Humans became their prey: Disquieting new theory on Canada’s only fatal coyote attack

A team of biologists believe they have solved the enduring mystery as to why a pack of Cape Breton coyotes attacked and killed a Canadian singer-songwriter in 2009.


Taylor Mitchell of Toronto died after being attacked by a pack of coyotes in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, in 2009

Story by Tristin Hopper •  National Post

After harsh conditions deprived the coyotes of their usual food sources of small mammals, the animals appear to have developed a taste for moose — which ultimately led them to begin seeing humans as food.

“They were actually killing moose when they could,” lead author Stan Gehrt, an ecologist at Ohio State University, said in a Monday statement . Once the Nova Scotia coyotes got confident that they could take down unconventional prey, it led “to conflicts with people that you wouldn’t normally see,” added Gehrt.

Taylor Mitchell, 19, was in the midst of a concert tour of the Atlantic Provinces when she was set upon by a group of coyotes during a solo hike through Cape Breton Highlands National Park.

Although nearby hikers saw the unprovoked attack and were able to summon medical help, Mitchell died of blood loss 12 hours later. The Toronto singer remains the only documented adult North American fatality from a coyote attack.

Every year yields a reliable tally of North American bear attacks, and even wolves are known to kill a human roughly every five to 10 years .

But before Mitchells death, the only documented North American case of a coyote killing someone was when a three-year-old was attacked in California in 1981.

This is despite the fact that humans live in close proximity to coyotes all across the continent, and will semi-regularly be nipped by the animals.



A coyote travels through an industrial park in Edmonton in April 2021.© Provided by National Post

But even before the Oct. 2009 attack on Mitchell, coyotes in the Cape Breton Highlands had developed a reputation for being particularly aggressive.

The park has had 32 recent examples of “coyote-human incidents,” including seven where coyotes bit people.

In 2010, another teenager would be attacked just 30 kilometres from where Mitchell had been killed. A 16-year-old girl was sleeping outside when she was awoken in the early dawn hours by a coyote biting her twice on the top of her scalp.

At the time of Mitchell’s death, wildlife experts guessed that the coyotes had become emboldened by exposure to human food and had “lost their fear” of people.

That’s usually the explanation when humans are attacked by a bear or wolf.

Parks Canada, for instance, will routinely euthanize bears that display what they call “food conditioning.” The animals get accustomed to sourcing their meals from campsites and garbage cans, which leads to potentially deadly encounters with humans.

In 2016, grey wolves began stalking and attacking workers at Saskatchewan’s Cigar Lake uranium mine. In one case, a wolf managed to get its jaws around the neck of a 26-year-old before being scared off by security.

The diagnosis in that case was “habituation”; wolves had gotten used to scrounging for human food around the mine without incident, and had decided to take their predation to the next level. “If a person gets attacked, it is likely that it is being tested by the wolf, to see if it might serve as prey,” was how conservation biologist Dennis Murray explained the behaviour of the Cigar Lake wolves to the National Post at the time.

But in the case of the Cape Breton coyotes, the Ohio State paper found that very few of them had any history of scrounging for human garbage.

“We found little evidence that anthropogenic (human) foods were an important part of coyote diets in Cape Breton Highlands National Park,” reads the paper, published in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

Rather, it appeared to be a case of wild animals choosing to eat humans even before they had gotten accustomed to eating human garbage. As the paper put it, the coyotes were able to “circumvent the habituation process altogether and view people as alternative prey.”

The paper — a joint effort by Ohio State, Parks Canada, the Nova Scotia government, and the Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation — spent months between 2011 and 2013 diligently tracking the movements and diets of Cape Breton coyotes.

This included chemical analysis of fur from five coyotes believed to have been involved in Mitchell’s death, and which were euthanized shortly afterwards by park staff.

The typical diet of a Canadian coyote is a selection of small mammals, such as squirrels, mice, snowshoe hares or even juvenile deer. But these animals were in short supply within the “extreme environmental conditions and topography” of Cape Breton Highlands National Park.

Meanwhile, those same harsh conditions were also yielding some particularly colossal snow drifts in the winter.

Moose that became trapped in these drifts likely became the first victims of the coyotes’ switch to taking down larger prey.

By the time of the Mitchell attack, Cape Breton coyotes were routinely taking down moose, which average 1,000 pounds apiece in that part of Nova Scotia. Analysis of two coyotes known to have attacked Mitchell (known as CBH-25 and CBH-26) found that they’d been mostly eating moose meat in the preceding months.

“We suggest that the unprovoked, severe attacks on people in Cape Breton Highlands National Park are at least partially the result of prey-switching by coyotes that had specialized on a very large prey species in the absence of alternative smaller prey,” the paper concluded.

Adding to the coyotes’ boldness was the fact that hunting or trapping is forbidden in the park. “Without these negative stimuli they may not view humans with the fear that typifies the coyote–human relationship elsewhere,” wrote researchers.

The research points towards the Cape Breton coyotes being members of a vanishingly small cohort of wild animals that have actively decided to treat modern humans as just another large prey animal.

When researchers tried to think of a similar example, the closest analogue they could think of was the infamous Man-Eaters of Tsavo, a pair of Kenyan lions that in 1898 hunted and killed more than 100 railway workers.