The Nature of the Beast
I am uncharacteristically sitting at the kitchen counter this evening, watching TV on Kim’s kitchen TV (all is well with the new FireTV installation). I am doing this since I have to leave shortly for the airport to pick up our friend David, who is flying in from New York. I was reclining on our bed watching Law & Order SVU, one of our go-to shows (also not a normal venue for me at that time of day) because Kim needed to have the living room for her piano lesson. She is off at her first rehearsal of her new singing group and she was getting into the music groove. Before leaving she fed Betty and took her out for her normal evening poop walk. That was when she called me. She has only called me once before during a Betty walk and it was when she slipped and fell over near Camino Elena in our neighborhood. This time she called to say that a neighbor had warned her when she drove by that there were several coyotes out on the road between her and our house.
I jumped in the car and went and picked up my girls, kidding about how I was saving them from the wilds of Escondido. When I got home I got a ping on my text messaging. My Nepalese neighbor Ramesh was texting me and Winston with a video of a pack of five coyotes coming up the hill near his house and onto our short road. From the look of the twilight, I imagine that this had occurred pretty much when Kim had called me a few minutes earlier. I figure the pack was out on the hunt for a little white doggy tidbit for dinner. I called our neighbors on the other side, the ones who had three little dogs when they moved here and now have two little dogs thanks to a twilight coyote snatch and grab during their first week. Welcome to the neighborhood.
Recently, a woman in Kim’s ladies group told her that someone had seen mountain lion tracks in the area in the prior few days. We know that the territorial mountain lion that counts this as his or her territory was last seen about five years ago and we were told that their area is so large that they only come by every five years or so. It seems that our lion is keeping to schedule. I’ve had one face-to-face encounter with a mountain lion up on Palomar Mountain and it was a non-event except for my need to change my u-trou. I also had a bobcat sighting right in our front yard games area. That bobcat spent some time chewing the head off of a rubber snake I had planted under a mini-golf obstacle and ripping up all the red turf tees (which I have since spiked into place with one-foot spikes. The point is that there really are a few wild animals still roaming these chaparral hills around here. I’m glad there are no bears, but I suspect a mountain lion would do more damage in a scuffle, but I have a thing about bears ever since living in Canada and reading one too many Bear Attacks books.
I know that deer and the likes of bunnies and gofers do more damage to gardens than bears, mountain lions, bobcats and coyotes combined, but since they aren’t really a threat to me personally, I don’t tend to be too concerned about them. Bunnies are particularly friendly and even cute, and gofers are hard to spot (they are apparently quite shy of humans). As for deer, I’m sure they exist, but not so much around here. The only reason I know we have gofers are the telltale little piles of dirt here and there on the back hillside. My Nepalese neighbors take gofers much more seriously than I do and they sent me a text picture proudly showing me how their gofer traps have gotten as many as five of the little buggers at a time. That feels too much like hunting for me to bother with. I don’t want coyotes lurking or any lion or bear encounters, but I certainly don’t feel the need to stalk, hunt and then dispose of the carcasses of wild animals.
The one wild animal I am prepared to kill if I see it, is a rattlesnake. The good news is that I haven’t seen one since last May, and I have certainly spent a lot of time on that back hillside, so if there was one lurking, I would have seen it. The bad news is that last May we had five rattlesnakes, all of which we killed (meaning someone other than me, but on our property). I don’t like anything that can be that harmful and hide in wait for you. I know people like to say that its just their nature and we should relocate them, but I tend to think they are simply too dangerous to play with. How stupid would I feel if I got fatally bitten while trying to help a rattlesnake survive? Not going to happen. If one gets me while I’m tromping around in his space, I will suffer the consequences, but that’s it.
Coyotes enjoy a special place in our consciousness. Right this moment I can hear Kim outside yelling for Betty, who has probably wandered off somewhere. While Betty wouldn’t be much of a tasty meal since she’s old and stringy, she also could be easily overcome and taken down for whatever nutritional value she might provide. We don’t want that to happen to our Betty, so we are very aware of the movements of coyotes around us. Lone coyotes can be pretty dangerous, especially larger ones, but the ones that hunt in packs are a real threat. I don’t know enough about coyote behavior to know what it takes for a pack of coyotes to take on a human walking a dog, but there must be a line that can get crossed. That line might be one of the odds (how many coyotes are hunting in the pack versus whether Betty is wandering around alone or on a leash with Kim), or it might be one of degree of desperation. I’m sure a hungry band of coyotes will adjust their tactics to take more risk than they might otherwise take. Hungry or scared animals are not to be trifled with.
When we moved out here, Kim would carry a few rocks in her pocket in case she encountered a coyote. That didn’t strike me as a very good arsenal, so I bought her a flashlight taser to give her some more robust protection. In addition, I got her a flashlight that looks like a small bat that can be used as a weapon in a pinch. Both Kim and I are anti-gun for both philosophical and practical reasons. The practical reason is that in an emergency one is more likely to shoot oneself in the foot than provide oneself real protection. At least with a taser, if you shoot yourself in the foot you will likely survive. On the other hand, it takes some kind of practice to use a taser and I’m not so sure Kim or I would really be prepared during a wild animal attack to use the damn thing properly. Is there a taser training class? Probably, but I’m not sure we are anxious to do that either. I guess a taser is there mostly to make us feel we aren’t completely helpless even if we are anti-gun people.
So, I guess I have to admit that the nature of this beast (meaning me and us) is that we are more ashamed to betray our liberal anti-gun sentiments than we are to suffer an attack from some wild animal or, worse yet, a pack of wild animals tactically hunting us. It would be interesting to see (hopefully never) if a real attack would change my mind about toting a gun?