PRESIDENT’S Statement  —  June 2024

Summertime is coming and I hope everyone is planning on taking advantage of how nice it is to be in the Bay Area while the rest of the state is usually on fire and the air too hot to breathe. We are lucky to be in a place where laryngeal paralysis labradors overheating and animals accidentally locked in hot cars are not a daily problem. However, we do have our own local issues that are somewhat dynamic nowadays. For my current quarterly letter I want to bring up the issue of San Francisco’s coyote population. Let me explain why this is a topic we should pay attention to. Right now new pups are weaning and venturing out making interactions with people and pets more frequent…

For those that don’t know, we went almost a century without coyotes in San Francisco. Then around 2002 an ambitious pair were the first known to cross the Golden Gate Bridge and take up residence in the Presidio. Fast forward a couple decades and we have over a hundred, and maybe two hundred, if you include the overflowing population that moves to the south of the city. Parents put up with their offspring for a year or two then they are told to grow up and find their own territory. Since SF is landlocked everywhere but to the South, that is where they are going.

I’ll start by stating that we do not have a lot of data on how this particular population of unvaccinated, free-roaming apex predators might impact the domestic and wild animals they share habitats with. But, let us consider a few topics of concern: …