Coyotes don’t always attack dogs. It’s one of those myths that coyote haters like to spread. However, if this were a smaller dog, I’d really worry about it.
In my own experience with coyotes (which is quite extensive, they are a very common species where I grew up), they generally fear people and large dogs, proably because most people who keep foxhounds have now turned them into coyote hounds. The ones I know are of the larger Eastern subspecies, which is about 10 to 15 pounds heavier than Western subpecies. The larger size is thought to come through interbreeding with wolves. 40 percent of all wolf/coyote and dog/coyote hybrids are fertile, so these Eastern animals may have some wolf in them. They have very little dog in them, because coyotes consider dogs mates and because female coyotes are in season only once a year. If any fertile female coydog existed, she would come into season at the wrong time to be bred by her male counterparts. Unlike male dogs, male coyotes are not fertile year round. That’s why most coyotes have very little dog in them.
I’m not a coyote hater. I do think one can hunt them responsibly, however. But I think a lot of what we hear on the rumor mill about coyotes is really just projection. We get the same thing about wolves, and because coyotes are the only animals of this type in the Eastern US, the wolf hatred has been transferred onto coyotes.
I’m sure coyotes do attack dogs, including large ones. I’ve even heard of them killing large dogs and, in another case, castrating them. However, I don’t know whether this is a common occurrence. My experience with them is they are really no threat to people or dogs, unless it’s a dog smaller than 25 pounds. However, that is my experience, and I’m just one person. People don’t feed coyotes where I grew up. They shoot them, so the coyotes never learn any positive experiences with people. Further, they are hunted with hounds, and they learn to fear dogs. I’m sure they could be a bit more dangerous where they are fed by people or no natural prey exists.
The dog in the video is a Gordon setter. The video is from manray68.
That Coyote is FAST. I wonder if we can train him for flyball.
Actually, you can’t even housebreak him.
I read an account of someone who had a bottle-reared coyote, and he kept it with his springer. This was in the 1970’s. The coyote was good at escaping from its enclosure and chasing cats. It also outran the springer. But it could never learn the boundaries and limitations that one places on a dog. He never figured out not to use the house a toilet.
Yes, coyotes are fast little bastards. That’s what makes them so hard to shoot. You need at least three or four fast foxhounds to hunt one with dogs. Otherwise the coyote will give them the slip or run around behind the dogs and rough them up.
In the real world, the coyote would’ve caught the roadrunner, provided the roadrunner didn’t fly.
Bill Daniels was a Cable magnate and one of Denver’s biggest philanthropists. I met him through Young American’s Bank, one of his pet projects. At his mansion he had a taxidermied Coyote, standing up with his paw around a Road Runner’s neck, two Xs over the road runner’s eyes.
The sign in the Coyote’s hand had something funny to say and I got a good laugh out of it. My recent blog post will illuminate why.
I doubt there is any dog in the Eastern coyote or if there is, it’s totally insignificant. I suspect what they do possess is a fair percentage of Canis lycaon genes in their makeup.
Or as I call it Canis lupus lycaon. I believe there is only one species of wolf. It’s just very genetically diverse. I think that there is good evidence that coyotes always existed in the East (see Holly Menino’s “Darwin’s Fox and My Coyote”). Both wolves and coyotes were extirpated from the East, but the wolves disappeared faster. The wolves then interbred with coyotes. This created the subspecies of lycaon and rufus. I’m very skeptical of molecular clocks, although I do use some of their evidence on this blog, particularly if it’s based on the fossil record. The molecular clock also said that dogs are 100,000 years old, when I know from better calibrations that they are only 15,000 years old.
As for the two newly proposed Old World species (Indian and Himalayan), I think they are relics of two wolf populations that became isolated early on. Originally, Canis lupus was a very diverse species genetically, so if you had two populations that were isolated earlier than 30,000 years ago, they would appear to be separate species.
Although I disagree with the finding that dogs are that old, you can see some analysis on the diversity of wolves in the 30,000 years ago here: https://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2008/12/22/are-dogs-31700-years-old/
When it comes to fuzzy taxonomy, I’m a lumper.
What struck me, other than the coyote’s apparent skepticism about this whole interaction contrasted with the dog’s unselfconscious engagement, is the perfection of the coyote’s movement. Everything works together absolutely precisely, and is integrated by an organized brain. This is clear even in *play,* the activity during which any animal is most likely to simulate inefficiency.
The dog, in contrast, moves like a dork.
Dogs do move like dorks. Proportionally, most dogs have much shorter legs than wolves and coyotes, and that old saw about neoteny changes their behavior. But everything about coyotes is efficient.
You can tell dog tracks from coyotes because dogs have very inefficient movement. Dog tracks are widely spread out and scattered along the assumed pathway that the animal took. Coyote tracks are roughly in a straight line. These animals waste no movement.
I’ve done some analysis on how we’ve further wrecked that ancestral efficiency by breeding for coarser bodies and less fluid movement. After all, the Russians say “A wolf is kept fed by its feet.”
https://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2008/12/05/a-comparison-of-golden-body-tpes/
And I’ve done the same on show flat-coats, which are efficiently built, and show goldens, which aren’t:
https://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2009/01/07/a-comparison-of-show-goldens-and-flatties/
My second SAR partner, Mel, moved like a 70# coyote. Oh it was beautiful to see. I’d stop breathing sometimes, watching her work her way into a scent cone.
She both single-tracked and direct-registered, like a wild canid. A good tracker encountering her prints would be looking around for the wolf.
Applying the same label — “German shepherd” — to the hunched and teetering show-ring orcs is the most hateful of slanders.
Our current German shepherd SAR dog, Sophia, is from excellent working breeding. She is structurally lovely-looking. Great hips, great elbows. Intense drives and energy. And she moves like a total dork.
I think the difference must have been in their brains. Mel had an excellent brain. Sophia, despite the name, appears not to have one at all, and I’ve given up hoping one will grow.
Wow. That is a fantastic video. Thanks for posting it. We here in New York City currently have a coyote in Central Park. No one knows how it found its way there, although speculation is rampant. It was first spotted a couple of days ago and has so far been able to avoid the Park Police who would like to capture it. I posted about it this morning. Another coyote was caught a couple of weeks ago wandering about in Harlem.
We’ve entered an interesting era in our cities and suburbs of human-wildlife interaction with lots of potential for conflict. I’m so glad I saw the video, which puts quite a novel spin on the subject.
You might also find this interesting:
https://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/romeo-the-friendly-wolf-is-missing/
Wolves are even more notorious for killing domestic dogs than coyotes are.
However, most interactions I’ve seen between coyotes and domestic dogs generally end with the coyote running like hell to get away from the dogs.
It is possible for a coyote to kill a dog, and a pack of them can kill a large dog. However, I think we can live with them, but it is probably wise to keep cats indoors, and dogs on leashes (as if you had any other choice in your area).