Eugene Parnell

Yeah, it's not a great photo. The cell phone's camera doesn't have a zoom.

This morning, as I was drinking my coffee and surveying the backyard from our top-floor kitchen window, wondering what needed to be done yet before spring, I caught sight of a coyote in our backyard. This is not uncommon in Seattle: coyotes are regularly spotted even downtown (a security camera once famously caught an image of a coyote trapped inside the elevator of Smith Tower), and in our wooded, fringe neighborhood of the city, near a large beach park, they are common as raccoons.

The neighbor’s golden retriever was in its yard, and it was at attention: it could smell the coyote, but not see it. The coyote popped over into our other neighbor’s yard for a moment, then circled back around, paying special attention to the blackberry thicket which grows over the fencerow in the back corner of our yard, where raccoons regularly sleep. I could see its breath steaming in the dawn light. Our crows circled overhead, making their alarm sound ( I say our crows because like most animals, they are territorial, and usually in the large fir tree in the corner of our lot).

A second coyote appeared a few moments later, as I went downstairs to summon my wife so she could have a look. Then the first re-appeared, this time with something dark and furry in its mouth. It turned out to be half of the neighbor’s cat. The front half, to be precise.

Proof that ShakeItPhoto makes anything look interesting, even a dead cat

At this point I had to leave (to take down Bigfoot is Probably Real at 4Culture, to be precise), but my wife later told me that the coyote dropped the dead cat, and then the crows decided to have a go at it. People often forget that crows eat carrion. Part of the reason people associate crows with death is their habit of snacking on dead human corpses in the wake of war or natural disaster– flocks of crows regularly followed armies from battle to battle in centuries past.

Then the coyotes returned to ward off the crows, and then got in a fight with each other over the remains of the cat. Then apparently they took off, spooked by something unseen.

My wife finds all of this a bit traumatizing, but I have been thinking about this all day. I found the remains of the cat, and photographed it, so if you live in West Seattle and are missing a black cat with at least one white paw, unfortunately we’ve found it. Clearly if we’d had a personal attachment to the cat then the even would have been extraordinarily sad for us. It still was, for my wife, who is a cat lover and a sensitive soul.

But is species-based favoritism warranted, or even fair? We exhibit the same moral judgements when we watch nature documentaries: we root for the rabbit to escape the coyote. Or at least we do, unless the coyote has been introduced to us by that voice-of-god narrator, and given a name, and we’ve seen her den full of starving pups– then of course we are rooting for her. It’s a simple cinematic convention.

But is it appropriate for us to wish death on the coyotes, to call the police to come get them, or to want to shoot them ourselves? Is there something inherent in the nature of the housecat that demands that we favor its life over that of a wild coyote? Is is its status as cherished pet of one of our neighbors? Is it its status as cute and cuddly, and ostensibly friendly, that grants it absolution from the sin of carnivory, an absolution that we can’t or won’t grant the coyote?

And really, what if cats were larger and more aggressive, and coyotes smaller and weaker, and housecats regularly killed coyotes? Would we, or should we, then feel more sympathy for the coyotes? Is overall size figured into the moral equation? Do we imagine that cats are any less vicious killers than coyotes? (Because in reality, they aren’t).

And another thing: my wife feels “uneasy in the backyard now” while I can’t wait for them to come back. I point out that there have been only two deaths attributed to coyotes in the U.S. and Canada in decades, while domestic dogs kill about a dozen people each year in the U.S. alone, and that, statistically, she has more to worry about from the neighbor’s dufus golden retriever than the coyotes. But she’s not convinced: it’s about “normality”, she says: it’s normal to have dogs around, but coyotes, not so much. Which is perfectly valid, but perhaps, then, this is an opportunity to re-examine our notions of normalcy. From another perspective, it’s completely normal to have coyotes in this ecosystem. They have been here longer than humans have: since the early Pleistocene, if not longer. They “belong” here as much as do we, if not more.

All of this is not to show callous indifference to the neighbor’s cat. I don’t have strong allegiances, or hard answers to any of these questions. But an ongoing exploration of what, exactly, drives our emotional reactions to the fauna around is precisely at the heart of my art practice.