All parties came out of the encounter unscathed. Which was probably really stupid, but all I could think of was, Must save Beanie.” The good news is that, by Gehrt’s logic, this wasn’t stupid at all. “I swear, I didn’t know I would do this, but I charged the coyote. Beanie was bounding toward the coyote, ready to make a new friend. I looked up, and there’s a coyote like 12 feet from her,” she says. “Normally, Beanie stays close to me, but this one time, she was about 20 feet away, not wearing her vest. Read: Keeping the ranch safe from predatorsĪkhtar, to her credit, has some instinctual experience with coyote hazing. “Over time, when you do that, coyotes learn they can make people disappear.” The worst thing you can do? Run back into your house, says Gehrt. You can wave your arms at the coyote, yell, and make yourself look bigger and more aggressive to define your yard as your territory. “In the cases where people do know they have coyotes using their yards, they need to keep a close watch on their dogs and try to haze coyotes when they see them,” Gehrt explains. Still, he says, the threat to pets is very low in most places, and you can do some proven-effective things to safeguard your pet for free, if you’re worried. “In the last 10 years, they’ve increased dramatically in almost all major cities.” “Coyotes have been common in residential areas for a while now,” Gehrt says. But shifting coyote habitats have brought some of those same threats to much more populated areas, according to Stanley Gehrt, an urban-coyote researcher at Ohio State University. These attack-prevention methods have historically been used on dogs that guard livestock in remote areas, where they’re in danger from wild predators. Unfortunately, those don’t come in a variety of fashionable colors. Similar devices are used on working dogs in Italy, Spain, and some parts of the United States. Today, many Anatolian shepherd dogs in Turkey are equipped with spiked metal collars to protect themselves while they protect livestock. The ancient Greeks invented the spiked collar to protect their hunting companions from wolf attacks. (There’s always one.)Īlthough Beanie’s protective outfit is decidedly modern, the idea of dressing dogs to ward off attacks has a long, cross-cultural lineage. The vest was designed with coyote attacks in mind, but the manufacturer says it can also help ward off birds of prey and the giant dog down the street whose owners just let it run around the neighborhood. They come in a variety of colors and are somewhat modular: An LCD blinker, a bite-activated shock device, and “whiskers,” which are the sprays of wire that stand up on Beanie’s back in the famous photo, can be added for an additional cost. The vests start at $100 for spiked Kevlar. Read: Urban foxes and coyotes learn to make nice “I brought her here, and if anything happens to her, I’m going to feel really bad.” Some Googling led to a company called Coyote Vest, which was founded after its CEO, Paul Mott, lost his dog to a coyote attack in Southern California. “I had this moment of guilt after I moved back to Arizona from New York City,” she says. That’s what led Akhtar to buy the viral vest, which features a bright-pink Kevlar body, rows of metal spikes, and several sprays of neon-orange wire. They’ll attack dogs, too.” Because Beanie only weighs a little over eight pounds, hawks picking her up and flying away are also a concern. “We have coyotes, bobcats, and javelinas, which are these weird, aggressive pig things. “I have to watch out for the zoo outside my windows,” says Akhtar. The two live in a remote area outside Sedona, Arizona, where the Sonoran Desert presents certain practical challenges to Beanie’s daily constitutional. The now-iconic dog is an 8-year-old chihuahua owned by a longtime friend of mine, the novelist Amina Akhtar. The original photo has 97,000 likes and counting on Twitter.īack home in Arizona, Beanie was just trying to go for a walk. Reddit challenged its users to Photoshop the spiky chihuahua into creative scenarios, sending her into the hands of the pin-faced villain from Hellraiser and under the sea as an anemone. The comedian Andy Richter named the little pup the next host of the Academy Awards. A popular dog-rating Twitter account pronounced her coyote-proof. Earlier this week, an image of a tiny dog in some kind of wild neon dog armor began to ricochet around the internet.
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