From reader Fred Tippens, WSOCTV.
ORANGE COUNTY, N.C. – A North Carolina man said he shot and killed a coyote after it came dangerously close to his 6-year-old daughter and dog.
Ian Vigus said that shortly after he came home from work in Orange County, he heard his dog barking near where his daughter was playing.
Vigus said his dog was spooked by a coyote, so he took both the dog and his daughter inside and grabbed his rifle.
“As he started to lope off, I shot him and killed him,” Vigus said. “I just wanted to protect my family and protect my livestock.”
Orange County officials said there have been several recent reports of coyotes in the area.
Earlier this week in Huntersville, a family came face-to-face with a coyote that officials said was rabid.
In a video that the Schroter family recorded of the encounter, the coyote can be seen snarling at them.
More … tests confirm that Coyote that attacked Huntersville family’s car was rabid.
As I mentioned before, I’ve had them come trotting down the road at me in my neighborhood. I wonder whether this was a Coyote or a Coywolf. Many of what people take for Coyotes are actually Coywolves.
Via Knuckledraggin’, this is a good video about the Coywolf, but I found that it was too focused on the Northeast and Canada, as if the Coywolf was a Canadian invention and remains in the Northeast. They also make the mistake of assuming that the Coywolf is just Wolf and Coyote, but it’s clear that it’s more complicated than that.
Coyotes have lived in the East since the 1930s, and recent genetic tests have shown they are actually a mixture of coyote, wolf and dog …
The Eastern coyote is one of 19 subspecies of coyote, which are adaptable predators that live everywhere from the streets of Los Angeles to Florida swamps.
The Eastern subspecies, which ranges as far west as Ohio, is thought to have migrated to the Northeast some 80 years ago, taking over the range occupied by wolves and interbreeding with the larger animals.
They no longer overlap with wolves, which are long gone from the East save for the very rare red wolf, but they remain eight to 25 percent wolf genetically, said Roland Kays, a leading coyote biologist with the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
They are also about eight to 11 percent dog due to past interbreeding with feral dogs, he said.
The point of all of this is that we have a new breed of very adaptable, very smart canine in the land, one that isn’t scared of humans, may be rabid, and knows how to survive virtually anywhere.
Do you carry guns with you? I do. If threatened, you can’t shoot them if you don’t carry guns.
