Mailbag: Coyote problem a silent killer in O.C.

How many pets will be eaten by coyotes in Huntington Beach (and all of O.C.) until each respective city efficiently alerts its residents? Most people are not aware, thinking their small dog or cat is lost and will come home.

It will take the killing of a small child innocently walking or a toddler or infant in a playpen in someone’s yard or patio. It is irrelevant if adults are present or chasing the coyote away. This morning in my small walled-in townhome community near the beach in Huntington, residents were trying to scare and chase a coyote away, and within minutes it had a calico cat in its mouth (too late for this domestic pet, ignorantly kept outside).

And this is in full daylight! Third pet killed here this week. Recently, a dog was snatched being walked on a leash in the middle of the day and was torn apart by a coyote.

Perhaps if alerting residents was a revenue-generating issue, you can bet hundreds of lives of our innocent creatures would have been saved.

I am not surprised Huntington Beach does a lousy job or no job of alerting its residents, as it is one of the only coastal cities in Orange County that does not have its own shelter, contracting with the high-kill shelter on The City Drive in Orange, where about 10,000 cats are killed annually. This is no fault of OC Animal Care, since it contracts with 17 cities in O.C. where dogs and cats by the dozens are brought daily and dumped, making it easy for their owners to walk away.

There is nowhere in Orange County where coyotes do not hunt.

Lynn Copeland

Huntington Beach

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Congressman is behind the times

I have just finished reading a very cogent article on the potential consequences of global warming by Vic Leipzig and Lou Murray (“Dire consequences if we don’t curb emissions,” Natural Perspectives, Nov. 17).

I hope you know that our own congressman, Dana Rohrabacher, is not convinced that global warming is real. He doesn’t see the homeless people begging on our streets or bathing in our library bathrooms, but he has been to Honduras to help them create jobs. I believe he is part of the reason people are starting to march in the streets.

Marianne P. Cohen

Huntington Beach