Ours are actually a mix of Anatolian, Great Pyrenees, and Akbash. The male looks full Pyr, the female not so much. She’s lankier and not as hairy. She’s also the more alert of the two.
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Man, if they’re that close, just shoot 'em.
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What is their food source? I know in the past you’ve posted about having property kind of surrounded by encroaching housing. Rabbits? Mice? We bought our small 4 acre farm 22 years ago. In the years since every acreage around us ( mostly failed orange groves) has been developed into zero lot line gated communities. There is a large parcel of about 50 acres still to the south of me. And when the emergency vehicles travel the abutting road sirens wailing the coyotes howl. Sounds like a pretty healthy pack. It’s a cattle property. I’ve never had them on my property. Can they scale 4+ foot no climb fence? Perhaps they’re being pushed into the last available space (your land) and the coyotes here still have the cattle property to roam.
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Perhaps your neighbors have already been shooting at them (bolding is mine)
"“When you have coyotes eating rodents and rabbits around sheep, that’s desirable. Random shooting — ‘preventive control’ — creates chaos, removing the good coyotes. So other coyotes immediately come in to fill the void, and some may be undesirables. Same with bears and mountain lions.”
“virtually all coyote “control” results in more, not fewer, coyotes. Crabtree reports that where coyotes are left alone, the average litter size at birth is five or six, but because of all the competition in summer only 1.5 to 2.5 pups survive. Where coyotes are killed by humans (never resulting in a population reduction approaching 70 percent), less competition results in significantly higher survival.”
From https://e360.yale.edu/features/coyote-carnage-the-gruesome-truth-about-wildlife-killing-contests
Shooting coyotes is a temporary “fix” to a permanent problem.
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I am in the middle of the city, a few million people around us. Animal control refuses to do anything since these are not domesticated animals. All I can is continue to send photos to the city warning that there is an ever increasing problem that they are refusing to do anything about.
We just happen to have the center lot of fifteen that are on multiple acre tracks (five in front of us, five behind us and two on either side) the two on either side currently are vacant as the owners have removed the houses preparing to rebuild… so here we are on about ten acres of just us and our horses and goats
(less than one mile away is a two billion dollar mall shopping complex and three billion dollars of construction)
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not unless they are using silencers … this is highly populated area that
is actually a small town of 8,000 that got surrounded by a few million people.
Please don’t shoot them, it really won’t solve your problem. Keep small dogs and cats inside, build a predator proof enclosure for poultry, etc.
We have a trail camera set up in the bush behind our house, less than 300’ away. We get pictures of coyotes multiple times per week. I see tracks all the time, we hear them frequently. They’ve never bothered my chickens. Their population goes up and down with their natural food sources.
We’ve got a picture of some pups playing with an old duck decoy, pretty cute.
When I used to live in Edmonton (pop around 1 million), I used to see coyotes early in the morning walking the dog. They never bothered us. They used the network of ravines to get around the city. Coworkers who lived there their entire lives didn’t believe that there were coyotes, foxes, the odd bear, deer, etc living within the city limits.
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Food source? most likely kitties and small dogs… and there is twice a week trash pickup (but we personally are careful with what is thrown away when)
all of our rabbits that are wild stay near the hay barn or in the paddocks with the ponies (ponies share their hay with the bunnies)… they are accounted for as I see them when putting the hay out for the horses. (hawks and the owl are more likely to get the rabbits, but we water a flock of crows who seem to keep the hawks away or at least will confront them… we also use the crows and blue jays to monitor West Nile as these two will contract West Nile first.
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Well, maybe a guard donkey is your best answer. If you can find one that hates dogs, should keep them out just fine. Maybe do a BLM adoption of a wild one?
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Call your local conservation officer. While animal control will not deal with wild animals, it is actually the job of conservation officers to do so.
I live in an area with a very healthy population of coyotes. While we do not SEE them in large numbers, except on game cams, we HEAR them very regularly. I would be concerned if you are suddenly seeing them so close to your home and barn. This signifies that something has changed in their environment, and I would want to know what that is!
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Just a thought: if coyotes are chewing up the leather halter parts, maybe they’re looking for salt. And if you can’t shoot them and they’re that close, how about an industrial sized slingshot with salt chunks as ammo? If you hit one it’ll sting like crazy but not kill it. Might earn you some respect amongst the pack.
We’ve had lots of coyotes around here and sometimes they’re quite fearless. Our horses have been known to chase them and a 6 yo gelding decided one day that he was NOT going to let them have the wild turkey carcass they’d left behind. But the real deterrent was a shot from the guy who hunts deer here. As he put it, “I creased the hair on his back but I didn’t kill him, and he just took off running with the pack.” After that the pack would melt away when we were out and about.
Yep. They took one of my dog’s filled bones from the driveway down to the bottom field and chewed it. I generally in decent weather leave my front door open and my spoiled pupper brings things in and out, but this was a first for something this close. It was late spring so I imagine they were hungry, as right now another filled bone (
) has been sitting in approx the same place for a while now.
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Another remedy would be to shut the barn doors at night. With wildlife, it’s generally more successful to change our own behavior rather than trying to change theirs.
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Well then I was wrong and I stand corrected @clanter. I sure wouldn’t want them that familiar with my property.
I doubt it. Most likely rabbits and other small mammals.
The occasional small dog might become coyote food, but it’s not like they are out in sufficient numbers to feed packs of coyotes. Cats are pretty tough to catch and kill; not that it can’t happen, of course. But most coyotes would choose a rabbit over a cat anyday.
Trash - yes. They are opportunists and will return to places known to have food.
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On a complete tangent, Great Pyrenees and similar are the scariest bloody things I’ve ever encountered while hiking/mountaineering in the Alps. You see a sheep, just turn a 180 and go the other way. The dog won’t be far.
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this our concern, they have just become too comfortable.
Bonnie our 23 year old mare that we took in from the Morgan Safenet , she has spent nearly all he life out in pastures, the last seven before we brought her in two years ago were by herself… she was watching them this morning which is something she normally does not pay any attention to at all…if she is concerned then I am concerned.
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we have salt ,both loose and block, out in the pastures for the horses, it is freely available.
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Thinking I best check what are approved methods of ridding my area of coyotes I checked with the The Humane Society of the United States …they do have a web page " Coyote hazing: Guidelines for discouraging neighborhood coyotes"
recommendations include yelling
“Go away, coyote!”
I really do know if I should laugh or cry
I will check with the police next Tuesday to see if it is OK to do what I did in Kentucky when we had a large pack of wild dogs invading the farm. There I drove a large steel stake into the wet ground then wrapped a pretty good size piece of raw meat to the stake with electric fence wire… then plugged up the fence charger.
That night the pack returned, inspected the prize…lead dog tried to eat it… nearly tore the steel stake out of the ground… the pack never returned
Tuesday we have the supposed final review of the new animal control ordnance that is in the process of being updated
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