Op-Ed: Can coyotes and humans get along?

We civilized humans love to watch wild animals being wild. It’s why we go on safari and to the aquarium and hope the lions are active at the zoo. One of the best things about living in Los Angeles is we can be city dwellers and at the same time be surrounded by abundant fauna.

I can scroll through my Twitter feed next to hummingbirds. I can eat a tempeh kale taco at Echo Park Lake and watch the beautiful Canada geese and their adorable goslings waddle and swim. Or I can walk through Elysian Park and laugh at the gophers sticking their heads out first one hole then another like the whack-a-mole game at Chuck E. Cheese.

It’s nature. It’s fun. Until those gophers attack your yard or raccoons nest in your crawl space or the geese use your grassy lawn as their personal bathroom. Then what do you do? It’s like what my mother used to say about my father: I can’t live with him and I can’t kill him.

Except that’s exactly what someone did in Silver Lake in June: shot and killed a coyote. The coyote apparently didn’t have a cat or a Pekingese or a baby in its mouth. It wasn’t rabid. It was just standing in the street and then it was dead. We want to live with wild fauna until we don’t.

In Silver Lake and neighboring Echo Park, where I live, development is rampant. Every vacant lot, no matter how steep and narrow, is for sale or already a construction site. When I moved into my house 20 years ago, down the street there was a wide-open hillside. Everyone knew it was home to a band of coyotes. At night they would yip and howl, and we were advised to keep our small dogs and cats inside and not leave out food or water or even an unprotected compost pile. The coyotes kept the fruit rat population at a minimum, and we had the pleasure — because it was a pleasure — of going out to get the paper in the early morning and seeing a coyote mother and pup trotting past.

Now that empty space is gone and so is the band of coyotes, but to where? They skitter from one backyard to another, in and out of the park around Dodger Stadium, along the last few overgrown edges of the hills. They don’t run away as fast when you yell at them or turn on the deck lights. They’ve learned to scavenge and live off human refuse and the neighborhood cats because, basically, their territory has been overtaken.

The lot directly behind me — which once hosted a coyote den — now has three houses and open dirt where there used to be one house and a thicket of eucalyptus and loquat trees. I have always had dogs, large and small, and with some healthy respect for coyotes on my side, I never had a run-in with a coyote. Now I hear stories of them nabbing dogs right off the leash, turning over trash cans, stalking picnickers. I shake my head and think, they have to live somewhere and they have to eat.

I’m all for progress. I love having restaurants I can walk to and rising property values, and I know L.A. needs more housing, more density, even if it’s mostly aimed at wealthy hipsters in my neighborhood. But development and progress are not synonymous. Development just means more and more. Progress means moving forward in a better way, thinking through the situation and acting for the good of an entire community, including the four-legged and winged populations.

If a builder puts 20 townhouses on a lot that once had a single home, he is required to provide parking for some number of cars as well. That builder, to truly help a neighborhood progress, should also be required to mitigate other effects of increased population — on schools, grocery stores, public transportation. There’s been a lot of back and forth in the neighborhood about those things. But no one speaks for the coyotes.

If every empty lot is gone — and with it the living space for the coyotes, and their easy access to gophers, rats, mice and lizards — then is it any wonder those coyotes are killing our pets, settling in in our backyards and eating out of our garbage cans? Griffith Park and Elysian Park can only absorb so many more coyotes.

We can purposefully save some room for wildlife. Call it a park or some groovy hipster variation like wildspace, but build it into the rules that govern hillside development, so we can re-establish peace between humans and coyotes. The coyotes have figured out how to make the urban density work for them. If it’s not working for us, it’s our problem. We’re supposed to be the smart ones.

Diana Wagman is the author, most recently, of the novel “Life #6.”

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