Coyotes present little danger to Islanders, panelists say

(Prince Edward) Islanders have little to fear from coyotes despite the death of a woman in Cape Breton last fall, a panel of experts said recently in Charlottetown.
The main difference between the two areas is protection offered to coyotes in a vast area through Cape Breton, both within the national park and adjacent wildlife protection areas, said the panel.
On PEI, coyotes are hunted and trapped and that gives them a healthy fear of face-to-face contact with humans.
Over 100 people packed the Farm Centre for the annual meeting of the PEI Wildlife Federation, followed by a panel discussion on coyotes.
The meeting was told the Oct. 27, 2009, attack on singer Taylor Mitchell was only the second fatal attack by coyotes ever in North America.
Simon Gadbois, an animal behaviourist from Dalhousie, was a panel member at the Charlottetown meeting.
He said he got a tip that some people in Cape Breton were hand-raising coyote pups, then releasing the animals into the wild when the cute, dog-like pups grew and became dangerous.
The Cape Breton coyotes have lost their fear of humans and have even come to associate humans with food, which is making them very dangerous compared to other coyote populations, the meeting heard.
Even that does not explain the vicious attack on Mitchell that clearly was not for food, said Gadbois.
The attack marks on her body were not typical of a coyote, he said.
Some information about the Mitchell attack and historical data about coyote approaches or bites on humans in the Cape Breton National Park are mysteriously hard to obtain, said Gadbois.
The meeting heard a member of the audience compare that situation to the movie Jaws, there the affected town wanted to suppress stories about the giant shark to protect tourism.
The same thing is likely happening in the Cape Breton National Park, members of the audience said.
"They need to be hunted and trapped," said Randy Dibblee, wildlife biologist with the PEI government and panel member.
Montague-area trapper Carl Balsor, president of the PEI Trappers Association, was also on the panel.
He illustrated the point by comparing Cape Breton to Florida, and PEI to Afghanistan, as far as a coyote is concerned.
"How many people took their kids and headed down south to Florida?" said Balsor.
"Now, how many went to Afghanistan? Nobody, because it's not safe to go there."
Islanders will be seeing lots of coyotes as they are well established here, but there have been no reports of coyotes approaching or attacking humans on PEI, said Dibblee.
One man at the meeting challenged the panel, saying that Dibblee knows full well there has been a coyote bite on PEI. because the man in the audience himself was the victim.
Dibblee asked the man to explain the circumstances of that bite and the man did not answer, so Dibblee told the story.
The man was hunting a coyote on PEI and shot it, wounding the animal.
The man went over to pick up the coyote, perhaps believing it to be dead, and that is when he was bitten.
When the chuckling died down, the meeting was told that a bounty never helps. Nova Scotia tried one but had to give up after thousands of dollars were paid out but the coyote population didn't change much.
Some of the pelts came from animals shot outside the province, said Balsor.
"If you had a bounty here, there would be one pile of coyotes coming over the fixed link from New Brunswick," he said.
Coyotes are here to stay and the best way to limit problems with humans is to keep hunting, trapping and harassing them, the meeting was told.
"They have been poisoned, machine gunned, shot from helicopters, everything, and you can't get rid of them," said Dibblee.
Gadbois said a program of killing and harassing coyotes needs to be done well and intensively, or the animals will quickly learn were they can feel safe, and where they cannot.
He even went so far as to suggest including a program of using paintball guns on bold coyotes that get close enough to be shot by such means.
Because of the paint markings on the affected animal, the message is quickly sent to other coyotes that also in this additional way, humans are dangerous.