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When Charlene Warner walks her dog each morning in her neighborhood in upscale Seal Beach, California, she's terrified she'll be attacked - not by muggers or gangs, but by coyotes.

"They are killing our animals. They are scaring us. I go out every morning with rocks in my pockets, tennis shoes on, mace on my neck, a whistle on my neck and a foghorn on my leash, and I still don't feel safe," Ms. Warner said last week in comments before the Seal Beach City Council.

She has reason to be nervous. Stories abound in nearby Orange County of dogs and cats snatched off leashes and plucked out of backyards a few feet away from their horrified owners. Mangled pet carcasses turn up on front lawns, often identifiable only by their tails.

Earlier this month, a woman living in the Leisure World retirement community opened her screen door to pick up her newspaper, only to watch a coyote scamper inside, grab her cat, and run back out. Another Seal Beach resident, Nate Kranda, started a memorial Facebook page for photos of dead pets.

It's not just Southern California. From Florida to Washington to Maine, communities are wrestling with how to handle the influx of a surprisingly fearless coyote population. Nobody knows whether the coyote's numbers are actually on the rise, but there's little doubt that the adaptable predator is increasingly making itself at home in urban and suburban America.

"It's spreading all across the United States now," said Rex Baker, professor emeritus at Cal Poly Pomona, who's done extensive research on coyotes. "You're having less hunting going on, and urbanization is continuing, and the coyotes are showing up everywhere."

In rural America, the solution is obvious: Trap and shoot the varmints. In suburbia, however, local governments are increasingly adopting a "coexistence" philosophy promoted by animal rights groups that rejects lethal control in favor of education and behavior modification.

When coyotes get too close, groups like the Humane Society and San Francisco-based Project Coyote recommend hazing: Make noise, stomp your feet, wave your arms, shoot them with water guns, and throw things in order to teach the animals that humans are dangerous.

"Hazing is just a way to remind coyotes that people are something they need to be wary of," said Project Coyote wildlife ecologist Ashley DeLaup. "It's something that makes people seem unpredictable again. Because right now, we're pretty predictable."

In California, however, hazing is facing a backlash from those who say the ruckus hasn't stopped the coyotes from feasting on their pets. A group called Coyote Watch is calling on state and local governments to quit relying on individuals to scare off the predators and take a more active role in combatting the coyote infestation.

Critics of the coexistence philosophy cite a 2009 study in the Journal of Wildlife Management on coyotes in Tucson, Arizona, that found 42 percent of their diet consisted of cats.

"Most of the city councils and animal control departments have been unresponsive in managing the population levels of this unchecked predator," says the Coyote Watch website. "Some are advocating that we must coexist with this predator, and that we should just chase after coyotes banging on pots and pans. But this 'hazing' policy has not worked, leaving our children unprotected and our pets served up as nighttime meals."

In Seal Beach the city council gave up on hazing last week, voting 4-0 to hire a predator control company and begin the strategic trapping and euthanizing of coyotes.

"We learned about the ways to haze, we were educated, we learned what to do about the coyotes, and, as far as I know, we have all put them into place the best that we can," Mayor Ellery Deaton said. "After that, when the spring came this year, the problem was worse and not better."

Project Coyote representative Randi Feilich was one of the few to speak out against trapping at the packed meeting. She said other towns like Calabasas, California, have had success with nonlethal control, and noted that the Los Angeles City Council voted in April to ban snare traps.

"Did you know that, in March, the city of Los Angeles banned the trapping of coyotes and animals? The whole city of Los Angeles. And we don't see Los Angeles on the news right now with all these people saying, 'Let's trap wildlife,'" Ms. Feilich said. "Trapping is not a long-term solution, but rather very cruel and inhumane."

Robert Crabtree, Project Coyote science adviser, argues that not only are lethal control methods like trapping and shooting unethical, they're also ineffective, because other coyotes quickly fill the void left by missing animals.

"Indiscriminate killing of coyotes doesn't work. It never works in the long term," said Mr. Crabtree, who heads the Yellowstone Ecological Research Center in Bozeman, Montana. "Even if you're lucky and happen to get the offending individual, which is absolutely almost unvalidatable, you may have a short-term response, and even then it's unethical and is not economically justified."

Other experts disagree.

Robert Timm, former director of the University of California Hopland Research & Extension Center, recommends removing aggressive "target animals," a strategy used by Mr. Baker in the 1990s to combat a coyote invasion in Griffith Park in Los Angeles.

"Frequently, when you take one or two target animals out, it seems to re-instill the fear in the population," said Mr. Baker. "[We] don't go out and en masse lay traps all over the place. [We're] after that individual and on the trail where it's been seen."

Experts on both sides of the debate agree that neighborhoods need to practice good hygiene to discourage the predators from setting up shop. Never feed coyotes. Don't leave food and water outside. Don't allow pets to roam outside unattended. Keep dogs on a short leash and pick them up if a coyote approaches. Keep garbage cans and outdoor grills securely closed.

As for hazing, Mr. Baker argues that it typically isn't effective as practiced in suburbia, because by the time coyotes are comfortable walking around people during the day, it's too late.

"If you wait until you start to see coyotes in the daytime, you better start going after the bold ones by then, either trapping or shooting. Or you're going to have some problems," Mr. Baker said.

"When you see them in the daytime, especially around people, that's when they've really lost their fear of man, and that's when they've become dangerous."

Evidence of that danger can be found in the Denver-Boulder metro area in Colorado, where about 25 people have been bitten since 2000. Many of those incidents involved coyotes chasing joggers along popular trails, but children have also been targeted.

"We had a spate of coyotes actually knocking down little kids and biting them," said Jennifer Churchill, spokeswoman for Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

In one alarming episode, a 22-year-old Niwot man was attacked by three coyotes in October as he walked to work shortly before dawn. He fought them off with his flashlight and was later treated for bites and scratches to his face, arms and legs.

State wildlife agents will remove coyotes after attacks on humans but not on pets. Like many states, Colorado doesn't relocate coyotes because they either cause the same problems or they perish quickly in unfamiliar habitat, Ms. Churchill said.

Several communities in Boulder County reacted last year by undertaking concentrated hazing efforts, in which volunteers would meet regularly to make a commotion at the site of coyote conflicts. While coyotes would flee the area at first, they would often return after the hazing program ended.

"A hazing program is only as useful as everyone involved in it," Ms. Churchill said. "It's really hard to change an animal's behavior by having people go out weekly and haze coyotes. I think they need to have negative interactions with everyone they come across."

That's a tall order in towns like Seal Beach, with 25,000 people. Despite the city's best efforts, there are still residents who not only don't haze, they actually persist in feeding coyotes. Just last week, Ms. Deaton said her husband found someone had placed pet food on the sidewalk.

In addition to trapping, the council also voted to start fining people who leave food outside. The mayor also called for developing a regional plan with other coyote-infested towns along the Orange County coast.

"What we have here is a tension between the people who are trying to help the coyotes and people who are trying to keep their pets safe," Ms. Deaton said.