Wednesday, January 03, 2007

A Dead Coyote on an Urban Beach

Are we really a nation of urbanized, sanitized boobs. Have we ripped ourselves completely out of the natural world? Do we have to anthropomorphize everything? Here’s a story that Seth form Massachusetts sent me about a coyote that evidently wandered through several miles of urban landscape and wound up on a beach.

The coyote reportedly acted aggressively toward a woman and her dog. She called the police. The police watched the coyote and then decided to shoot it as it wandered into an even more settled area. Here’s what an onlooker (a man) had to say, “He was just out celebrating, the poor thing.”

That's just not right. I suppose a coyote can enjoy life, but I don’t see him celebrating with a day at the beach. Do we have to treat every wild animal as if it were a cartoon star in “Bambi,” “The Ice Age,” or “Over the Hedge?”

Further, I don’t know because I wasn’t there, if the coyote was aggressive or not. If it was aggressive it needed killing, but I wonder how aggressive Mr. Coyote was if the woman with the dog could call the police. If it was truly aggressive and the woman didn’t live in Massachusetts, she could’ve handled the problem with her own gun.

I know my last sentence will cause someone to raise an eyebrow, but the professionalization of self-defense bothers me. We appointed a special cadre of civilians special powers to enforce and uphold the law. They should do that, but we didn’t abrogate to them all of our rights to defend ourselves from four or two-legged predators. That's really what it si coming to in Massachusetts; don't defend yourself, wait for the police no matter how much it hurts even unto death.

Scott Allen Miller is a talk radio host who blogged about urban coyotes and the dead coyote recently. He points out that they are invading our turf, at least in Massachusetts. In other words, nature is coming to us even if we have become too urbanized and too PETA-ized to deal with it. And to paraphrase Martha Stewart, that’s not a good thing.

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