By now, you've probably read about the sad and unfortunate death of Taylor Mitchell, the 19-year-old folk singer from Toronto who died from injuries sustained in a mauling involving coyotes in Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Highlands National Park. And, if you live in North America, you no doubt have been subjected to commentary from hysteria- driven (not hysterical) disc hockeys on AM radio.
The further that society becomes insulated, isolated, and detached from nature, it seems, there is a corresponding amount of fear that arises among urban dwellers about the natural world. That's unfortunate, considering the city, suburbs and exurbia is where most people live.
As coyotes, a canid endemic to North America, have adapted to fragmentation of their traditional habitat, and learned how to exploit a new niche, their numbers and range have expanded dramatically across the continent. During the 1990s, I wrote a book about that expansion titled Track of the Coyote.
One of the things I do when I'm not writing about art is I tend to my regular career as a professional journalist who specializes in covering the environment. And recently, I wrote a story about the coyote attack for The Christian Science Monitor . Interestingly, after one of the experts I interviewed mentioned that coyote attacks are not only rare, but especially uncommon compared to, say, maulings committed by pit bulls, the owners of pit bulls themselves became riled and defended their breed.
By asserting that injuries caused by pit bulls on people are relatively rare compared to the odds of dying in a car accident, being struck by lightning, or coming down with cancer, they didn't realize it but they corroborated the point made by the wildlife biologist who meant no defamation of pit bulls. The point is that while pit bull attacks are relatively small in number, coyote attacks are, in comparison, almost non existent. Two human fatalities from coyotes in Canada over many, many decades. Millions of coyotes on the continent dwelling among hundreds of millions of people.
It certainly doesn't minimize the horror of Mitchell's death.
Another researcher, Jon Way, who has been studying 50 radio-collared coyotes on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, including animals living in the middle of dense human neighborhoods, says the angst is disproportionate to the actual danger. Very likely, the animals that attacked Mitchell had been fed human food and had learned to associate nutritional rewards with people. The animals also might have been sick. Or, if this was a true predatory incident, it was extraordinarily uncommon.
"Coyotes are living amongst us in areas where we live and sleep and children play in our backyards," he said. "You tend not to see them during the day but as the human activity level wanes in the evening coyotes become more active. There is a general avoidance that goes on between them and humans."
What Way finds intriguing about the Canadian incident is that it involved a pair of coyotes. "Of course there is going to be hysteria, but the fact is that incidents like this could have been happening everywhere over several decades, but they didn't," he said.
The same can be said of attacks by grizzly bears, wolves, cougars, alligators, sharks and dingoes. (We would like to hear from our readers in Africa and Asia about the frequency of wildlife attacks there on people). Still, we malign the animals and yet we are drawn to wild places, excited by the prospect of exploring those rare spots on the planet where large carnivores and omnivores still exist. Check out the bar graph, above.
Naturalist Ralph Maughan, a retired political science professor who taught at Idaho State University for three decades (and whom I interviewed for the Monitor story, today operates a wonderful level-headed site, Ralph Maughan's Wildlife Blog I highly recommend you visiting that tracks wildlife issues, including human-animal encounters. The next time you see a wildlife attack making headlines, make a point of clicking on Maughan's site. He'll put it in perspective.
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