A 2-year-old toddler is in serious condition after being attacked by a coyote on the front porch of the child’s Dallas house on Tuesday, according to authorities.
The incident occurred at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday in a Dallas suburb just north of White Rock Lake.
According to a police statement, a police officer responding to the complaint found the coyote in a park near the child’s home and opened fire on the animal, which escaped into surrounding woods.
It was unclear whether the cop injured the animal, but an active search with a game warden was launched, according to police. Police are alerting people in the area that the coyote is highly hazardous.
The incident occured less than a week after a coyote attacked a 2-year-old kid in Huntington Beach, California. The coyote was later shot and killed.
According to state wildlife specialists, the coyote was clearly fed by neighboring individuals, whether purposefully or unintentionally. Otherwise, the coyote would have avoided human interaction, according to state urban wildlife expert Sam Kieschnick. Such attacks are “not just unusual, but extremely rare,” he added.
According to Robert M. Timm, a retired wildlife scientist at the University of California’s Hopland Research & Extension Center who has long researched the history of human involvement with coyotes, the coyote’s lack of fear of people may be disastrous.
Timm co-authored a research for the Fall 2017 issue of the journal Human-Wildlife Interactions that cited a 2009 study that collected 142 documented coyote attacks on humans in the United States and Canada from 1960 to 2006. Between 1995 and 2010, 26 coyote assaults on people were documented in Canada, according to a 2011 research.
“This is a challenging situation to manage, given the range of public sentiments regarding coyotes, particularly in suburban areas,” he told The Associated Press in an email. “It soon becomes a political nightmare for cities, counties, and governmental agencies, since many people reject any deadly wildlife management, which is sometimes the only answer when certain individual coyotes grow used to living in suburbia to the point where they attack.”