Coyotes have fans — and foes — in Pasadena
As pups born between spring and summer come of age, their existence in the wildland-urban interface is a topic of hot debate online. Humane Society workers look for ways to mend a fractious discourse.
Four young coyote pups cavort amidst the trash of the vacant lot, gray coats painted pink by the soft July twilight. The pack looks awkward and clumsy, all oversized paws and big ears under soft, downy fur. With mom gone hunting, they have been left alone, exploring the boundaries of their childhood home.
These are some of the newest additions to Pasadena’s coyote population, the fruit of the coyote baby season between late spring and early summer. They have spent that time exploring the small area around their burrow.
According to experts, by September, these pups will join their mother on their first hunt, leaving the safety of their lot and venturing out onto the residential streets of Pasadena in search of food and space.
The pups are wholly unaware that their existence has already been clocked and debated on their neighborhood’s Nextdoor feed, with some Pasadena residents already demanding their removal while others defend their innocence. Just months away from leaving the lot, they are now the subject of a spirited, nearly weekly online debate.
One of the voices defending their right to remain in the lot is Dave Hancock.
Hancock became aware of Pasadena’s rocky relationship with coyotes immediately upon moving into the neighborhood in 2020, after living between Tujunga-Sunland, Shadow Hills and La Tuna Canyon.
“Coyotes were something I would see regularly,” Hancock recalled of his old neighborhoods.
After moving to Pasadena, and joining the neighborhood’s Nextdoor community, Hancock noticed that Pasadena residents were far more fearful of coyotes.
“I was kind of alarmed, because I had come from a place where coyotes were a pretty normal sighting, and I didn’t see that kind of, for a lack of a better word, hysteria on Nextdoor,” Hancock noted.
It has been a bad year for coyotes’ reputation across Southern California. In late Spring, two coyotes were shot after attacking a 2-year old child near Huntington Beach Pier. Two months later, a coyote was euthanized after it attacked another 2-year old child in Fountain Valley. In July, the City of Manhattan Beach City Council voted unanimously to hire a trapper to propose a coyote management strategy. In the words of Councilmember Susanne Hadley, echoing the mayor’s sentiment: “great, let’s trap and euthanize.”
One side of the debate in Pasadena fears that coyotes pose a growing, or an imminent threat to humans and their pets. They want the coyotes gone, relocated or dead.
Others sees coyotes as a reality of California life. They perceive human-coyote conflict as a problem, but one that can be addressed by following a set of guidelines.
‘Initial touchpoint’ on coyotes
For many residents trying to contact the officials responsible for wildlife in the community, Pasadena Humane Society is their initial touchpoint. However, Pasadena Humane Society follows a strict set of rules for intervening in the complicated relationship between humans and coyotes.
Since 1904, the city of Pasadena has contracted Pasadena Humane Society to act as Pasadena’s Poundmaster. A majority of Pasadena Humane Society’s work consists of responding to situations involving domestic animals. When it comes to coyotes, Pasadena Humane Society is limited to several activities.
The Society can respond to calls regarding sick and injured coyotes, which they are authorized to remove. They send samples from captured sick coyotes to the Pasadena Department of Public Health for testing in order to detect any potentially human-transmissible diseases, such as rabies, that the city should be aware of.
The organization also responds to the rare instances when a coyote appears to be threatening humans. In those cases, Pasadena Humane Society can send a team to haze the coyote out of the area. Hazing is the method of scaring off a coyote with enough intensity and persistence that the coyote learns to fear a location or people.
The process to remove a coyote is onerous, involving decision-making at multiple levels on up to the city manager prior to setting the first trap in the field. Relocating wildlife is illegal in California, leaving lethal removal as the only option for reducing the local coyote population, and lethal removal is only considered if a coyote attacks a human without having been provoked.
With the city manager’s approval, the city would contract California Department of Fish and Wildlife representatives or a licensed animal trapper to remove the coyote.
Experts say removal as a strategy for population management can backfire, leading to an increase in the population size. When a coyote is removed, space opens up for new coyotes to fill in. If a breeding female is removed from her pack, the other females can be pushed into hormonal overdrive, multiplying the number of ovulating coyotes.
It is not considered unusually aggressive for a coyote to stalk and kill unattended pets. That is considered “normal coyote behavior,” a term often used by experts discussing human-coyote interactions. While humans view a clear distinction between dogs, cats, rats and squirrels, coyotes only see a possible food source.
Getting the word out
The most common service that Pasadena Humane Society offers is educating the public about how to avoid conflicts with coyotes. When Pasadena Humane Society gets involved with wildlife issues, it is Wildlife Manager Lauren Hamlett who guides the response.
“The main goal is to keep animals in homes,” she explained. “And that includes wildlife, so our goal is to keep wildlife in its home too.”
This mission statement doesn’t quell the angst some residents feel.
“Our right to peaceful living on our property is now gone, and not one city government will even address it,” asserted one furious resident commenting on Nextdoor, echoing others who believe the “situation is clearly out of hand.”
Hamlett recognizes that the public is often confused about what Pasadena Humane Society’s role is when responding to coyote-related incidents.
“A lot of what I do is, I have to clarify what is considered normal coyote behavior, first of all, and then what legally we are allowed to do, what contractually we’re allowed to do,” Hamlett said.
Hamlett is acutely aware of the concerns that Pasadena residents have regarding coyotes. She manages the Wildlife Helpline at Pasadena Humane Society which, so far in 2022, has received 74 calls and texts about coyotes. For comparison, during that same period they received only 13 Helpline reports about bears and 14 regarding bobcats. Hamlett also reviews wildlife-related reports made through the Pasadena Citizens Service Center where, she says, “9.9 times out of 10, it’s a coyote complaint.” She also receives coyote-related emails and reports through Pasadena Humane Society’s website.
When leading workshops, Hamlett teaches that coyotes are drawn to people for a few reasons: food, water and shelter. Residents can make their homes less attractive to coyotes by removing water sources, ensuring that ornamental fruit trees are not dropping potential coyote food (coyotes do consume fruit when available), keeping trash in trash cans, and not leaving pets and pet food outside unattended. A coyote will view small pets as an accessible food source if the pet is further than six feet from a human.
Hamlett advises residents to keep their properties from becoming overgrown or cluttered, which provides coyotes with opportune places to build their burrows. She also teaches hazing techniques.
Hamlett acknowledges that residents might tire of taking the precautions she teaches. “With coyotes it really takes community effort and it really takes consistency. People get tired of doing it and especially if they’re doing everything right but their neighbor is still putting out food.”
Kelley Ritch is among those who are tired of putting in the effort with seemingly few results. A Pasadena resident since 1994, Ritch feels that her personal coyote sightings have increased rapidly in just the past five years.
Ritch has attended Pasadena Humane Society coyote workshops and tries to follow the guidelines and techniques she learns. She keeps her dog and two cats inside unless she can chaperone. She keeps her property free of pet food, ornamental fruit and water sources. When necessary, she even removes coyote attractants from her neighbor’s yard by picking up the fruit falling off their trees.
Ritch feels that the coyotes she sees are acting bolder than the image being painted at the workshops she has attended.
“I walk away feeling insulted because I’m screaming at the top of my lungs ‘this has gotten so bad’ and no one is listening! They just keep saying ‘no, coyotes won’t do that’ and I’m like ‘but they did do that’,” Ritch lamented.
Over the years, Ritch has contacted Pasadena Humane Society, California Fish and Wildlife and the Mayor’s Office, yet feels that she only receives “canned responses,” hearing suggestions that have little to no effect.
Shared responsibility
Kent Smirl, governmental program analyst at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, believes that a successful program for preventing human-wildlife conflict relies on addressing the anger that residents like Ritch feel. Smirl says that the gap between angry residents and their government needs to be bridged.
“They need someone to listen to them and understand where they’re coming from,” he explained. “You can’t just give them the run around and say ‘hey, just go call this agency’ or ‘we don’t do this.’ Because it will come back and bite ya, it will. People are gonna let their emotions out in one way or another.”
In order to address the human component of human-wildlife conflict, Smirl helped found the Wildlife Watch program at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Wildlife Watch employs “conservation coaching” which teaches participants leadership skills in addition to wildlife education. The goal is to ensure that residents know the right information when it comes to preventing conflict with coyotes and that they are confident in leading their communities in following those guidelines.
A major theme in Wildlife Watch is getting communities to share the burden of preventing human-wildlife conflict.
Sharing community responsibility would mean that many residents would do what Kelley Ritch does when she sees fruit on her neighbor’s yard, clean it up.
Lauren Hamlett has experienced this application of shared responsibility firsthand. Prior to working as the Wildlife Manager at Pasadena Humane Society, Hamlett lived and worked in Kodiak, Alaska, home to the largest bears on earth. A Kodiak Brown Bear can stand ten feet high and weigh 1,500 pounds, equivalent to about 43 coyotes. Hamlett recalled how most people in Kodiak took personal responsibility for safely living around these giants.
“There’s this public, communal, social pressure on you to get educated,” Hamlett explained. “Whereas I think we’re not there yet in Pasadena.”
Hamlett said that people who weren’t educated about bears in Kodiak would be afraid to leave their houses and go out into nature.
“I see that a lot in people in Pasadena,” Hamlett said. “They’re afraid of taking their dogs on walks. They’re afraid of going on hikes.”
She understands that people are frustrated and frightened of what they see as the recently heightened threat posed by coyotes.
“I know that it’s frustrating, that it didn’t feel like they were here before,” she acknowledged. “But they’re here now and so we need to adapt and we need to learn about them so that you’re not afraid.”
Hamlett thinks that Pasadena residents are capable of changing their feelings about coyotes and has witnessed that change after speaking individually with coyote detractors.
“People are really understanding and receptive, and they’re like ‘OK, I feel empowered to go out there and be the human that is the top of the food chain and not be afraid of these coyotes and make them feel uncomfortable’,” she recalled. “I think people just need sort of that encouragement because coyotes don’t have any natural predators, so we are the natural predators and we need to start acting like it.”
The community has some distance to go to mend the fractured discourse around coyotes. Kelley Ritch feels that those on opposite sides of the issue are dug into their respective camps.
“The advocates are going to talk to whoever is going to listen and then people who are experiencing what I’m experiencing, we’re going to talk to whoever will listen,” Ritch explained. “It is incredibly polarizing, and there doesn’t seem to be any gray area.”
While the residents of Pasadena argue with one another over how to deal with coyotes, the coyotes themselves will continue to do what they have done in North America for thousands of years: relax in the sun, hunt prey and howl their ancient song.
