The Coyotes of Culver City

Coyotes and Southern California. They go together like Precedent Shitgibbon and brain injury.

Normally, people jump to the image of an exploitive asshole, taking poor immigrants for every peso they've got. Loading them into the back of an beat up old Nissan Cargo van. Tossing them some Sparkletts water and some packets of stolen airline nuts. And then dropping them off in one of the ungodly neighborhoods of El Centro in the Imperial Valley. Pro tip: all the neighborhoods of El Centro are ungodly.

But the coyotes I'm talking about today are of the four legged variety, see above.

We've got 'em.
And by we, I mean Culver City.

There are coyote alert posters plastered throughout the neighborhood.

Apparently, they nest above the hills in Baldwin Park and venture down into the tonier sections of Culver City at night looking for cats. To eat. It all feels so lycanthropic, thank you Toby Barlow.

Moreover, there's a hardly a day goes by that one neighbor or another hasn't gone onto nextdoor.com to tell the harrowing tale of the "disappearance" of Mr. Biggles, Schrodinger or Catrick Swayze.

It's heartbreaking.

But then again if you've ever watched a few hours of the National Geographic Channel, you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that nature is a bitch. One minute you're watching a young impala make a miraculous escape from a bullet fast cheetah and enjoying some Serengetti schadenfreude.
Twenty minutes later you're watching one of the cheetah young cubs, dehydrated and bony (because his mother lost a kill), fall in a ditch and never get up.

As my neighbor, the great M. Emmett Walsh put it when I told him I think there are tree rats running along our mutual fence, "Hey, they gotta live too."

Rats gotta live.
Coyotes gotta eat.
We all live in the same neighborhood.

There is one notable exception however.

If you're the kind of person who disregards the warning at the bottom of the flyer and insists on actually feeding the coyotes, you represent the shallow end of the gene people. You're a candidate for the Darwin Award. You're the kind of douchebag neighbor who has a jet engine loud car alarm that goes off at all hours of the day. To you, sir or mam, I would suggest you ALWAYS feed the coyote.

Always.