COYOTES, DEER, BEARS, AND HUMANS

 A current story in LA TIMES explores the struggle to deal with the prevalence of coyotes in the city.

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2022-09-20/southern-california-coyotes-population-escalating-war

The many pets which have been eaten by these visitors could all have been protected by not letting them out at night,  so it is hard to see how this is simply an issue of the coyotes.  An occasional child may also be at risk, but then a child walking at night without an adult should either understand the risk, or is too young to be walking alone.

All over the country, cities struggle with the expanding deer population and their consumption of ornamental plantings.  There are plants that deer will not eat,  and there are fences deer cannot cross,  but humans tend to see the issue as a deer problem,  rather than the interaction of humans and deer.

In mountain communities all over the country,  bears are sometime visitors to town garbage sites,  and occasionally to home swimming pools and other human habitations.  Bears see the encroachment of human dwellings as a possible new source of food,  and do not distinguish between natural and artificial watering holes (at least until they try to drink the water).

(And by the way, our house,  and many others are occasionally visited by raccoons looking for food supplies.)

All these stories address the human confusion about the relationship between humans (us) and other animals living in the same space. THIS IS NOT A NEW PROBLEM!!  Humans have always shared the land with other animals!!  As local regions became densely urban, the animal population changed from large mammals, to cockroaches, other insects,  birds,  and rats (small mammals).  People attempt to isolate these smaller pests from their interior spaces by construction, and other methods,  and the illusion that there is a zone of humans and a zone of non-human life is created.  As humans move out into suburbs, and ex-urbs, the interaction with larger mammals returns, the humans are surprised that this occurs,  and write newspaper stories about it.  No one seems to notice that the humans moved into the animal spaces,  not the other way around.

To make the story even more peculiar,  animals like mountain lions in the Santa Monica mountains are now rare and forage across highways to find food and are sometimes killed by cars.  So the region is building an animal crosswalk over the highway to allow them to safely cross!!  This will give them access to more mountain regions,  and also wealthy neighborhoods where they have been tracked visiting on monitors.

Some animals are pests because they intrude into our lives and some are precious and need protection (even though they are more dangerous to humans).  The simple message is that humans have lost the understanding of how to live with other species,  how to set boundaries,  and how the boundaries change when living in different habitats.  Though it is often presented in this way,  it is not a problem of animals (except that human activities have eliminated some of their predators).  It is a problem of humans who became so "urbanized" that we lost the knowledge of how to manage our boundaries with animals.  

Robert Frost: Good fences make good neighbors.  Also applies here.