GRAND HAVEN, Mich. — An Ottawa County woman has a warning for pet owners in the area after a suspected coyote attacked her dog near a popular park.
Kayli Sneller is a dog trainer and one-year-old Archie’s owner.
She says she lives near Mulligan’s Hollow, a park in Grand Haven, where people often take their pets.
Sneller says she let out Archie after dinner on the Friday before Halloween, only to hear a yelp and see blood gushing from his back paw.
“He was going potty and then he comes back up with a dangling leg,” Sneller explained to FOX 17. “He was obviously panting a lot. Being in the dog training business, you know a lot of their stress signs. He was completely shut down.”
While Sneller didn’t see exactly what happened, she believes a coyote caused Archie’s broken femur. This left her pup with a metal plate and eight screws in his leg.
“With coyotes specifically, their canines are generally about, for both males and females, an inch apart which is the width between his punctures,” Sneller added.
She said it’s not unusual to hear howls late at night, but she never thought they lived so close to her home.
“Coyotes are extremely adaptable animals,” Rachel Leightner with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources told FOX 17.
Leightner says coyotes are elusive, skittish animals that don’t typically attack others, but can in extraordinary cases.
“There can be a territorial dispute that will occur or a small dog, [it’s] difficult to distinguish a small dog from a small squirrel from a coyote’s perspective, so those kinds of attacks can happen. For the most part, coyotes are much more afraid of people. They keep their distances and that’s why we have such high populations of coyotes that live close to us, but we so rarely actually know they’re there,” Leightner explained.
She says young coyotes leave their dens during the fall, so people may notice them more often as they try to find a new place to live.
She recommends removing any yard items that could attract the animals that coyotes eat, such as bird feeders.
Leightner says it you do encounter a coyote, stand your ground and make a lot of noise.
Meanwhile, Sneller wants other dog owners to avoid what she and Archie went through: “It was a very traumatic experience for both of us. I would say that, especially at night, to keep your dog on a leash, as well as keep a flashlight, things on you that you can be seeing everything around you possibly scaring other animals away.”
For more information about coyotes in Michigan, visit the DNR’s website.
