Is that a coyote?

Years ago, I walked out of a cafe in Bartlesville Oklahoma with a food take out box in my hand. A scrawny looking dog came right up to me and stood two feet away staring at me with beady eyes and a pitiful look. A few seconds later my husband came out of the front door of the café. As he walked over to me, I said, “Oh, look at this poor animal, he looks scared.”

“That’s a coyote," my husband said, "they are always hanging around the café, looking for food.” Everyone knew the circumstances when they decided to go there for a meal, it was common knowledge, and yet every day the people and coyotes intermixed with one another.

I was stunned, not when the coyote stood right in front of me staring at me as if his last breath depended on it, but after my husband told me the name of that animal. I mean, aren’t they supposed to be vicious?

The water was pumped up through wells in the ground. If you were thirsty you didn’t have to drive over to a mini mart for a bottled water, all you had to do is reach down and lift the lever on the well and fresh clear water spurted right out of the ground.

It wasn’t just all these circumstances that were very different for this LA native, it was the mindset. Everyone and everything coexisted just fine. There were plenty of folks living in Bartlesville amongst nature without fearing it, they grew up there, their parents grew up there, it was a mindset.

The same wildlife lives among the folks of Arcadia. In fact, this wildlife strolled our city streets long before pavement and houses were even built. This is their home and if people make a conscious choice to live in an area where wildlife has always migrated you don’t thin out the herd with trapping. In doing so you are thinning out your own, you reap what you sew.

Someone said they heard a coyote howl the other night, and yet the loud sirens of ambulances and police cars day and night are a normal acceptable sound? The city of Arcadia doesn’t have a coyote problem, it has a people problem.

It is a mindset, one that knows the rules naturally, a people who need to live with the land and nature.

Author, Arcadia resident, Patricia Huff