Nobody knows the number of coyotes that roam the Golden Triangle.
“They’re everywhere, I can tell you that,” Lowndes County Extension Agent Reid Nevins said. “Just about anywhere you go in this area, there’s coyotes somewhere in the vicinity.”
What everyone does seem to agree on — from biologists at the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks to the state director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) program — is that they are not a threat to humans. Nor are they even that much of a nuisance, going by the lack of calls Kris Godwin, state director at APHIS, gets from Golden Triangle residents with questions or complaints about them.
“They may be for some people,” Godwin said. “But they’re not calling us with a problem if they’re having it because they can handle it on their own because of the nuisance classification.”
Coyotes are considered nuisance animals in Mississippi, according to MDWFP. Anyone with a hunting license can kill them at any time of the year.
The only coyote incident Nevins even knows about is his own. About a month ago, he said, he and his squirrel dog were hunting when the dog raced off into the woods.
“All of a sudden, I heard all this commotion,” he said. “She went to barking. And here she comes, I could see her running through the woods and two (coyotes) were right on top of her. They came right out like 10 yards in front of me…I was trying to get a shot but I didn’t want to hit her. Anyway, one of them kind of broke loose and I lit him up…If I wasn’t there and hadn’t done that, they probably would have killed her.”
The squirrel dog ran back to Nevins where she could safely bark at her assailants from behind his legs, with nothing more than a scratch on her nose. That’s the only time he’s heard of coyotes in the Golden Triangle area being a threat to pets.
“I guess they were kind of brazen,” he said. “They didn’t know I was around. But once I fired that round off from that shotgun, oh, they took off.”
That’s generally what coyotes do when they come in contact with humans, he said.
Robert Miller, who works at Trophy Room Taxidermy, says the business stuffs four or five coyotes a year.
“It really just depends on how many folks get mad at them deer hunting,” Miller said.
Miller used to hunt coyotes and other animals himself and still goes out with friends to at dusk when he has the chance.
“We had a place … out just north of Caledonia,” he said. “We’d got out there and kill four or five within just a couple of hours and we’d do it every weekend.”
Hunters tend to not like coyotes because they eat deer, particularly fawns, and turkey, leaving fewer of those animals for the hunters, Nevins said.
But they’re no threat to humans, Nevins and Godwin both agreed. Though an article in the Sun Herald in October reported that coyotes in residential neighborhoods on the coast have been attacking and eating pets, Godwin says that hasn’t been a problem in the Golden Triangle.
“You may get one or two in a township once in a while,” Godwin said. “And sometimes it’s just the idea of seeing one scares people more than the animal’s actually causing an issue…if you see one or you hear them, it’s automatically just kind of gives people that creepy feeling.”
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