Hazing and Semiosis in Coyote Management Plans

• In Event: Humans and Animals: Managing Co-existence

Abstract

Across parts of the US, Municipal Coyote Management Plans have proliferated as documents that address a purported rise in coyote-human interaction, primarily coyote predation of pet cats and small dogs. These plans uniformly promote a practice known as “hazing”, despite any ecological or behavioral evidence of its effectiveness, as an alternative to more violent forms of management such as trapping, hunting, and euthanizing coyotes. Hazing involves communicating with coyotes in a threatening manner, often including the use of noisemakers, yelling, using squirt guns, or throwing tennis balls or other projectiles. While the intended effect is to scare off or deter coyotes from killing pets or threatening humans, hazing in fact opens up a novel domain of human-animal communication much different from other forms like pet-training, sign language, or mind-reading. We analyze this form of communication as a form of semiosis that is uncertain for both coyotes and humans, and which can be understood as a present performance of a future state that never arrives, but whose reality is presumed as something to be avoided. Hazing as a practice and a semiosis constitutes an emergent set of relations among humans and wildlife in cities that is related to technically mediated forms of communication including fencing, automated lights, or sprinklers, and the use of cameras, sounds, and scents which form a new domain of human-animal communication.

Authors

• Christopher Kelty, UCLA

• Chase A Niesner