CAUGHT ON CAMERA: Badass House Cat Fights Off 3 Coyotes! https://t.co/4eyjBzKg5P pic.twitter.com/7PLWaH7Jzs
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) January 14, 2020
WATCH: It turns out this cat named Max is a great warrior. See for yourself as he fights off coyotes in his own backyard. pic.twitter.com/weYGc5D9Lm
— WDBJ7 (@WDBJ7) January 13, 2020
I say Max, having proved his valor, should now retire with full honors. The Washington Post has a good write-up:
… What the coyotes didn’t know was that Max is a seasoned street life veteran. He survived alone in Long Beach before being adopted by his current family nearly four years ago, Maya Gurrin, his human, told The Washington Post. Max has probably seen and been involved in scuffles for which he has no words — or meows…
Gurrin and her husband, Eliot, saw some tails wagging through a glass door, and decided to go outside to investigate the noise.
“We thought it was a raccoon,” she said. “We went out and saw that he was surrounded by them. The coyotes hurried off when we went out there.”
Max walked back inside unfazed and unsullied.
“He wanted to go right back outside like a psycho,” Gurrin said…
Since his brush with death, Max has been inside, but the Gurrins know that they can’t keep him indoors forever, based on experience…
[T]he Gurrins are working out a compromise that would ensure Max’s safety and give him the freedom to smell the outdoors in the form of a catio or cat patio, which is an enclosed outdoor structure for cats still tapped into their wild side.Max is very intelligent, according to Eliot, who said Max can open doors with horizontal handles.
“He’s a weird mix of friendly, of independent and loud and sensitive,” he said. “He’s a very hard cat to define. He’s super smart.” …
We’ve always done our best to ensure that our cats are indoor-only companions, but it can be difficult to outsmart a street-hardened rescue. We inherited six-pound Maine-Coon-type Kishkan when her previous owners moved to a country with a six-month pet quarantine. She’d come to live with them (despite one partner’s mild ailurophobia) by the simple expedient of waiting at their door & strolling in whenever it was opened. When they finally broke down & accepted their fate, their vet discovered she’d already been spayed, but nobody responded to their flyers. She was at least six years old when she came to live with us, and she lived another eight years before succumbing to kidney disease… despite regularly taking advantage of the dogs’ potty breaks to dart out for a walkabout. And she regularly brought back mice, voles, and baby bunnies to leave on the back stoop, just to show that we were not the boss of her.
Cheryl Rofer
I have seen coyotes, foxes, and a bobcat in the yard. My neighbor says she saw a cougar. Ric and Zooey are indoor cats, except when we go out with harnesses and leashes. And I think they were free-ranging for their first two and a half years.
Kent
This post is extremely apropos because we have a young cat who is an escape artist, always trying to slip outside when the door opens. He always watches me from the window intently when I take the dog out hides out near the door to make a break whenever someone comes in or out.
Problem is that we live next to a green belt with a lot of coyotes. People are always losing cats and small dogs to the coyotes so there is no way we can leave him out. We lost the first cat to coyotes when we first moved here and didn’t know about them. Daughter picked the new one out and pretty much owns him so we can’t lose this one.
So what kind of GPS or other electronic cat tracking devices are recommended? The actual GPS devices I see on amazon look more like for dogs and too big and bulky to keep on a cat collar 24/7. I see smaller Bluetooth devices like the ones you put on keychains. And there are some RF trackers that are like the old style wildlife collars with homing beacon finders. Has anyone here gone through the trial and error of finding the right cat tracker?
My fear is that he is going to run out sometime when I’m on the way to work or the kids are going to get the school bus and we won’t have time to hunt him down in all the jungle of shrubbery and forest we have around the house. That has already happened once and luckily I was able to text a neighbor to go find him. He dashed out the door as my daughter was leaving to catch her school bus (she was last out of the house) and she was in tears on the bus worried about him as she couldn’t find him before the bus arrived.
khead
Mrs Khead was a nervous wreck while we were trying to get Penny in the house. I mean, you just don’t know what other critters are lurking out there.
trollhattan
@Cheryl Rofer:
My best buddy in the Sierra foothills has had coyotes, bears and mountain lions in his yard. It’s a Disney movie, with predation.
Bill Arnold
Max is very intelligent, according to Eliot, who said Max can open doors with horizontal handles.
[Have?] a coon+something cat (male) that can open doors with horizontal handles. He watched a human opening a door carefully one day, then tried it out and has done it since.
Still can’t use the toilet, though.
Eastern coyotes are bigger (more wolf). But a cat claw can take out an eye (a blind predator starves) and a cat bite can kill with infection, so even larger predators need to be cautious with cats. (Great Horned Owls maybe excepted.)
ziggy
My crazy/stupid 13 lb. chihuahua mix has twice crawled under the fence to chase off coyotes. They also jump over the fence. He is on very reduced and supervised outdoor time now, but I’m not really sure how to protect him as we can’t afford a coyote-proof fence. I lost two cats to coyotes when I was young, living next to deep woods. A wildlife removal specialist told me that they are very reticent to fight and get injured, would much rather sneak up on a “sure thing”. So that may be what saved this cat and my dog.
ETA–I had much better luck with cats once I started making sure they only went out in broad daylight, for limited periods. You can use food to get them back in again.
Anne Laurie
@ziggy: Coyote vest.
Haven’t tried it personally (yet), but it’s gotten good reviews.
There was a coyote in our immediate neighborhood at the beginning of December, and (despite our fence & his newly-rigged floodlight) the Spousal Unit *still* won’t let our two 15lb rescues out in the yard unsupervised. Main reason we haven’t already invested in a couple coyote vests is that our alpha-bitch rescue is *extremely* sensitive about her personal space (& her dignity), and the threat is not yet so urgent (no coyote wails since that memorable 36-hour period — pretty sure s/he’s moved on) we’re willing to risk getting bitten a dozen times a day.
Adam L Silverman
@Anne Laurie: And when not using his or her coyote vest for outdoor activities, your dog can also wear it when jamming with its Norwegian death metal band!
ziggy
@Anne Laurie: I looked into the coyote vests, and also the badass spiked collars. Unfortunately my dog is also VERY sensitive to wearing anything beyond a normal collar, and pretty much shuts down. It may be a matter of dignity, he won’t say. Sometimes I think there is only so much you can do without ruining their quality of life.
Anne Laurie
Old school remedy: If the cat always wears a collar — or better yet, a harness — fasten a short ‘leash’ with a clip on the end near the door. Before you take the dog out, clip the leash on the cat, so if he darts out he’ll be retrievable.
It’s tedious for everyone concerned, but *most* cats give up lurking by the door fairly soon, if they feel like they can’t win.
One cat, a true Bodhisattva, decided he was fine with the leash, if we’d let him sit in the bushes by the door for half an hour when the weather was nice. We ended up planting a honeysuckle bush just for him to lurk under.
Didn’t work with our escape artist Kishkan, because (Maine Coon) she had a genius for getting out of even the most ‘cat proof’ harnesses, which she would leave in prominent places (the bathroom sink, on our pillows) to make sure we got the message.
Anne Laurie
I know the feeling, alas! Any way you could block the fence perimeter to keep your elderly adventurer imprisoned? Maybe some of the plastic temporary fencing sold to keep varmints out of garden plots?
Major Major Major Major
Samwise barely even understands what outside is, except that it’s where the birds live…
StringOnAStick
I saw a Chihuahua wearing a vest with two rows of spikes down the back and spikes in the top neck area. I thought it was a humorous “look at my killer dog” thing what with all the other quite large dogs around, but I finally caught a clue. The vest didn’t have the plastic sprays on along the spine like in that link though; I’m assuming those are to ward off a raptor.
tomtofa
Our cat in the suburbs has been indoor/outdoor for all his 8 or so years. Hard to keep him in when his dog brother has pet doors to the outside world. He’s had the occasional scratch or nick – maybe from scuffles, maybe just from exposed screw ends in fences he jumps – but has mostly been predator rather than prey. Brought in a lot of outdoor rodents and the occasional bird. Thankfully this seems to be tapering off as he ages; I had too many middle of the night searches through the house for the ones he tired of playing with before they succumbed, or the morning discoveries of the the one organ (always the same one – liver, spleen?) that he won’t eat. And, of course, the feathers . . .
We recently had to house him with our daughter for a week while our house was being repainted/staged for selling. She lives in an apartment; he adapted like a champ, using a litter box, having no accidents, destroying no furniture. Good to know, as we try to figure out what type of place to move into when we sell.
No coyotes here; raccoons, possums, skunks.
ziggy
@Anne Laurie:
We have 2/3rds of an acre with wire fencing. It is now pegged down with rebar, but the rabbits still dig under it (yes it is a menagerie of wildlife here!). My little devil is very fast and agile, and he follows the bunny smells…argggh!
Kent
Hmmm. That might work when we are home. But he has a cat’s perverse ability to scoot through someone’s legs when we are heading out late for something. I can’t see leaving him on the leash all day inside the house.
We have a pretty open layout house so we can’t just put him in a different part of the house and close a door or he’ll not have access to food and litter box. When we turn around and stare him down he gives up. It’s only when a kid is the last one out and late for the bus or something that he scoots through the legs.
If he was a dog we could put in a gate and keep him upstairs during the day. But he is an acrobat who can go over/under anything. My fear is that he will get out sometime during the day and then get stuck outside for a spell and wander off. He might just spend a couple of hours on the front porch safe and sound. Or he might explore the neighborhood. We’ve never tested that proposition. I don’t want to be the family that is posting 400 lost cat posters around the neighborhood when I could have spent $100 on amazon to avoid it.
Martin
We’ve got loads of coyotes here. If you’re an early bird, you’ll see them pretty much every day. Get a kid attacked by one about every year or so (never fatal). But we’ve also got bobcats here, and they’re much dicier for the outdoor cats. Pretty sure that’s what got Kevin Drums cat as we had a bobcat in the neighborhood just a day or two before (it was in the tree just outside my slider).
Major Major Major Major
tomtofa
BBC had a fascinating program on an English village that tracked their cats. They wander further than one would think.
Mary G
That cat was on his territory, and Max was not having it. My smart cat can open doors and cupboards, and when he was younger and determined to go walkabout outside would use any means necessary to get out, including pushing screens out of their frames or tearing them open.
Sandia Blanca
We have coyotes, hawks, and owls right here within the Austin City Limits, and neighbors are constantly losing cats to either those natural predators or traffic on the nearby highway. Fortunately our cats are happy to stay inside and watch the birds and squirrels.
smike
@ziggy: I’ve seen rabbits it my yard (cottontails) bolt under a chain-link fence (dog door action sequence) and have tried to find a gap big enough for them under be bottom wire. I have not found that gap.
Mnemosyne
@Kent:
Building a catio might work — you can find a ton of plans online. That might make him feel like he’s got access to the outdoors without putting him at risk.
Kent
@Mnemosyne: We actually have an upstairs deck out the the back of the house that is 15′ up and we let the cats out there all the time. They spend hours out there in the summer in the sun. It is high enough that they don’t try to climb or jump down. That hasn’t cured his wanderlust though. He still wants out the front door at the most inconvenient times.
Anne Laurie
Yeah, there are too many big-dog owners who don’t realize that ‘He was only playing!’ doesn’t change the fact that their dog hasn’t just threatened / wounded / killed the smaller dog. That’s why smart dog parks have a ‘small dogs only’ segregated area!
When I got my first (15lb) dog, he wanted to play with my friends’ Irish setters / Afghan hounds, but even with the best intentions the big guys didn’t always remember how much of an advantage they had. So we put his fiberglass crate in the yard when they all went out together — when he got overwhelmed, Galliard shot into his crate & stayed there until things calmed down again. After the first few times it happened, the other dogs would actually look embarrassed by their carelessness (because dogs are pack animals, and pick up social cues).
Funnily enough, we never had that problem with another friend’s Great Danes. The Danes *never* forgot their size, and were unfailingly careful around Galliard (and the Pomeranians, and the mini-doxies, even when the doxies were friggin’ obnoxious to the Danes).
Anne Laurie
We have hawks, but there’s so much free roadkill, they’re not a problem for pets around here. But our vet says that local scat studies indicate cats are up to 40% of the local coyotes’ diet… which is verified by rescue & spay/neuter groups, who have noticed a related drop in ‘clients’.
(Still plenty of cats who need rehoming, and ‘accidental’ kittens in season, but the coyotes are cleaning out the feral population. And the local foxes, too, alas.)
WaterGirl
@Anne Laurie:
That made me smile.
WaterGirl
@Anne Laurie:
But this did not. :-(
satby
Spray bottles with water near the door for wanna-be escape artists. If it has a “stream” setting even better. As soon as you notice them waiting for their chance to scoot out, hit then with a blast from the bottle, in the face if you can manage it. It’s a training aid that is a strong deterrent but doesn’t hurt them at all. Most cats will give up after a few episodes, though the really stubborn ones take longer. My last rescue pulled from the streets now watches me take the dogs in and out intently, but doesn’t try to make any breaks for freedom anymore. Though I suspect the cold air when I open the door is also a reminder of some bad old days too.
BethanyAnne
I don’t remember where I saw it, but I learned that the average lifespan of an indoor only cat is 16 years. For indoor / outdoor cats, it’s 4 years. Wish I had a cite for it. My last 2 were 17 and 19 when they passed. and were indoor only for the vast majority of that time. For a couple of years, they were let out, cause you don’t win everything in a marriage (ex-wife wanted to let them go out).
satby
@BethanyAnne: you might have read it here.
Between the danger to the cats and to local songbirds and wildlife, cats shouldn’t really be allowed to roam outside. Most people just like not having to deal as much with litter boxes if they let the cats out.
satby
Bizarrely slow night tonight. Everyone must be sleeping well or coping with bad weather. We had two inches (roughly) of snow but now sleet is falling so a layer of ice has formed over everything. It’s my first day back at the market after two weeks off, and driving even just a few blocks will be hair-raising. Wish I could skip it.
BethanyAnne
I was scared every time we let Suli out. She would trot right out to wheedle all the neighbors into feeding her. My other cat, Cheyenne, was a rescue that had been caught starving as a kitten. She would go up to the open door and start yowling: “Someone might come in! You need to close this!”
BethanyAnne
@satby: Yeah, I fell asleep right after work, and am now awake for hopefully only a couple of hours before I try to catch a few more hours of sleep. I have a full day tomorrow, and it’ll suck if I can’t catch a few more zzz’s.
eclare
@satby: I’m very sorry that I snapped at you a few days ago, that is all on me. Be careful in the snow!
Juice Box
I can’t sleep; the coyotes are barking and the poodle is growling. He hates those guys.
MagdaInBlack
@satby:
My 5 pm 25 mile drive from South Elgin to Arlington Heights took an hour and a half. Normal is an hour. I did not see a single plow truck ?
Im holed up for the weekend now, tho. Im sorry you have to go out.
Be safe.
BethanyAnne
*sigh* I fucked up and was all pissy in an open thread a couple of days ago. Don’t even know why, just free floating grumpiness that day. I feel all embarrassed now; I’m not normally such an ass (at least without a reason).
BethanyAnne
Anyway, I’m going to try and get some sleep. Y’all be well.
satby
@eclare: oh, no worries. It’s all good.
satby
@BethanyAnne: everyone is on edge. And online forums are unfortunately going to be places where we can’t always reliably discern intent. But we’ll get through it.
Cermet
Considering cats kill a few billion birds a year and up to 20 billion manmals a year(!) these creatures dwarf the Australian wild fires in sheer destructiveness and even what cars do to wildlife. Cats should never run wild and are one of the most destructive animals introduced into the wild by humans anywhere. These down sides also ignores the dangers of Toxoplasmosis that infects hundreds of millions of humans with still unknow effects. Not bad for a small, furry and affectionate animal.
sab
@Cermet: My first cat, 50 years ago, got killed by a car at age 2. My sister’s cat was also killed by a car, age 8.
We have five cats now, three of them were semi-feral. The fourth was a kitten found abandoned by the side of a highway.
The fifth was my dad’s longtime companion. He is our only current cat who ever went outside, and he has had tapeworms numerous times. He went blind in one eye from toxoplasmosis, and blind in the other eye from glaucoma. Once I got him his outside days were over. Now that he is completely blind he is happy to stay inside.
The three semi-ferals are horrified by the idea of outside, since the food and warmth are inside. They run away from open doors.
The maine coon fell out an upstairs window once when the screen popped because he is so big. We found him hiding in the shrubbery, not enjoying himself at all.
Gvg
Air lock door arrangements. My sister had an escape artist dog. When we moved, we had to figure out how to keep her safe till the new yard could be fenced. At both houses, we fenced front and back yards with an automatic gate opener. At any rate, until the fence could be built, we picked at least one door that could be double doored and used that one. It was something we considered when choosing potential houses too. Sometimes you can just come and go through the garage which gives you a second chance to catch an escapee. Other times you can have a screened front porch. The house we moved into had a front non screened porch and we borrowed dog pen panels and tied then to the porch supports to make a dog fence that could not be knocked over.
For a cat it would need to be screened porch. Even if they can claw through it if they have time, they can’t run through it fast. Also there is a kind of screening that is “pet proof”. It is sold for pet owners whose cats climb screens or dogs scratch to get out. The coating is applied after the weaving to make a screen where the strands don’t move. It definitely holds up better though it also blocks a bit more sunlight which in Florida I didn’t mind. We did the back porch that way and it was great. No mosquitos! The cats really enjoyed that large screened porch. Some houses we looked at had a small sort of courtyard that could be screen doored. Sometimes even a decorative fence can slow an escaping cat enough to work. The metal kind with straight up and down narrow pickets can’t be climbed. A gate with a spring to auto shut and a sign to tell strangers to keep it shut would be required. You need to know how high your kitty jumps.
The Pale Scot
Raptor vests…Hmm. My sister’s scottie is is a wee runt of the litter (16lbs), we’ve watched the local red hawks sizing her up when she’s out in the yard. On the other hand I’ve watched her stare down 6 point bucks that want to try the landscaping.
But I don’t know if her sense of dignity would allow it. My parent’s scottie, a big oaf, would only allow my mother to put xmas bell booties and antlers on him. Anyone else was a call for total resistance
debbie
A coyote ran up and bit a cop helping a stranded driver on the freeway (I70) the other day. It’s being reported as totally unprovoked. The coyote also tried to bite nearby state road workers and was unfazed after being tased. I’m betting rabies.
sab
Woke up to three inches of fluffy snow. Lovley. Now it’s raining, so the snow is turning to mush. Yuck. I hope it melts before it freezes. Freezing rain is one ot the reasons I never even considered living in southern or central Ohio or the border states. We aren’t supposed to have this stuff this far north.
J R in WV
@Kent:
We have friends with a balcony type deck like that. Their cat was taken by a barred owl right off the balcony one evening. A couple of feathers and some tufts of cat fur… gone.
Our cats are sometimes outdoors, mostly late at night, and they must be ghosts in the night. We have lost one smaller dog and a brazen tom cat to predators over the many years on the farm. And chickens to barred owls in the long ago when we kept livestock.
Scamp Dog
My previous dog, a Border Collie, was an implacable foe of coyotes. One day on our morning walk, we ran into one. We crossed the street to the park, and then crossed the creek and traveled north along it. We hadn’t gotten far before we heard the “ow, ow, owoo” coyote bark. I looked across the creek and saw the coyote. Biscuit saw it, too. Her hackles went up, she raised her tail (usually she held it down low), and she started jumping around and barking.
I walked a little ways toward the coyote, and Biscuit advanced, barking all the while. I decided it wouldn’t be real smart to get close, so we headed back north along the creek.
Apparently that was the coyote’s way home, because he crossed the creek and tried to circle around us, but I-25 kept him from getting far enough away from us. Biscuit saw him and charged! I tried to call her back, but she kept going, barking and growling. I was a little concerned—coyotes are bigger than Biscuit, and kill things for a living. But the coyote ran off, while Biscuit kept watching him. No predators allowed when there’s a Border Collie on duty!
MoxieM
One of the reasons I enjoy having Newfies (and currently, Murphy who is mostly Gt Pyrenees) is that their sheer size makes them unlikely coyote targets. I always have a real fence too, at least 4-5 ‘ so any predator would have to be able to get over that. Murphy would be highly aggressive towards any intruder; it’s her job as a livestock guardian dog, and she does it with all the neighborhood dogs who get too close, ahem. (We are not popular together.)
I was interested to see the coyotes in that video hunting as a pack. I (used to?) think that Coys were solitary hunters, and wolves were the pack hunters. Has that changed since coyotes now have to contend with so much human incursion into their habitat? (Not enough space for individual animals to each have a hunting territory).
Anyhow, good on Max, who is gorgeous as well as a badass.
SWMBO
@Anne Laurie: We rescued and rehomed a dachshund once. He loved to play ball. The daughter of the new furmom was a vet tech and raised mastiffs for show. She took the dachshund over to visit and this little 17 pound dog DOMINATED all of her mastiffs. The daughter said if she ever decided to switch breeds, she go for a dachshund. She said she had no idea they packed that much personality in such a small dog.
Paul
My cat Ziggy got hit by a car in 2015. My 7-year-old son found his first pet frozen dead on the road on his way to the school bus. Easily one of the worst days of my life. But in the end I had to admit, Ziggy was only happy as an outdoor cat. He was fat and sedated as an indoor cat. He was awesome, regal, HAPPY when he got to go outdoors. He went out while crossing the road trying to get home for breakfast. No doubt for me that – to him – it was better than wasting away in the house until he died.
Anyway, to each his own. Not saying this to sway people. He was my cat. I loved him. I knew he wanted to run with the night.
Fay khoury
@Cheryl Rofer: good for you cats are safer inside.