rats.

While nosing around the foothills and canyons, if Mr. Coyote should come across a fat, juicy little cat, well, c’est la vie, and bring on a nice bottle of merlot, although some prefer a vintage cabernet with cat.

The fact that coyotes are showing up more frequently in areas where they have not been seen before has caused a kind of mass hysteria resulting in new demands from foothill dwellers for trapping and killing.

“They’re just not educated about what coyotes are,” says Michael Bell, who, as vice president of the Wildlife Protection League, is a well-known coyote-hugger. “They equate them with packs of wolves that come out of the mountains looking for children to eat. That’s just not true.”

Unless you’re a rat or maybe a hare, and sometimes a cat, you’re probably safe.

However, people ought to know what they’re getting into when they move into areas that really belong to wildlife, Bell says. Toward that end, he’s trying to get the city to enact a disclosure law that would warn new home owners they’re moving into an area inhabited by coyotes.

A good idea. If we’d had the same law warning us of human predators in the city, L.A. would be half the size and twice as safe.

*

State humane officer Barbara Fabricant, my favorite animal lover, blames New Yorkers for the problem of coyotes preying on small domestic animals.

“They move out of their damned high-rises and come into our canyons to get trees and all that crap,” she says. “They own nice little pussycats, and coyotes love pussycat entrails.

“If they haven’t got brains enough to keep their cats inside or to build a fence to protect their dogs, they damned well deserve what they get.”

Both Bell and Fabricant contend that by eating rats, coyotes protect us from the deadly hantavirus, which is carried by rodents. “Coyotes,” as Bell puts it, “stand between us and disaster.”

I live among coyotes and am less bothered by them than I am by the panhandlers of Santa Monica, though I do not advocate trapping and killing, I mean eradicating, them for convenience’s sake.

The fact is, there’s no need to kill anything. As Fabricant says, keep your damned cat home and the likelihood is you’ll be able to live among coyotes with impunity.

That goes for your damned dog, too.