This story is one that I covered for several postings on my Instagram Account. Rather than writing it out again for those of you not on Instagram, I’m including links to those postings. After writing about the catastrophic and senseless slaughter — this is embedded in my previous post — I wrote about the specific importance of *denning* signs (as opposed to simply *awareness* signage) where there is coyote denning going on: https://www.instagram.com/p/C8-oZdSSm25/. Denning behavior intensifies all coyote protective behaviors, which is why this is so important to have the proper signs out, especially where there are children around. There were no denning signs at all in the area.
I next posted a short *homage* to the killed family, briefly summarizing who they were and what the family consisted of when I last saw them 6 weeks ago: https://www.instagram.com/p/C9AUEBQpgKZ/.
I followed up then with how older family members — youngsters born in previous years — are capable of of helping and *possibly* taking over the raising of orphaned pups, if indeed the pups are orphaned: https://www.instagram.com/p/C9DpnUDyLZL/.
Finally, so far, I’ve investigated which members of this family still remain alive. I found this one older yearling male and a female I believe is Mom (I need to confirm this).
So it appears that Dad and two one-year-old yearlings were annihilated. Again, the reason is that ONE bit a child. When language is used like *attack*, the connotation is that the coyote had set out to do this. This is not so: we know the child approached where the coyote was. We’ve tried educating folks that they must stay away, and walk away from a coyote whenever they see one. A five-year-old child does not have the capacity to deal with potential dangers of this sort. There were no *denning* signs out there to warn the adults that a child needed to always be tightly supervised in the area. Hopefully we can all learn from this and prevent it from ever happening again.
