There goes the neighborhood: Urban coyotes and the politics of wildlife

ABSTRACT

Coyotes have incorporated themselves into nearly every major city in North America. As apex predators, coyotes’ ability to thrive in cities testifies not only to the blurring of human-wildlife boundaries in an urbanizing world; it also undermines the idea that cities and suburbs are places where people do not have to contend with wild predators. In cities where coyotes have become established more recently, the timing of their arrival has overlapped with an ongoing reevaluation, in science and in society, of the role of wild animals in urban settings. As part of this reevaluation, conservation scientists are deemphasizing human-wildlife conflict in favor of tolerance and coexistence. And human-animal studies scholars are generating politically and ethically more inclusive multispecies accounts of city life that seek to take seriously wild animals as social actors, both in how they interact with humans and in their own right. How do such calls for more egalitarian human-wildlife relationalities resonate in public debates about urban coyotes? Based on an interpretive media analysis of discussions prompted by reports of coyote sightings in Facebook community pages, we investigate how residents of two cities where coyotes are relative newcomers—Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Chino/Chino Hills, California—attempt to make sense of the arrival of these wild canines.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We wish to acknowledge here that posthumanist theories have been influenced by Indigenous cosmologies and standpoints. See Tallbear (2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christian Hunold

Christian Hunold is Professor in the Department of Politics at Drexel University. He is the coauthor, with John Dryzek and David Schlosberg, of Green States and Social Movements (Oxford, 2003). An environmental political theorist trained in the tradition of deliberative democracy, Hunold’s research on the politics of urban sustainability has touched on food systems and stormwater management. His more recent work in critical animal studies, in which he examines the politics of urban wildlife both as means to foster urban wildlife spaces “after nature” and to understand how the blurring of human and animal worlds is generating new forms of environmental political engagement, has appeared in Environmental Values, Humanimalia, and Nature and Culture. Hunold serves on the editorial board of Environmental Politics.

Teresa Lloro

Teresa Lloro is Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Studies at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her research focuses on the intersections of critical animal studies, critical food studies, and environmental education. In all of her projects, she uses a variety of qualitative research methods to understand how educational spaces and processes are inherently political and produce human-animal and human-nature relations within these political frameworks. The Animals & Society Institute and the Council on Anthropology and Education of the American Anthropological Association both recently selected her as an Early Career Fellow. Her forthcoming sole-authored book, Animal Edutainment in a Neoliberal Era, examines the politics of teaching and learning in aquariums and zoos. Her co-edited book, Animals in Environmental Education: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Curriculum and Pedagogy (Springer, 2019), explores new curricular and pedagogical approaches in animal-focused education.