While we’re on the topic of urban legends, folklore, and dogs, I am genuinely offering a call for information. If you have seen a dog, ideally a dog you know, being lured to their death by coyotes, I would like to hear about it. This is a thing that a lot of people believe—check the comments of any video showing outwardly friendly coyote-dog interactions—and I would like to know more.
This does not mean:
- “Our neighbors always swore that must’ve been what became of that sheepdog they had who went missing. Always was too friendly for his own good, and it happened right around breeding season, too, so must’ve been he caught sight of some female and…” or
- “My friend’s cousin’s dog was eaten by coyotes after he was playing with them,” or
- “I heard growing up that’s why we kept our dogs on a chain, after one my parents had before I was born ran off and got killed by coyotes,” or
- “I read in [someone]’s memoir they lost a good husky that way,” or
- “Here’s a news story with a quote from a local official that mentions coyotes doing this,” and extremely it does not mean
- “Well… not me personally, but I know for a fact this definitely happens sometimes.”
Also not:
- “Have you seen if this is covered in Coyote America*?,” or
- “I don’t think it’s controversial that coyotes kill domestic animals all the time” or
- “On NextDoor somebody said a coyote snatched their dog right off their porch, if you want to talk to them about it”
I know coyotes attack housepets. I know people who keep outdoor cats are mostly doing so only because giving kibble directly to neighborhood coyotes is apparently unseemly (just feed them, dudes. The songbirds will thank you for it). Coyotes are dangerous wild animals and you should keep your pets safe. I’m not arguing that. I just want to hear from you, or someone you know, specifically about domestic dogs being drawn away by coyotes for the purpose of killing them. If Cohost or Telegram isn’t an option, you can E-mail me at coyotes@writing.dog.
Failing that, I’ll also accept video evidence, I guess. Send me a video of the cutest, sweetest dog I have ever seen being seduced and brutally murdered like some Cold War spy thriller and I promise I will watch it with frame-by-frame, Zapruder-film intensity like a weird OSINT dweeb on Twitter to get to the bottom of this.
(As my tone with this last paragraph may imply, I definitely don’t believe this happens regularly—I am not entirely certain it has ever unambiguously happened at all—so if there is someone whose honesty this impugns, who would find this slander might induce them to convince me otherwise: you are more than free to go ahead and tell them “hey, this dog on the Internet is calling you a liar, are you gonna take that?” if it helps)
* Not directly, as far as I can recall.
Despite the cat-killer urban legend, in city after city the science indicates that pets provide only about 1 to 2 percent of the average coyote’s diet. Stan Gehrt grew up as a rural Kansan who’d never seen a city the likes of Chicago, but coyotes had attracted so much attention there by the latest 1990s that he finally got funding to study them. Unless new isotope analysis of coyote diets shows something his original scat studies didn’t, he told me, then “despite the stories, I can say flat out that urban coyotes don’t depend on pets for food. If coyotes were relying on pets as a source of food, we quickly wouldn’t have any pets left.”Flores, D. (2016). *Coyote America*. New York: Hachette. p. 197-198.
(I don’t believe it’s mentioned at all in Catherine Reid’s Coyote: Seeking the Hunter in Our Midst (2005) or Michael Huff’s Understanding Coyotes (2016) except for briefly, on page 29 in the latter: “Coyotes may occasionally steal some dog food left outside for Fido or kill the neighborhood cat when in town. [However,] these are typically very low on the preference list of coyotes, especially in rural areas”)
