Last night, the Decatur City Commission heard from another round of residents upset about the recent deaths of cats in Drexel/East Parkwood neighborhood.  In a detailed Powerpoint presentation, Christy Bosarge detailed the death of her cat to a coyote 5 weeks ago.  She emphasized that she knew that the city could not eradicate coyotes, but that they needed to “put the fear” back into the coyote population so that they weren’t so casually interacting with the human population and their pets.

Ms. Bosarge even invited a coyote trapper, Chip Elliot, to the meeting, who was very complementary of coyotes’ intelligence and upfront about the fact that you can’t eliminate them from an area.  (A coyote’s territory is 5 square miles in an urban area, according to Elliot.)  The executive director for A.W.A.R.E, Tarah Hadley, also spoke out at the meeting, in opposition to trapping and killing coyotes in Decatur.

The contrast in viewpoints between Mr. Elliot and Ms. Hadley demonstrated the complexity of the issue of coyotes in urban environments.  While they both agreed that coyotes could not be removed from an area by trapping them, they disagreed that a coyote could be made more cautious of the human population through trapping.

However, Mr. Elliot admitted that the best case scenario is to trap yearly and hope that it instills caution in the coyote population.  But even this method won’t even guarantee that the population will decline.

The City Commission came away from the discussion with talk about getting the word out to residents about Decatur’s coyote population, but as the City Manager reemphasized in response to a resident’s question: the process of choice of most metro Atlanta communities is “cohabitation”.

So that’s that for the time being.  But let me quickly discuss the most interesting thing I heard at last night’s meeting.  In reflection on the comments from Mr. Elliot, at the end of the commission meeting Ms. Merriss noted that the calls to city hall with coyote sightings come in regularly like clockwork as the coyotes move around their territory, following the fresh water sources.  A sighting near Drexel will be followed a couple days later on Glenlake and then a couple days later in Winnona Park.

Also, at one point Mr. Elliot was discussing how coyotes choose their and noted that they go after whatever will burn the fewest calories.  Amongst the trash and other small animals, “cats who don’t run away”, were another option.

Which basically boils down to: if you live near a floodplain and have outdoor cats who aren’t especially skittish around dogs and other people, you should be the most wary about the coyotes.