I’ve seen video of coyotes and wolves acting playful to lure dogs back to the pack. And coyotes snatch small dogs in our urban parks.
I’ve seen videos of coyotes acting playful with dogs. I’m not sure the design is to lure them back to the pack.
In my areas, coyotes tend to be solitary hunters. They do have a pack, but they aren’t roaming around in one.
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About dozen coyotes, some laying down, others milling surrounding a cow down trying to give birth, her calf half out and already chewed on, as the cow’s hind end was, is what our neighbor found one day at evening check.
THAT is a pack.
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A friend of ours was bitten on the heel of his boot by a coyote in a pack. He was walking home from haying I think again and cut through a brushy part of the trail and walked into a pack eating something. He totally surprised them and one of them nipped at his heel as he jumped back out. No harm, no foul, but it got his attention!
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I’m so glad I found this thread! I heard the coyotes barking last night when I went out to the barn, and it sounded so much like a dog I was thinking there was a stray in the area. Then they started howling and it was mixed in with the barks so I was worried they had a dog cornered. After hearing the recordings I’m sure it was just a group of coyotes. We’ve been hearing them for 30 years and I never heard the bark before!
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I was shed hunting once, got lost, and ended up on a shallow swamp. I broke through some ice to my waist, and was crawling back off the ice trying to dissipate my weight. The coyote must have spotted me crawling, and was VERY close when I finally got to good ground and stood up. Once up, he/she started barking frantically at me. I could see it just 15 yards away. Nothing I did deterred that animal - I screamed, I took my jacket off and was whipping it over my head, etc etc. It escorted me all the way back to the parking lot, bold critter.
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This kind of story is what I come here for 
(several people made the comment about being false; not just yourself)
I’m not so sure. Coyotes live, hunt, and travel in packs.
Why wouldn’t they hunt as a pack?
My husband is an avid hunter, including hunting coyotes. It most successful to call them at night, with appropriate night vision gear. It’s not uncommon to spot 50 or 60 coyotes or more in a short period of time in that setting. They will come running in packs, to distress calls. In this case, they are being lured into the call, rather than them out actively luring out a dog (in the aforementioned examples). But if they come running together to a distress call, again, I don’t see any reason why it couldn’t be true that they could try to actively lure food in for the kill as a pack.
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So weird. I never see more than one at a time (coyotes) and the game cameras that are set up all over my place catch photos of a coyote frequently, but never more than one.
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I have video cameras at the back of my property, facing the forest preserve. They’re always running in 2s and 3s by me.
Agreed. I do think there may be different behaviors shown in different parts of the country. In the Northeast they are not roaming around in packs, ever. I don’t have game cameras but my brother has many. I will ask him if he ever sees packs; my recollection is that he sees one at a time, typically hunting small rodents.
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A - It appears that coyote behavior varies by geography.
B - do not forget that there are coy-dogs as well as coyotes, and there behavior may be quite different (including bring less shy of humans).
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Nor the PNW. I have lots of game camera shots and they are always singles, I had one who appeared younger and more curious but not an adolescent, then one who was less curious and would just move on by. I could tell them apart because the older one had a notch out of one ear (not intentional, just an old boo-boo). The only time I’ve seen a grouping was three ran across the street in front of my car once, and they were really bouncy because at first glance I thought they were deer, but that led me to believe they were litter mates out on their own but not sexually mature yet.
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Thoughts on the game cameras, is that they only show a close view, and you cannot see what is directly adjacent (either 20 feet behind the camera focus, or 20 feet to the right or left of the camera, etc).
While you might only be catching one coyote in the shot, there could very well be others around that aren’t close enough to the camera to be captured in the picture, and maybe they don’t come close enough to the camera to trigger the picture.
It’s possible you might not be able to see that there are more there.
When my husband is out hunting with night gear, he’s viewing a very large area with a night scope.
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Why are coyotes always so controversial?
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Or, they do different things in different areas.
I physically see coyotes, with my very own eyes, trotting thru my mowed pasture and hay field. No place for another one to hide. 30 acres of open-ness.
The research I have done since this thread (I admit, it was minimal) agrees that they might join together for somethings, and they do have family units, they are a solitary animal that lives alone and typically hunts alone. Most of their diet is small things like frogs and rodents.
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Not that I’m advocating this method, exactly, but I did successfully “retrain” a pair of overly curious coyotes last summer by chasing them off with a pitchfork several mornings in a row. In my pajamas and mud boots, naturally.
Coyotes are not really pack animals the way wolves and dogs are. They may appear as a “pack” when pups are big enough to learn to hunt but not ready to strike out on their own. Most often, though, “packs” are either coydogs or plain old feral dogs.
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SW Ontario, Canada, the packs are large and loud, but they are usually seen singly when seen, unless you’re actively hunting them and go looking for a pack.
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Because there is no evidence that they do.
Of course they live near each other - anyone who hears them call and respond knows that because you can hear it – one calls, and multiple others respond. And they congregate for periods of time in a social group that has a variety of group dynamics.
But the vast majority of a coyote’s diet are small rodents. They are not roaming in packs, thinking together too coordinate a larger kill, and then splitting up the game.
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