Watch: Stalking Coyote Rushes 2-Year-Old in Own Backyard
A 2-year-old Canadian girl in Aurora, Ontario was knocked down by a wild coyote that decided to bum-rush her earlier this month.
Thankfully, the girl suffered only a superficial lesion.
The incident began after the girl’s family returned home from dinner on June 16 and their daughter and 6-year-old son checked on the progress of a tree they had planted in the backyard, CTV News Toronto reported.
That’s when the bold coyote came barreling out of nowhere.
As the 2-year-old approached the tree, the coyote bolted out of the neighbor’s yard and directly toward her and her brother, who was beside her.
The wild animal then lunged at the girl, knocking her over.
The creature quickly ran away as fast as it charged the girl, while the parents sprinted across the yard to aid the child.
The terrifying sequence was caught on camera — check out the video surveillance footage below:
The coyote sighting was not the first by the family, though the attack was.
The mother spotted a coyote — likely the same one that attacked her daughter — about three weeks prior, capturing video of it casually strolling in front of her house.
That prompted her to immediately call the city to ask what she should do about the potentially dangerous situation.
She was told the best coyote deterrent is noise and that she and her family should be very loud if they were to ever come in close contact with one.
“And that is what I did,” she told CTV News.
Now, the prepared mother plans to take things a step further by researching fencing that will keep the coyote away from her home and her children while they play in the yard.
Coyotes have been an annoyance across America for years, given their fast rate of reproduction.
In fact, around 500,000 coyotes are legally killed in the U.S. by hunters every single year, National Geographic reported in 2016.
But despite the attempts at population control, coyotes can adapt under incredible pressure.
Dan Flores, author of “Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History,” offered a stunning take on the animals in a National Geographic interview.
“The coyote evolved with an adaptive, evolutionarily derived strategy for surviving under persecution. Coyotes evolved alongside larger canids, like wolves, which often persecuted and harassed them and killed their pups. As a result, both jackals and coyotes developed this fission-fusion adaptation, which human beings also have,” Flores said.
“This enables them to either function as pack predators or as singles and pairs. When they’re persecuted, they tend to abandon the pack strategy and scatter across the landscape in singles and pairs. And the poison campaign was one of the things that kept scattering them across North America.”
Flores also explained their unique breeding habits.
“One of the other adaptations they have is that, whenever their populations are pressured, their litter sizes go up,” he said.
“The normal size is five to six pups. When their populations are suppressed, their litters get up as high as 12 to 16 pups.”
Even though hunters are trying their best to keep the population down, it seems to be next to impossible. That’s partly because of the way coyotes communicate population issues with each other, which is nothing less than fascinating (and kind of eerie).
“You can reduce the numbers of coyotes in a given area by 70 percent but the next summer their population will be back to the original number,” Flores explained.
“They use their howls and yipping to create a kind of census of coyote populations. If their howls are not answered by other packs, it triggers an autogenic response that produces large litters.”
If Canada and the United States want to prevent coyote attacks and keep the population at bay, then it looks like either more hunters need to join the cause, or new methods at population control must be researched and deployed.
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