05/27/2026
Be helpful! Don't do harm
🚯 Your Handouts Are Harmful Not Helpful!
Why feeding wild canids and other animals is a bad idea:
⚠️ Most anthropogenic (human-provided) food is just not good for wildlife. Their nutritional needs are not the same as our domestic pets or us. The health of wildlife is connected to the land, water, flora, and fauna in their world.
🐺 Coyotes need to forage and hunt for their sustenance and not rely on human handouts. Feeding any wildlife increases their proximity tolerance to people and high-activity areas such as parks, parking lots, cemeteries, backyards, and trails.
🚮 Feeding wildlife puts them at an increased risk of encountering people, pets, and unsafe situations. Their natural wariness is impacted by food rewards. Community members are also put in situations that they never expected or initiated. Like this true, lived experience at a mall in the parking lot - a shopper was approached by a coyote while in the middle of loading groceries. When a canid approaches your personal space while recreating outdoors, the coyote has likely been given a hand-out.
🫴 Feeding is essentially, and literally "killing wildlife" with misguided/deliberate intentions. More often than not, communities that have unresolved human-wildlife conflict that results in a bite or physical interaction between a person and a coyote, or other wildlife - started with people feeding or baiting to bring an animal closer. Far too frequently, wildlife pays with their lives.
🚯 Please do not feed wildlife. Their lives depend on our restraint and respect.
Please circulate this vital message.
Photo copyright Coyote Watch Canada
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