My Ongoing Hatred Of Coyotes

I was sitting here enjoying the storm last night, the wind blowing, the rain hitting the windows, my music playing low, when out of the night, from right across the street, starts up what sounded like 25 coyotes all giving voice.  I about pissed myself.

"Aw, I think they sound beautiful," people say.  Not to me, but people say it.  And they are usually people who don't live where they have to worry about coyotes.  I LIVE WHERE YOU HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT COYOTES.  They will come right into your yard, or farm, or barn, and steal your animals and dig in your trash and climb up on things and tear shit up.  Hell, I have to worry about eagles and other birds of prey here. I even have to worry about bears, and I even have to worry about wild ducks tearing up my yard during the winter.  Do you have to worry about ducks?  No you do not.  So shut up about how beautiful coyotes sound, because they don't sound beautiful.  They sound like the souls of the damned.  The insane damned.  One coyote sounds like five, and five sound like twenty five, and that's just too goddamned many coyotes, particularly at ten at night in the middle of a storm when most reasonable animals are in bed watching Netflix. 

Animals are just beginning to come out of hibernation, and there's really nothing out there to eat yet.  The coyotes are hungry.  When they're right in town like this, during bad weather, in their numbers, they're looking for 1. Your dog Spot  2. Your cat Princess Puff-Puff  3. First graders.  4. February calves.

It's the February calves that they're really counting on, and they'll take a few this year.  Last fall when the coyotes were out partying they weren't thinking about next February because they're coyotes.  Now there's a bunch of youngsters, and coyote dad is whining 'the condom broke, geeze' and mom coyote is just disgusted, and they have to feed their unplanned offspring.  The guy two fields down raises dairy stock, and he's going to get hit hard.  It's just beginning.

A coyote is fox-smart and dog-cowardly.  They are nimble and they can climb, too.  In packs they are a force to be reckoned with.  When they have intermingled over the years with dog stock, and these have, they are no damn joke.  They'll blitz the loafing sheds like a ninja attack.  And that's what freaks me out about coyotes.  They've always been on the outskirts, and they've always been hit and run scavengers. 

 Mankind didn't take in coyotes and tame them into dogs.  They took wolves.  Our ancestors were not stupid people.  A wolf is intelligent, and it's able to adapt.  A coyote has a different nature.  It was made for a specific ecological niche, and it's been very successful in that niche, and has no interest in adapting.  It's why humans tamed horses and not zebras.  A horse is intelligent and can adapt.  A zebra is just a stripey, pissed off animal with a shitty attitude that occupies a specific ecological niche, and has a passing resemblance to horses, but will chew on your face and stomp you to death because it's a zebra and does not want to adapt so fuck off.

The good thing about zebras is that they don't hunt in packs at night during rainstorms and howl like demented souls from Hades right outside my goddamn front window.  They have the sense to live in Africa.  Coyotes do not.  They live all up in my grille, and they have since I was a kid, because this is the Pacific Northwest, and we have wild animals all over the fucking place here.  When I lived in the suburbs we had coyotes, and when I lived in Portland we had coyotes in Portland; Seattle has coyotes and I know that for a damn fact because I saw a bunch of them one night crossing the park up on Capitol Hill.  They do not give a fuck. They are the reason that you do not put your cat outside at night here.  Or your first grader.  Never do that here. Coyotes will eat them.

When I was in grade school we had friends who lived way out in the country, and they had two girls; my parents used to like to dump me off with them for a week every now and then.  One night we were all sleeping in the downstairs corner bedroom, a room with large windows, almost floor to ceiling.  As we were going to sleep, we heard the coyotes start up out in the hills, and that was fine.  Until they started getting closer and closer, and adding members to the choir, and then came up and were just within the light limit of the house - we could peek out the drapes and see their eyeshine. No, it was when they started SCRATCHING ON THE SIDING OF THE HOUSE that I began to get alarmed.  And the things are still yattering and screeching and howling, remember!

  Mr. Farm Dude and his wife were no help.  They did not care.  Not in the least bit bothered.  Us kids are screaming, and they're just yelling at us to shut up and go to sleep, while just inches away there is a pack of wild animals scratching on the house trying to get in to where we three little girls were sleeping!  That is not a recipe for a good night's sleep.  That is the way you learn that 'Clearly, we're the disposable members of this group.'

So remember that the next time you go mooning on about the romance of the Old West.  That shit is imaginary.  It wasn't Dale Evans and Roy Rogers.  It was gonorrhea, whores and coyotes.