I am a small female and have encountered coyotes on my solo runs before. I live between rural and suburbs and run alone. A coyote has never done anything other than stop briefly and watch out of curiosity and then take off. Honestly it is a pretty cool experience. Unless sick, most wildlife has no interest in you. I am way more afraid of dogs and idiot dog owners than a coyote.
We regularly have coyotes in our yard, usually at dusk or at night. I also run across them on the trails often. If you are running with a dog they might go after them if they are smaller, but there is no way under normal circumstances a coyote will attack an adult human. I find his story highly unlikely.
Why are people reluctant to believe that a coyote approached and even went after the bar? At 3 in the morning in the middle of a long run like that, it wouldn't take much to knock a person over.
Wildlife specialists are so quick to cast doubt on this assault allegation. I guess coyotes will be coyotes and we should just ignore that sometimes they can be a threat to people.
Animals are generally cowardly when hunting. They only take on a sure thing. A single coyote is just not going to attack an animal that outweighs it by 100 lbs unless it is incapacitated. The coyote can't order door dash if it gets hurt when hunting. It picks its shots carefully and it is a master of opportunity cost.
I just watched the video. Looks to me that he is a terrible actor who is clearly lying. He doesn’t seem genuinely scared at all in the way someone probably would be if they had been attacked. At the beginning of the video, he says, “I just had something rather terrifying happen” in a casual way. Then he says “I’m out on a 150-mile trail run.” The distance of his run is not relevant to his story; stating it reeks of a pathetic attempt to impress people and get attention.
The giveaway is his final line: “I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I guess I got to keep going or else it’ll probably come back for me. Ooh.” The angle of the video, lighting, tone, words, facial expression, and “ooh” at the end are all as if he’s telling a spooky ghost story to children huddled around a camp fire, while he holds a flashlight under his chin for added effect. Beware the evil and dangerous coyote monster that’s coming to get you in the middle of the night, kids!
TLDR: the boy who cried wolf is now the man who cried coyote.
I can’t speak to Dean’s story being true or not and I know attaché are exceedingly rare, but they do happen. I was running on a trail near the quarry in Fredericksburg, VA last year and had an altercation with one.
Came around a corner and we surprised each other. I tried making myself look big and shouting at it, but it decided I was too close (911 operated told me after it could have been near its den with pups. Happened in late April). It was cautious in coming at me but for a small as it was (I would guess about 30-40lbs) it had huge teeth. It tried biting at my legs, but I kicked it away several times. Finally landed a strong enough kick that it went into the bushes and I took off to the concert venue behind Fredericksburg’s “Central Park”. Fortunately it did not follow me and a retired firefighter on a walk by the venue had heard me shouting and let me use his phone to call 911.
If Dean really was attacked he would probably be telling people about going to the hospital for several sounds of rabies shots, and how ludicrously expensive that is. The bill for my initial visit to the ER was $18,000 before insurance covered anything, and I had to go back for 4 more shots.
But I’m not surprised nobody believes it could have happened. I’ve had a lot of people look at me like I was jerking their chain or ask me if it wasn’t really a dog and I was confused.
One time I encountered a coyote at sunrise, while running. It did not look very intimidating and I though it was a stray dog, at first. When I got closer I realized what it was, but it scurried along completely disinterested in the fact that I was running towards it. I'd much rather encounter one of these again, than an unleashed pit bull with something to prove.
Dean K. has had the same "credibility questions" as people like Kilian and Wim Hof for years. There are myriad stories of him hopping on the backs of cars to shave miles, "lost GPS data" from places where there have been no reported outages, broad-spectrum verification issues in regards to his lactic acid "advantage" (re: his appearance on the History Channel during their shift to infotainment on the coattails of Stan Lee), and the typical and predictable "anyone can do this, I just want to inspire the everyman" attitude of most self-help charlatans. I mean, you look at the two main claims to fame and they're both fundamentally just watered-down versions of what people like Goggins, Eddie Gardener, and Frank Hart had been doing for a long time. I mean the transcendental thing for 3k miles in NYC had been going on for a hot minute before Dean K's early spring boarding into fame on the back of the early 2000's mini-boom of running.
The only two useful touchpoints of Dean K's "running career" are 1) the application of endurance-boosting "supplements" to a mid-life/late-life subject with prior running experience, and 2) the monetization of success from that science experimentation through prior connections within running journalism. You people put someone like this on a pedestal and it's comedy, he looks like you took a stretched-out version of ron perlman's face and put it on a 15-year-old's body - and then proceeded to just set him out in the california sun for three and a half decades uninterrupted. He's a meme within this community, and he's an adherent to the clout-chasing that seems to move needles within the broader running community (struggle overcome = success).
These experts are idiots and everyone who thinks coyotes don't attack people have no clue. Maybe that used to be the case, but urbanized coyotes are not afraid and can be very aggressive, even in broad daylight. In Vancouver, in Stanley park, 45 people were attacked in less than a year. People just walking had a coyote come up out of nowhere and nip them.
That's just Stanley park. The coyotes in all the neighboring regions of greater Vancouver have also become aggressive toward humans and you have to take them seriously. I've personally had a couple of freaky encounters with coyotes (who are bigger than you think) following me as I ran. Where I live I also have to worry about cougars and black bears, but no black bear has ever chased me (I see them all the time but they run away or ignore me). It is for sure far more likely than a coyote would attack me than a black bear. I've never had a black bear follow me for over ten minutes, that's for sure.
To be clear - I hate Dean, I mean an unnatural burning hatred. But, it is absolutely possible a urbanized coyote came up and nipped at him out of nowhere and he fell down as a result.
Vancouver officials optimistic changes in Stanley Park are bringing aggressive coyote attacks to heel | CBC News
So you think this was an urbanized coyote on vacation on the trails?
We see them frequently in the Sacto Delta. The only time any acted aggressive was when a pair of them came close and ran off—to distract us from a couple of cubs off in the bushes.
He's a person that writes about himself and his own experiences, and he's been doing it for around 20 years now. You don't stick to that kind of self-absorbed narrative for that long without developing some sort of narcissism. It'd be depressing if he hadn't done it to himself.
Why are people reluctant to believe that a coyote approached and even went after the bar? At 3 in the morning in the middle of a long run like that, it wouldn't take much to knock a person over.
Wildlife specialists are so quick to cast doubt on this assault allegation. I guess coyotes will be coyotes and we should just ignore that sometimes they can be a threat to people.
Animals are generally cowardly when hunting. They only take on a sure thing. A single coyote is just not going to attack an animal that outweighs it by 100 lbs unless it is incapacitated. The coyote can't order door dash if it gets hurt when hunting. It picks its shots carefully and it is a master of opportunity cost.
There are 45 reported attacks on humans by coyotes in one park alone in less than a year - there are many more in the neighboring municipalities. There's an entire wikipedea page that describes the number of fatal and non-fatal coyote attacks. A lot of the attacks are on adults. Yet person after person comes on here to say that they don't believe coyotes would ever attack an adult? Why do you all keep trying to deny this? Coyotes adapt and in some places they have lost their fear of humans and attack them. I'm sorry you don't want to believe this.
However, if it makes you feel better - I don't know anyone who has died of cancer, therefore cancer does not cause death. That's how truth in your world works right? Hopefully being upset about the truth about coyotes can be offset by knowing cancer no longer kills, because that's my experience which makes it universally true.
Coyote attacks are events where coyotes attack humans. While uncommon and rarely cause serious injuries, they have been increasing in frequency, especially in the state of California. Although media reports of such attacks ge...