A family in Mission Viejo, Calif., heard a series of loud crashes at their back door, then reviewed their doorbell camera footage to find a determined coyote had been trying to attack their cat.
The footage shows the coyote repeatedly throwing itself at the screen door, which might have buckled if there hadn’t been a baby gate reinforcing it.
“We ended up putting a baby gate up to keep the cats inside,” homeowner Cindy Stalnaker told KABC. “That ended up being what prevented the coyote from getting inside the house because that’s what he was banging into repeatedly.”
Coyotes weigh about 30 to 35 pounds and will attack potential prey smaller than they are, which includes pets as well as young children.
The canids aren’t usually keen on approaching human homes, but in many places they’ve run out of room to roam as towns and cities clear more wild land for new developments. Less habitat means less prey, which can also lead the animals to scavenge and hunt on the fringes of residential and urban neighborhoods.
Stalnaker said she was grateful the baby gate held, but she’s looking into a more stable and permanent solution to keep her cats safe from coyotes.
What if air conditioning isn’t enough?
Human activity isn’t just driving wild animals to extinction, it’s killing them off with temperature extremes, and a Tuesday story from The Guardian provides a bleak look at how our present situation threatens human life as well: Buildings in most US cities aren’t built to mitigate excess heat, air conditioners weren’t designed to keep on chugging indefinitely with temperatures around 100 degrees, and power grids can’t keep up with the demand when millions of AC units are drawing power simultaneously.
At the same time, summers keep getting hotter and there’s no reprieve in sight.
While the heat has major ramifications for animals and sea life, it’s also directly endangering human life now:
“Some experts have begun to warn of the looming threat of a “Heat Katrina” – a mass-casualty heat event. A study published last year that modeled heatwave-related blackouts in different cities showed that a two-day blackout in Phoenix could lead to the deaths of more than 12,000 people.”
An architectural engineer tells the newspaper that temperatures have spiked so much in recent summers that cooling “systems that we sold 10 years ago are not able to keep up with the weather we have.”
The result for people in America’s hottest cities is that even AC doesn’t provide relief.
In the meantime we’re likely to see more headlines about rolling blackouts, punishing energy bills and people dying in their homes, scientists say. Fusion power and significant leaps in battery technology can’t come soon enough.
Pain In The Bud 
I feel bad for the coyote. It’s probably starving and that’s why he did this. Of course, you know those cats are inside doing a little dance and they’re like “Ha Ha! We’re your food and you can’t get us! Psst!!” Then they mooned him and gave him the finger. No wonder he was hell bent on getting in there!
I don’t like seeing stories like this because they make me sad and angry. I really do feel sorry for him. That poor coyote is probably starving thanks to humans taking over their hunting grounds. When are people finally going to wake up and see, admit and stop doing all the harm we do to the planet? Will it be when all other life on Earth is dead and gone? I’m hoping it won’t take that long.
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I agree, there was a desperation in the way he kept throwing himself at the screen. When we pave over everything, there isn’t anything left for animals like coyotes to hunt. What’s even more scary is that coyotes are one of the most adaptable wild species, so if they’re struggling like this, what hope is there for most other animals?
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Exactly. What really makes me mad is the fact that IF it would’ve killed someone’s pet, it would’ve been hunted down and killed. For doing exactly what it was supposed to do. We’ve given animals like coyotes, bears, mountain lions, etc. no other choice but to resort to this. It’s sad it happens but WE are the cause of it. And we need to start taking responsibility for that fact.
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I disagree that the attack was motivated by desperation. Looks more like the natural hunting instinct to me.
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We hippies told you in the 1960s about what would happen if you Americans didn’t change your ways, and you mocked and vilified us. (“Hippy tree-hugger,” anyone?)
We tried to show you that humans can create any lifestyle that we want and to model one alternative lifestyle that didn’t rely on killing the earth.
We told you what would come to pass if you stayed on the same road you were traveling, and now we have arrived at that point. This is why I didn’t want to live into the 21st century: it’s the dystopia you created.
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Hey, I was Nonexistent Buddy when all that Silent Spring stuff was going down. 🙂
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Yes, I know you are a youngster.
The “you” was to all of the Americans out there.
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My neighbor lost his cat to a coyote. (Yeah, cat shouldn’t be outside but it was “only for a moment.”) I don’t have as much sympathy for the inner city predators as the other commenters. The laws are on their side. You can’t trap and remove them, so they continue to breed in urban areas. The pups know no other home. Here in Portland Oregon, there is still much wild territory. I’d like to see coyotes removed to natural places where they could be more at home. Note: Keep cats indoors.
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Sounds like the state laws are different out your way. Some years back there was a local freak-out over a series of coyote attacks on pets here in New York, including a coyote that snatched a woman’s toy-size dog while she was taking it for a night walk about a block from Casa de Buddy.
I remember the controversy when the authorities set traps for the coyotes, as people were concerned cats, dogs and other animals could be snared.
At the time there were a couple big development projects, including one that cleared a huge swath of wooded area where the coyotes lived and hunted.
As for the solution, I don’t know enough about relocation to have an opinion. I’ll have to read up on it.
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We lived in a forested community that is a sort of countercultural enclave. We often heard coyotes yipping at night, and I saw a juvenile one day next to the house. Cats were kept inside at our place. When some nearby land was deforested, we stopped hearing coyotes, but I think they were still out there. They are very adaptable and that’s part of why they’re showing up near dwellings, though we are indeed seeing way too much deforestation. Coyotes have been seen in town, but not where we are. Our cats are indoors only, but we feed and love (and TNR) ferals. I dream of one day returning to the woods with our indoor cats, and building a sturdy catio there for our town ferals.
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High temps of ocean water will also fuel an active hurricane season this year. Those sometimes head our way; though much weakened, they still bring some heavy wind and rain. Katrina dropped from hurricane to tropical storm about 25 miles away, and still downed 50 trees in town.
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This year the ocean temperatures near the equator hit record highs, causing widespread coral bleaching and a ton of other negative effects. It’s crazy. I don’t like to use the term climate change because people lose their minds over it and get into ideological arguments, but the indisputable truth is that we keep seeing new record high temperatures and if it keeps going this way, entire regions of the world will become unlivable. As it is, in some Gulf states literally everything is indoors and air conditioned because it’s life threatening to be out in 110 degree heat.
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About AC. I just read an article yesterday that said even AC can’t handle all the heat. They aren’t built for temperatures like we’ve been seeing in the South and what’s coming for the rest of us. They said AC’s built even just 10 years ago are not up to the stress of being run all the time. Also, the power grids aren’t equipped to handle all the extra usage of AC. It said be prepared for more rolling blackouts, deaths etc. caused by the heat.
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That’s the article I linked to and discussed in this post. 🙂 Lots of scary stuff happening lately with new heat records every summer, huge impact on ocean life, mass animal die-offs, tropical diseases infecting people further north than ever, energy shortages.
Lockheed Skunkworks announced they’d have a prototype of a compact fusion reactor in 5 years. That was like 10 years ago and they’ve quietly backed off the claim. We desperately need fusion for clean and abundant energy to get us out of this mess.
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