Coyotes Eating Cats in Oakhurst??
15 11 2007 
OK, obviously I don’t know or understand Oakhurst at all. It’s like the freakin’ wild west down there! It’s dog eat dog and coyote eat cat on the southern side of the tracks.
Apparently there are reports of coyotes eating cats in Oakhurst. Apparently these reports are credible enough for the AJC to write an article about it. Apparently there is such a concern that the Oakhurst Homeowners Association has invited Michael Ellis from the Atlanta Wild Animal Rescue Effort to speak to residents tonight at the Solarium at 7pm about the facts and myths of urban coyotes.
While I was aware of reports (and hilarious videos) of wild animals coming into cities as development continues to destroy their natural habitat (I’ve seen/heard a surprising number of owls ITP lately), I didn’t realize that coyotes were currently a problem in Oakhurst. Oakhurst isn’t exactly a fringe community, so I figure that if Oakhurst has this “problem”, much of metro Atlanta does too.
So why is Oakhurst getting all the press? Well, it seems a female coyote was caught in the neighborhood recently and 11 Alive reports that the animal will be euthanized on Thursday. Euthanized?! That’s our brilliant solution? We can’t release the animal somewhere outside the city? I guess that costs to many tax payer dollars. DeKalb County sure loves to euthanize animals! As the 11 alive article points out that “for every documented coyote attack on a human there are 400,000 dog attacks.”
Though there’s an understandable concern for pets safety with coyotes lurking about, their presence can also be beneficial. This story from World Science points out that they help control a neighborhood’s rat population.
There are a lot better ways to control a rat population than to encourage the presence of coyotes. Rats have many predators such as hawks, owls, foxes, raccoons and, of course, cats.
You might not be so benign to this problem if you were to lose your own pet to a predator that has no business whatsoever in an urban environment. Their native range is the prairies of the western US and Canada so this idea that they “belong here” is false. They have plenty of new habitat now out in the rural areas of the eastern US, which they never previously occupied until their own predators (wolf and cougar) were eliminated many years ago.
And then there is the issue of rabies and other coyote-carried diseases, but I’ll let you visit your nearby CDC for more-than-enough information on that subject. In the meantime, note that Texas had a BIG problem with coyotes a few years back, so take a moment and Google “Texas Oral Vaccine Project”. (BTW, the “vaccine” was actually the very lethal canine parvovirus– an example of biowarfare being used when all other options are ineffective.)
While I recognize that my levity on this issue would not be well-received by someone who had actually had a cat killed by a coyote, I stand by my immediate reaction, documented in this post. The first being “why the heck are there coyotes in Oakhurst?” and the second being embarrassed that our knee jerk reaction is extermination.
From an evolutionary standpoint, coyotes have “business” to be where ever there is food. Survival is their business. They have as much right to invade our space, as we do invading their dwindling environments with urban sprawl. An animal that threatens the human environment rarely lives to tell the tale. However, the argument becomes whether that animal is actually a threat or whether we’re just overly fearful of any wild predators.
When I hear of word that their are rabid coyotes in Oakhurst, I will change my tune. That’s not funny stuff, because the animal is now exceedingly dangerous to everyone. Until then, I support Michael Ellis’ effort to educate the community on the myths and facts of this new neighbor.