It'd do no good for me to call Chet Edwards. He got voted out last November, and was replaced by Bill Flores. I'll call my local Rep and both Senators, though, and tell them to support the bills to delist the wolf now moving through both chambers.

I don't really care to have a plague of wolves. Coyotes are bad enough. They're more than a nuisance. People underestimate them because they're small, but they can become a real menace.

Here in the southwest a really big male is maybe 40lbs, with most weighing less. What people don't understand is that suburban coyotes behave differently than coyotes in their natural environment. They form large packs around a particularly bold leader, and it's the leader and their numbers that make them really dangerous. Some people mistakenly believe that their dog is too big to be attacked. Not true. When I lived in SoCal there were documented cases of 80-90lb dogs attacked, and they had to be rescued by their owners. Pit Bulls have been attacked. It doesn't really matter how tough your dog is, if 10 or 11 coyotes attack it, it's in life-threatening danger.

They're smart. They'll send a bitch in heat through a neighborhood to troll for dogs, and if one chases her she leads it back to the pack which kills and eats it. Which is what this 'yote is probably doing, but you never know for sure.

It's not too big a leap for one of these 'yotes to go from thinking "people are a source of food" to "people are food."

They never made that leap here. Even though they kill about as many pets in both places, CA has always had more attacks on humans than TX. Biologists say that's because people in TX traditionally never had a bunny-hugger attitude toward them as they do in CA. Here, we'd rather kill them than have them around. In CA people will deliberately feed them. I've known of people who lost their pets to them, and still put bowls of food out on the back porch to feed the coyotes that killed their pet, if you can believe that. So up till now, coyotes have never made the leap here that they've made there; that humans are no longer threat but prey. Unfortunately we have a lot of people moving in with no experience with these animals and whose only know what "Animal Planet" tells them about nature. So the situation here seems to be changing.

Wolves and coyotes are methodical hunters and both go through a nearly identical 7 stage process when evaluating possible new prey species such as humans. Based on my observations, we are now at stage 6.