coyotes kill human

[lmpower]

A 19-year-old woman has been mauled to death by two coyotes while hiking in Canada.


Coyote attacks are uncommon


The teenager from Toronto died a day after being attacked by the wild animals in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, Nova Scotia.

The Royal Canadian Mountain Police (RCMP) said the woman was hiking along the popular Skyline Trail when the coyotes pounced.

RCMP Sergeant Brigdit Leger said officers arrived at the scene to find one of the animals still being aggressive.

The beast was shot and hobbled away. Its body has not been recovered.


We are keeping (the trail) closed until that second animal has been located and disposed of.

Parks Canada spokeswoman Germaine LaMoine
"The other one fled into the woods," Sgt Leger told Canada's CTV News.

The injured teenager was airlifted to a hospital in Halifax, the sergeant added.

Emergency Health Services spokesman Paul Maynard had said the hiker was in a critical condition with bites "all over the body".



The hiking trail has been closed

Police later announced that the teenager had succumbed to her injuries.

It was unclear whether the victim had been hiking in a group or on her own.

Parks Canada spokeswoman Germaine LaMoine told the National Post: "The trail has been closed and it is secure.

"We're very concerned about public safety. That's foremost on our minds. We are keeping it closed until that second animal has been located and disposed of."

Biologist Don Anderson told The Canadian Press that coyote attacks are rare unless the animal is diseased or provoked by humans.

[jbuck919]

Maybe New Mexico needs to send an emergency shipment of road runners.

[piston]

It is always a very sad story when a young, healthy individual dies while enjoying the beauty and splendor of nature, be it by falling off a cliff (such as the Knife Edge of Mount Katahdin), being swept away by a rogue wave, lost in the woods, or by an encounter with wild life. In this instance, it was a singer/song writer from Toronto with a promising life ahead of her.

Nevertheless, I do hope that people will manage to keep a sense of perspective. Human predators on such young women are far more deadly, even dogs! A rapid search on the internet indicates that the last human killed by a coyote was a young California child, in 1981 -- twenty-eight years ago. Yet, in New York state alone, a person dies yearly from dog attacks.

[jbuck919]

It is always a very sad story when a young, healthy individual dies while enjoying the beauty and splendor of nature, be it by falling off a cliff (such as the Knife Edge of Mount Katahdin), being swept away by a rogue wave, lost in the woods, or by an encounter with wild life. In this instance, it was a singer/song writer from Toronto with a promising life ahead of her.

Nevertheless, I do hope that people will manage to keep a sense of perspective. Human predators on such young women are far more deadly, even dogs! A rapid search on the internet indicates that the last human killed by a coyote was a young California child, in 1981 -- twenty-eight years ago. Yet, in New York state alone, a person dies yearly from dog attacks.

Only one? I am truly surprised.

Wild nature even in the apparently benevolent forests of temperate climes is something deserving respect. I would never go hiking around here except with a group (in fact I just joined one, but it may be spring before they sponsor a hike that's where I'm at fitness wise).

Here's a story from yesterday's Times with an unusual twist on this:


The New York Times

October 27, 2009
Moscow Journal
A Hypnotizing Hunt Leaves Russians Bewildered
By ELLEN BARRY

MOSCOW — Earlier this month, a sodden and unshaven man emerged from the woods near the southern Russian village of Goryachy Klyuch, telling rescuers he spent three nights perched in trees to get away from jackals.

A similar tale came from the taiga near Bratsk, in Siberia, where a 22-year-old man wandered for five days, covering himself with pine boughs at night to ward off frostbite. Eleven time zones to the west, near the Baltic Sea, a search and rescue team found an elderly couple in a swamp where they had spent the night, the wife in what officials described as “a state of panic.”

It happens every mushroom season. Russians are passionate about gathering mushrooms, an ancient pastime they call the “quiet hunt,” and routinely become so hypnotized that they get hopelessly lost. Regional search-and-rescue teams fan out on foot or in helicopters, occasionally enlisting tracking dogs or parachute jumpers, and newspapers retell their stories with gusto.

Fall has drawn Russians into the forest for too many centuries to count. Even hardened urbanites whisper endearments to the wood spirits before turning their eyes to the ground, a gesture to their pagan ancestors. But Aleksandr Kuznetsov, who founded an online “mushroomers’ club,” said he believed that Russians’ sense of the natural world had dulled over the generations, leaving them too often disoriented in the woods.

“People are leaning on technology, forgetting that nature is still nature,” said Mr. Kuznetsov, a Muscovite, whose Web site advertises a mobile global positioning system as “the mushroomer’s best friend.”

“Civilization carries a certain negative side, and people are losing their natural instincts,” he added. “They are city people now.”

City people or not, they creep out with wicker baskets at dawn, when mist is still rising from the earth, looking for humid, sun-warmed spots where mushrooms have risen overnight. True devotees are unapologetically competitive, hiding their secrets from the neighbors and slyly covering their baskets with cloth when someone approaches. At its best, mushroom hunting is a trance state, blotting out everyday concerns like the passage of time, or the way home.

Herein lies the problem. Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations does not keep statistics on lost mushroomers, and a spokeswoman said the number of the missing was so small as to be statistically irrelevant.

But reports trickle out from regional rescue services throughout the fall: The western region of Kaluga conducted 21 searches for mushroom hunters, of whom seven were brought to safety, five were found dead and nine were still missing.

Perm reported 11; Irkutsk had carried out 35 by late August.

Aleksandr Zmanovsky, who leads a rescue team near Bratsk, said nearly every year someone goes into the wild and is never found — often because of bears, who so thoroughly bury the remains of a body that “we will never find anything.”

An older generation knew how to navigate by the angle of the light, he said.

“If a person just puts on his sneakers and goes into the taiga, or someone drives him there and he doesn’t know where he is, then of course he gets lost,” Mr. Zmanovsky said. “I call those people the children of asphalt, those who grew up in the city. People who grew up in villages, they don’t get lost.”

One such case drew a flurry of attention to Nizhnaya Salda, a city of 17,000 in the Urals.

Late in September, a 37-year-old woman named Irina Fedyno returned home a full 24 days after she had gone out mushroom picking, and more than two weeks after a search-and-rescue effort had been called off.

Ms. Fedyno’s hair-raising survival story spread as far as the Moscow tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, which quoted her description of the forest, where “from one side, there was shooting — from the other, howling.”

A local journalist took a skeptical view, writing in The City Herald that Ms. Fedyno “appeared completely fresh, not emaciated, after her 24 days in the woods.” Kseniya Vashchenko, a City Herald journalist, said that “in our law enforcement organs, there is some basis for believing that she spent the time with, how should I put it, her friend.”

In an interview, Ms. Fedyno fumed at the rumors that she had “gone on a bender.” Her husband, Alexei Sitnikov, was equally indignant, saying that his wife returned home so smelly that after her ordeal she was ashamed to go to the hospital. He said that she tore up her blouse to wrap around her wounded feet, adding. “it was a nice blouse, too,” and that when she ran into his arms on her return to him, she was so light that he could have thrown her up to the ceiling.

He said he was overjoyed to have her home.

“I thought I would never see Irinka again,” he said. “Twenty days. Nobody can stay alive in the forest that long. But she survived. I believed, and I waited, and finally she was home.”



Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

[lmpower]

This is a matter of concern to me, since I frequently hike in coyote country. I carry a very stout staff with me. I thought I might possibly have to fend off a cougar someday, but I certainly never thought I might be threatened by coyotes. The western coyotes are smaller than those in the east, which is somewhat comforting. There have been a few cases of small children being attacked, but I don't recall ever hearing of an adult being killed by a coyote. Perhaps further investigation will shed some light on what caused this aberration.

[jbuck919]

The black bear is the only predator that one might encounter around here. I'm told that the proper way to deal with a spontaneous confrontation is to take an assertive stance and shout loudly to establish dominance and scare it off. Somehow, I don't think I'd be able to manage that.

[piston]

Zap it with bear pepper spray:


Do not run away or attempt to climb a tree. Either confront it or play dead, face down, but the latter solution could prove painful.

I have been at camp, alone, and without a vehicle, for periods extending to 15 days, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by wild life. There's no reason to worry about bears if one takes very good care to store all food in the camp and to dispose of all waste in the fire place.

As to coyotes, they're far more scared of a human throwing rocks and swinging an ax than we are of them.

[jbuck919]

Zap it with bear pepper spray:

That's what I should do when I walk the roads of Stony Creek so that I don't become New York's dog casualty for 2009.

[piston]

It's about 30-40 bucks.

[piston]

This is what you need to do, John. Picture yourself in the role of a wolverine:

[piston]

In Mongolia, their "dog fights" involve a mighty scared coyote-sized wolf and a giant eagle. Watch them play with that wolf as though it were a little puppy:

[Febnyc]

All of this shows the ignorance and naïvete of the majority of the population, including many otherwise intelligent folks around here.

It is highly unusual for any "wild" animal to, per se, attack a human, unprovoked. Usually the person somehow has incited the poor animal by getting too close or not understanding what motions are considered threatening - the animal might be protecting young ones, for instance - or else it is sick or injured. The details of what caused the attack hardly ever emerge.

And, as to piston's post and the video - which I will not watch - it's a puzzlement as to why we need to see this stuff. What is entertaining or even interesting or noteworthy in the suffering of any living creature? Beats me.

[jbuck919]

All of this shows the ignorance and naïvete of the majority of the population, including many otherwise intelligent folks around here.

It is highly unusual for any "wild" animal to, per se, attack a human, unprovoked. Usually the person somehow has incited the poor animal by getting too close or not understanding what motions are considered threatening - the animal might be protecting young ones, for instance - or else it is sick or injured. The details of what caused the attack hardly ever emerge.

Straight from the backwoodsman's mouth, right Frank?

I was interested to hear the other day which vertebrate (other than other people) is responsible for the most human deaths in Africa. Poisonous snakes? Lions? Hyenas? Cape buffalo? Nope--the happy hippopotamus.

[piston]

Speaking of a "stout staff," this little personal anecdote could prove amusing. My spouse and I spent a week at a remote Maine camp during the month of March, with a splendid access to the icy surface of Lake Nicatous. Every morning, before breakfast, I'd scout the area for a new trail, for our leisurely late morning walks. One particular morning, I ventured into an area where I found a "stout staff" visibly planted there on purpose, in a small mount of rocks. Being a little thoughtless that morning, I just picked up the staff, went back to camp, thinking "This is a nice trail!"

When we returned to this area, a few hours later, my spouse soon spotted a lot of bear foot prints in the snow, meandering as though the animal was half asleep. She said: "Where did you get that staff?" I had led her directly into black bear country, at the tail end of their hibernation, when they're pretty hungry.

Needless to say that our ritual morning walk was cut short....