In my neck of the woods in upstate NY, we call them coydogs.
That yip yip yip always freaks me out when I’m outside because I know they have already caught something and it could have been one of my pets.
Yup. I had little doggy guest here that goes out on tether. Tiny, white maltese for the week. I go outside with her. And I make lots of noise before bringing her out.
One late night bedtime turnout, darn thing howled from just behind the shed. Needless to say the little guest used a potty pad instead inside.
Lived here near 25 years and used to daily hike the back of the property, now I won’t go back there without protection.
Our authorities have a tracking map, IF people report them. If they do not get reported, the authorities do not know how often they come into and onto city property.
Some years back, a few of us were outside in a rural area of central-western Massachusetts, just standing outside late at night, and we heard the most terrible sound of a dog in agony, yelping in a squealing screetch interspersed with the sound of a yipping pack of coyotes.
It was awful. The poor dog was no doubt being torn to pieces (as the horrible yelping suddenly ceased) and it was hideous to hear.
Nature isn’t kind. It is cruel. Period.
These imbeciles who say “Oh, wolves don’t pick on people” have no idea what they are talking about.
If wolves needed food, they damn well would do to an isolated, unarmed human what they did to that poor dog we heard.
Turns out that they are a hybrid between a coyote and a wolf, and they developed from cross-breeding that occurred as western coyotes migrated across Ontario into the northeastern U.S. The hybrid animal is larger than a coyote and has characteristics of both strains of predatory dog: the wily nature of a coyote combined with the “pack” social model of wolves. Coyotes are solitary animals by nature, but the coyote-wolf hybrid is not.