Coyotes aren’t cute —they’re deadly

The coyote crept out of the brush behind our Cardoza Street, Westlake Village home and made an instinctive hunter’s dash for my baby daughter. My wife had left the backyard to get another bag of sand for the sandbox that she was filling with our children that summer afternoon. Were it not for the bravery of Lindsay’s 4-year-old big brother Christopher yelling at the animal to loosen its jaws from around her Pampers, and our ex-cowgirl neighbor who spotted the attack from her kitchen window and made a lifesaving dash to help, that predator would have surely killed our baby.

It was front page in The Acorn and on every local TV newscast. We were the first family in the state to use a new rabies medication that eliminated the painful series of injections that was standard medicine at the time. A short time later, a child was attacked and killed by coyotes in Glendale.

Your misleading front-page photo of cute and cuddly Mesa, the coyote, brought back all those memories, especially of all the "old timers" who said we didn’t know what we were talking about. They insisted coyotes don’t attack people. No-growth locals grumbled it was our own fault and that all the home building in Westlake was forcing the coyotes out of their "rightful homes."

Without any story at all, your photo of cute little Mesa, the friendly coyote, gives new families with babies of their own the impression that these are not dangerous predators who send females in heat to roam streets at night to attract the family dog into the hills to be torn apart by the waiting pack, who can jump a six-foot Westlake Village slump-stone wall easily to get at your cat or your kid and who have mauled joggers almost dead in their tracks.

Coyotes will stalk, attack and kill pets or people. They are very good at it. That’s because they come in that cute and cuddly "family dog" disguise as depicted on your front page. If one comes at you or your kids on a trail or in your backyard, be afraid. Be very, very afraid.

Bob Raser

Westlake Village