A snarl and a snare for canines in new country

Jimmie Rizzo picked his way into a ravine below a home in Redlands, California.

Through a wrought-iron fence, a French bulldog named Phoebe yipped, snorted and wheezed in her rhinestone collar. Rizzo told her to shut up. He was there to help.

For years, coyotes have fed on pets in this hilltop neighbourhood. When residents complain to the county, the county calls Rizzo.

The trapper, born and raised in the hardwood forests of the Mississippi delta, specialises in California's big predators: coyotes, bears and mountain lions.

Bear and lion problems make news. Coyotes make business.

Rizzo spends about 80 per cent of his time tracking, trapping and putting down the wild canids from the sea to the desert.

His services are at once widely sought and controversial, reflecting suburbia's conflicted relationship with its wildlife.

Coyotes have adapted to civilisation like no other predator, often breeding for generations completely detached from the wilderness.

Cities and suburbs offer much more sustenance than dry scrubland — with little of the risk coyotes once encountered when ranchers and hunters shot them as a matter of course. Coyotes sleep in hedges and drains.

They migrate along storm channels and easements. They drink from pools and pet bowls.

They prey on cats and small dogs, eat fallen fruit, dig scraps from compost heaps and raid bird feeders, garbage bins and bags of pet food.

Terror for pets

Rizzo, 45, has seen coyotes stalking along the 2-metre walls between homes in Orange County, hunting for pets below.

He has come upon a sobbing man who had let his Doberman out to fight off a coyote that had jumped in the backyard — only to see his pet killed in seconds.

A 9-kilogram coyote can kill a 26-kilogram dog and drag it over a 2-metre wall.

Though coyotes do lose fights now and then, smaller, less ferocious dogs have no chance against them.

“Why are they going to go chase rabbits when you got Fifi locked up with a bowl of water to drink right next to her?'' Rizzo asked.

A square mile of wilderness can support two to four coyotes, said Kevin Brennan, senior wildlife biologist for the California Department of Fish and Game.

A square mile of suburbia might support a dozen coyotes or more, which has allowed them to expand well beyond their historical numbers.

“The situation is not natural,'' Brennan said. “These are not coyotes who have wandered out of the hills and are trapped in the city trying to make it.''

Phoebe's owner, Dianne Crowther, 63, said few of her neighbours in Redlands, east of San Bernardino, have cats anymore. “We had a cat and he became coyote sushi.''

She said a pack of coyotes once even chased her when she went out to get the mail one night.

She calls Rizzo a few times a year, when she says coyotes start lurking around her fence.

She doesn't care if animal rights activists call this type of regular trapping ineffective and cruel. She wants them gone.

“We don't want to lose her,'' she said of Phoebe. “She's the light of our life.''

Rizzo, who is licensed by the state, said he has trapped and killed more than two dozen coyotes next to Crowther's property in the past five years.

On a recent January morning, he studied the slopes for disturbed grass or subtle indentations in the clay soil, softened by recent rain.

He finds two narrow animal trails threaded through the brush towards the house.

He leans down to find a three-padded footprint. He pulls a hammer from his bag and drives a steel anchor into the ground.

Running from the anchor is about 2 metres of cable with a loop at the end. Rizzo uses a stiff heavy-gauge wire to suspend the loop across the trail at the height of a coyote's head.

The underbrush makes it difficult to see. If a coyote walks into it, the loop will pull tight like a choke chain.

Noose of death

The snare will not loosen until Rizzo arrives — with a needle full of sodium pentothal and a lawn-and-garden bag for the ride to the hereafter.

Rizzo learnt to hunt and trap as a boy on a small farm in Cleveland, Mississippi.

His grandmother taught him to call muskrat, deer, coon, mink, fox and beaver.

After he moved to Southern California in 1986, he started guiding hunts for bear, deer and turkey in the San Bernardino Mountains.

Six years ago, he became a full-time trapper for Animal Pest Management — one of a handful of companies in Southern California licensed to eradicate problem cougars, black bears, foxes, bobcats and coyotes.

He keeps a team of hounds at the office and travels in Southern California in a full-size Ford pickup loaded with tools, snares, guns and ammunition.

With his cowboy hat, faded Wranglers and Delta drawl, he seems about as out of place and anachronistic in posh, gated communities as the coyotes and cougars he is after. He packs his own rifle bullets in his backyard.

Rizzo's company charges several thousand dollars for the average job, though the price can vary depending on the circumstances.

San Bernardino county contracts him to deal with all the complaints it fields from residents about large predators.

In other counties, homeowner and community associations hire him directly.

More and more, Rizzo is working in neighbourhoods nowhere near the wild. “If you don't have coyotes in your neighbourhood now, you will,'' he said.

Mostly, coyotes live in suburbia without problems. But as the animals have become more comfortable with humanity, they have shown more aggression, researchers say.

A widely cited study by the University of California, Davis, in 2004 found that the first reported coyote attack in California, not attributed to rabies, occurred in 1978.

In the next 25 years, there were 89 attacks on people, or on pets in the presence of people. More than three fourths of those came after 1994.

Humans become prey

The biggest danger coyotes pose is to small children. The study's authors, Robert Timm and Rex Baker, found 35 incidents in which coyotes stalked or attacked young children — including a 3-year-old girl killed in front of her home in Glendale in 1993.

“They do see children as prey,'' Baker said. Humans are not going to get rid of urban coyotes. Many appreciate the wildlife and eradication efforts simply do not work.

“The coyote has been the most persecuted animal in North America,'' said Brennan of Fish and Game.

“Every predator control method known to man — aerial gunning, poisoning, trapping, shooting — they've survived them all.''

But he said the targeted trapping practised by Rizzo is effective — and often residents' only option once coyotes have become aggressive.

The snaring re-instils the fear of humans, he added. Because coyotes are so communicative, word gets out.
Brennan said people often ask him why trapped coyotes cannot be relocated.

“They want it to go to wild animal nirvana,'' he said.

“Unfortunately, nobody knows where that is. ... You got two choices: Leave them alone or kill them.''

Animal rights groups vehemently disagree. Sean Guinan, urban wildlife coordinator for the Humane Society of the United States, said snaring has little effect and is both cruel and indiscriminate.

The snares don't necessarily catch the problem coyote, might trap dogs and other animals and can cause an excruciating death by strangulation.

“It doesn't resolve conflicts,'' he said. “It's a knee-jerk reaction to a non-problem.''

Coyotes travel long distances and might vanish from a spot for a week at a time.

But they always come back. A week after Rizzo set the traps in Redlands, they did.

He loaded up his truck and rolled out.

From the opposite side of the canyon, he could see his quarry. One dead coyote and one sitting — panting and looking straight at Rizzo, very much aware of its predicament.

It had dug deep holes trying to hide. It did not have a chance. Rizzo descended upon it as quiet and resolute as the angel of death.

Last pangs of life

The animal hissed and reared up as he approached. Phoebe barked and wheezed behind the fence.

The trapped coyote whipped around violently on the cable. It was small and wiry, 9 kilograms of gristle, fur and teeth.

Rizzo strode up with a dog-catcher's pole and pinned the writhing animal down. When Rizzo put a blanket over its head, it stopped moving.

He took a needle and injected it in a leg.

He walked over to the dead coyote, cut it from the snare and hurled it into the canyon for the scavengers.

He returned to the other one, which was still breathing but no longer conscious. He cut the snare and admired its thick coat.

“All that expensive dog food has the same effect on coyotes as it does on dogs,'' he said. He put it into the bag and headed off to the next call.