If your cat is missing, you probably heard that you should put out their cat litter box or spread dirty litter around your yard to help them find their way home. You may have even heard that your cat can smell their dirty litter a mile away. Unfortunately, there is […]
Coyote
9 posts
When a cat or small dog goes missing, pet owners/guardians are often concerned that s/he could have fallen prey to a coyote or other predator. As a pet detective for over ten years, I have often been asked the question: “Do coyotes carry cats back to their dens to eat […]
Many people with a lost pet think that a search dog is the best method for finding their pet. However, most people tend to have unrealistic expectations and a lack of understanding of how a search dog works. I previously wrote an article on considerations for Using a Search Dog, and in […]
I have written several articles on coyotes killing cats and one on coyotes attacking dogs. Observations of Coyote Predation on Cats More Observations of Coyote-Cat Interactions: What Can We Learn? Coyotes Don’t Eat Cats Very Often Understanding Coyote Behavior in Urban/Suburban Areas and Assessing Risks to Cats Trends in Coyote […]
So many of the people who contacted me this summer were convinced that their lost cat had been killed by coyotes. This is a pervasive belief that unfortunately causes many people to lose hope and stop searching for their lost cat after a short period of time. Unless you are […]
The Cooke County, Illinois, Coyote Project provides some interesting research on observations of coyote attacks on dogs in the Chicago metropolitan area. Using a search of newspaper databases from 1990-2004, they found 70 articles of coyote attacks on dogs. The average number of attacks per year increased from 0-2/yr in […]
Most studies of urban/suburban coyotes have found that coyotes in these areas relied predominantly on natural food sources rather than human generated food such as trash, domestic animals, pet food, and domestic fruit (Gerht and Riley 2010; Morey et al. 2007). The most common food items were leporids (rabbits) and […]
This post relates to the earlier post “Observations of Coyote Predation on Cats.” Although it may sound like I’m criticizing Grubbs and Krausman’s (2009) study, I’m not saying that we should disregard the results entirely. As I said earlier, this is a fascinating research study and the only published study […]
In 2009 Grubbs and Krausman published a study on “Observations of Coyote-Cat Interactions,” which was then dubbed “Coyotes Eat Cats!” by the media. This is a very interesting study since it is the only published research on direct observations of coyote-cat interactions. However, I’m skeptical that this high level of […]
