What kind of jackass feeds a coyote?
That was one of my first questions when I heard about the three coyotes shot dead earlier this month in Golden Gate Park, after one of them bit a small girl at the San Francisco Botanical Garden.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife said the “culling” was required due to the animals’ “unpredictable” behavior. Such incidents are directly tied to residents feeding the coyotes, which leads them to lose their fear of people. The practice is illegal, not to mention immoral — and is a lot more likely to get the animal killed than leaving it to hunt its natural prey.
“If humans did the right thing, and didn’t break laws by feeding coyotes or befriending coyotes, they wouldn’t ruin it for everyone else,” Deb Campbell told me. She’s a spokeswoman for San Francisco Animal Care and Control, the agency that first responds to incidents like the bite at the park. “It angers and infuriates us.”
The coyote that bit the girl in Golden Gate Park lingered around the group of children she was playing with, even after a park employee intervened to scare it off, Captain Patrick Foy of the Fish and Wildlife Department told me. The animal “did not immediately run away,” he said, a sign of just how habituated they become with regular human contact.
It’s disappointing, even shocking, to learn how commonplace the feedings have become. San Francisco Animal Care and Control receives a constant stream of reports about residents setting platters of meat out on their driveways, or operating as a direct-to-den food delivery service offering rotisserie chickens, Campbell said.
This leads them to associate humans with food; when they lose their natural fear of humans, they’re more likely to walk right up to people, as has increasingly been seen in Golden Gate Park and elsewhere in San Francisco. And the more interactions between people and predatory wild animals, the more likely a human is to get hurt.
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Tali Caspi, a doctoral ecology student at the University of California at Davis, has spent five years, and walked over 600 miles of trails in San Francisco, studying more than 1,000 scat samples from the city’s coyotes. She also lurks on social media groups where the city’s coyotes are often discussed.
In her research, she’s found that the city’s coyotes have a disproportionate amount of pig and chicken DNA in their poop, further confirming that the urban coyotes are straying far from their natural omnivorous diets of small animals, like moles, gophers, rats, and vegetarian fare of fruits, berries and grasses.
“A coyote has had millennia of evolutionary forces shape it into an excellent gopher hunter, but it’s still easier to eat the burger that someone throws out the window to you,” Caspi said.
This isn’t the first time officials have hunted down human-habituated coyotes in the city. A few years ago, federal agents killed a Golden Gate Park coyote known locally as Carl. The animal was well known to both wildlife experts and general fans, in part because a woman who repeatedly fed him meat recorded her adventures on social media, according to Campbell.
But as he grew more comfortable with people, Carl began approaching toddlers in the park. After several complaints, the Department of Fish and Wildlife determined that Carl had to be shot for public safety reasons, she said.
“This poor coyote was ruined by people,” she said. “It’s sad.”
For all the recent sightings of coyotes around San Francisco, they only returned to the city about 20 years ago, after disappearing in the 1920’s, said Christine Wilkinson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley and the California Academy of the Sciences. About 100 coyotes now inhabit the city, according to San Francisco Animal Care and Control.
While some San Franciscans revere coyotes, the species is polarizing, especially because they’re known to snack on dogs, cats, and other small pets. Several states classify them as vermin, meaning permits aren’t required to hunt them, Wilkinson said. (In California, a hunting permit is required, but there are no limits on how many coyotes each hunter can kill.)
Wilkinson doesn’t think the feeding is coming from a bad place, even though it ultimately causes harm.
“People really want to connect with nature, and with wildlife, and at the root of that is a very pure thing, I think,” Wilkinson said. “They don't have the understanding that the consequence of these feedings, almost every time, is some adverse result,” which often means the coyote being killed.
While feeding coyotes is technically a violation of both local and state law, Campbell said no one’s been successfully prosecuted for it here. The closest the city came was in 2021, when the city tried to file charges against someone who’d been caught on camera feeding Carl. But the judge threw out the case. Campbell said the outcome was “heartbreaking and frustrating” because it could’ve set a precedent to deter people from feeding coyotes.
But laws aren’t a substitute for common sense — or basic respect for the wildlife that manages to persevere in our city. Coyotes shouldn’t pay the price for human ignorance.
“The last thing we want to see is animals losing their lives,” Campbell said. “We can live together as long as everyone follows the same rules – don’t feed them, don’t befriend them. Wild animals aren’t pets, they’re wild creatures. Let them stay wild.”
