Terrifying night

[Howard E]

Question for the OP........if you could capture and kill the coyotes in your area to eliminate the threat they pose to pets, etc., ........could you? (Meaning is it legal to do so).........and would you if you could?

 

[IamRainey]

I can't find the answer to the question of whether it is or isn't legal to kill them in LA and I wouldn't have anything to kill one with. Nor have I actually seen the ones in my immediate neighborhood. ...at least not the pack I described. (I have seen solitary coyotes walking on the street or following us when we walked the dog.)

I wouldn't attempt to trap one because I wouldn't want to deal with it once trapped. I still have pain from a staph infection I got from a feral cat about 2 decades ago.

I did find this info from an article the LA Times published a year ago:

So are they becoming more aggressive? There were only two reported coyote attacks on people in 2011 in Los Angeles County; in 2015, that number went up to 15. Last year, it was 16. And there's been an increase in the number of county residents receiving rabies shots for coyote bites from two in 2012 to 13 last year. (Most coyotes are not rabid.) Those numbers hardly constitute a public health emergency, but the increases are a bit unsettling.

 

[Zoomie]

Well, the howling behavior is the way the coyotes mark out their territory. They also leave physical markers like urine and feces but the howling is to tell other coyotes that this territory is held by a strong family and that other coyotes should keep away.

When they are hunting, they don't make any noise. If they howled while they were hunting they would never be able to surprise any prey! So the time you need to be careful is when it's quiet, oddly enough. And I do believe you should be careful.

Your coyote problem sounds scary to me. We have tons of coyotes here, but they don't bother people. In fact if it were not for the coyotes my whole house would disappear in a gigantic gopher hole... generally when we see them they are gainfully employed in digging up gophers.

 

[IamRainey]

Well, they can certainly have my gophers!

Thanks for the additional information. It makes perfect sense that they'd be as stealthy as possible when hunting. What I heard was almost triumphant -- as though they'd had a good kill. But that may have been my imagination working overtime when I was alone in the middle of the night...

It was, however, a very different thing than their typical isolated wail or two.