Years ago, (let’s say late 1990’s) I was taking an early spring morning walk on the edge of a fenceline with my German Shorthaired Pointer, Eva. When a coyote popped out in front of us, maybe 60 yards from me and 30 yards from Eva, I wasn’t sure what to expect: Eva had never took a step backwards in her entire life. When the coyote bolted, she took off after it and made up the 30-yard head start in less than 100 yards. Calling her back was to no avail, so I ran too.
I learned two things that morning. First, coyotes aren’t nearly as fast as I had expected. No wonder Wile E. Coyote can never catch the roadrunner. And two, I didn’t worry as much about encounters with single coyotes and my medium-sized dogs anymore, at least not ones traveling alone. Coyotes are survivalists, and tangling with hunting dogs isn’t smart for that objective. My perspective would change if the dog were smaller and alone, or multiple coyotes were involved.
A Century of Coyotes
Coyotes weren’t Ohio residents at the turn of the last century. The first sighting was around 1919, a handful of decades after wolves were extirpated from the state. At a time when many other wildlife populations were just beginning to recover across the state, whitetail deer for example, they walked in at an average weight of 35 pounds as the new apex predator on the block. Read the complete column here: This cunning predator has called Ohio home for 100 years
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