Coyote Trapping Policy

* In response to “Policy Only a Coyote Could Love,” editorial, June 2:

It is a sad day when The Times takes on the mentality of a selfish homeowner on the issue of animal regulation. The Times feels that coyotes are a danger when they have strayed into a residential area. But the fact is that it is people who are “straying” into the habitats of the coyotes. As long as there are greedy developers anxious to capitalize on “open” land, there will be idiots who insist on moving into these areas regardless of the fact that they’re moving into the homes of wild animals, such as coyotes.

What The Times refers to as “gobbledygook” is, in this reader’s view, a welcome step to discouraging the random killing of innocent wildlife.

The steps that the Animal Regulation Commission is requiring homeowners to take are reasonable. The people should be accommodating the wildlife, not the other way around.

TODD GROVES

Los Angeles

* Your editorial regarding the city’s policy on trapping coyotes made me smile. It’s good to see this ancient, much-maligned creature get a break.

The biological history of human beings is that we are the only animals to invade the ecological niches belonging to other species and then systematically eliminate them as we take over that niche. We have done this tens of thousands of times.

After we invade, we declare the original occupants the “problem.” For once, we need to sit back and realize that the solution just might be finding a point of gracious restraint where we do not try to consume everything, own everything and destroy everything.

The very name “coyote” comes from the Uto-Aztec language. That’s how far back this old character goes. In an age where we agonize over saving the condor, can’t we find an intelligent way to coexist with this surviving original inhabitant?

RICK DUNKERLY

Whittier

* For the better part of a year, we have been pleading with the Animal Regulation Commission, the mayor and our council members to deal, once and for all, with the dangers our children, pets and property face from a burgeoning coyote population that, in the absence of limited trapping, no longer fears human contact.

Instead of relief, we have a series of impossible bureaucratic hurdles thrown at us along with cries of budgetary poverty from a department that can’t afford to provide limited trapping, but can afford to buy eight new pickup trucks equipped with AM-FM stereo with rear speakers, presumably for the listening pleasure of stray animals.

We are living in fear. Not only in the hillsides, but also in the flats. Not only in our back yards, but city streets as well. Limited trapping as it was practiced before the ban was a measured and cost-effective method of largely stemming the problem. L.A. County understands this reality. Why can’t the commission, the mayor and City Council?

GLENN WALKER

Sherman Oaks