By: Barry Kent MacKay, Honourary Director
On February 13th, 2025, City TV published an article by Dilshad Burman about the vexing problem created by the clash between coyotes and humans in Liberty Village, in the urban core of Toronto, near the lake. There, a group of residents have formed the Coyote Watch Coalition (CWC), after a series of “attacks” by “aggressive” coyotes.
The article also described the fear some folks have, even though those same people face a far more deadly threat daily, cars and trucks that killed twenty-two people as they were walking in Toronto last year. And yet it does not engender the fear created by coyotes, who killed no humans. Coyotes did kill some dogs, but the other threat killed many more, dogs, and cats – too many to monitor. The difference is that people are less likely to fear what they understand, though cars and drivers are many thousands of times more common, and more deadly, than coyotes.
I have risked my life in defense of my dog. I assuredly understand the horror of having your beloved companion killed in front of you. As a child I was traumatized by the sight of a cherished neighborhood collie, like Lassie, killed by a car in front of my house. Friends often tease me for the level of precaution I take before walking across a street. I fear cars and I would never, ever, let a dog run loose on the road, or a young child cross a street without at least holding their hand. I know to make eye contact with drivers at crosswalks, to look all ways, to judge the situation and act accordingly. I take correct precautions.
And I take correct precautions where there are coyotes, knowing that if I do that I, or any child or pet in my care, is safe. But coyotes are not cars. There is a whole different category of knowledge required so that, as with automobile traffic, you know what the risks are, and how to avoid them.
The article quotes biology professor Dr. Dennis Murray, Canada Research Chair in Integrative Wildlife Conservation at Trent University, as saying of the coyotes who have tried, and sometimes succeeded, in killing dogs, have “…completely lost their fear of humans.” In fact, wild canids don’t naturally fear humans. Fear is acquired. Where canids have not been hurt by people, they accept people. It is no wonder that some became the companions we know as setters and spaniels and poodles and my favourites, mutts, more properly and politely called mixed-breeds.
But coyotes’ relationship to other canids – dogs – is complex, and where it is dogs who help create problems with coyotes’ behaviour, conflicts are more likely to occur.
Necessary knowledge is held by such people as Lesley Samson, founder of Coyote Watch Canada, Dr. Esther Attard and her team at Toronto Animal Services (TAS), and Nathalie Karvonen and her colleagues at Toronto Wildlife Centre. And yet the article indicates that a Coyote Watch Coalition spokesperson thinks that bylaw officers from TAS don’t understand the issues. It is the other way around. Coyote Watch Coalition opposes giving fines to people who let their dogs off-leash outside designated dog parks or private yards. But the people handling those dogs fuel the problem. Coyotes react strongly to dogs and will, if they think it safe to do so, defend themselves – seeing the dog as a risk to be eliminated. But coyotes don’t think it safe to defend themselves if the dog and human are seen as a formidable single unit…as happens if mid to large-sized dogs are pressed close to a human, or a small dog scooped up and carried.
With black pupils centered in the pale colored iris of an unblinking eye, an approaching coyote can look threatening to us, but not nearly as threatening as we can look to them, especially if we yell, raise a fist, step forward, flap a coat or, perhaps best of all, shake one of those green plastic garbage bags, which, incidentally, will even intimidate an approaching bear! Lights are good if walking in darkness, and Samson recommends headlamps, which leave the hands free to hold the dog close and deploy that plastic bag.
The city is a well populated ecosystem for many wildlife species who are more abundant in urban habitats than in the wilderness, including many eaten by coyotes. Pigeons, geese (goslings), rats, mice, squirrels, raccoons (the smaller young ones especially), eastern cottontails, ducks, baby songbirds such as robins and starlings, gulls, even muskrats, may occur in concentrated numbers in the city. Such prey can be much more easily found by urban coyotes than by their country cousins. Add animals struck by vehicles and scattered fast foods to the menu and urban coyotes are well-fed.
Problems arise when food becomes associated with people. Deliberately feeding animals bigger than a blue jay is a bad idea. If food is purposely provided for coyotes, those coyotes will obviously gravitate to humans. That leads to demands to kill animals who, once understood, are not a threat.
In the article, Dr. Murray is correct in saying coyotes are being “positively reinforced” when interacting with humans, but not in saying that it is “virtually impossible to get rid of that behaviour.” Ideally, that positive reinforcement should not happen and need not happen, if humans present a threat to the coyotes, as perceived by the coyotes, themselves. And while Murray advocates killing who he thinks are the individual miscreant animals, asserting they are incorrigible, the people most familiar with the situation assure me that conflict can arise with any coyote if triggered by a dog’s presence, and “conditioning” works both ways. Fearlessness is not hardwired in coyotes.
Both the historical record and recent scientific research shows that lethal management – the killing of coyotes – causes their numbers to increase. That is counter-intuitive, but the reason is something called “compensatory immigration”, whereby other coyotes move in to compete with each other to occupy the territory vacated by killing the animal who was once there.
In 2022 a research paper, citations removed, stated, “The mechanisms by which coyotes overcome lethal management are not well known, but research has suggested that compensatory breeding and immigration are likely causal.” But very recently Dr. Joey Hinton, Senior Research Scientist at the Wolf Conservation Center’s Integrative Ecology and Coexistence Lab, a co-author of that paper, led a webinar I attended and said that it has now been determined that “compensatory immigration” is the main driver of the population increase that occurs when coyotes are killed. You need contiguous habitat for new animals to replace the ones removed, but the Toronto core is bracketed by ravine corridors running from north to south, and crossed by power lines, railway tracks, paths and roads running east and west, and most of it full of food. Given the abundance of food the city provides, it makes more sense to keep the animals already there, but condition them to fear people.
Coyote Watch Canada provides tutorials on how to do that, and have on their website what you need to know to keep yourself safe. Toronto Animal Services also provides educational material. That Coyote Watch Coalition’s call for “urgent action” that has triggered a plethora of news articles is understandable. But the action has to come from us, just as it does when we protect ourselves from other, vastly more dangerous, urban hazards.
