Samantha’s Reviews > Coyote: Seeking the Hunter in Our Midst – A Graceful Ecological Memoir of an Intelligent Species > Status Update

Regarding her pet cat: "She smacks at a wall, she follows a sound with her eyes, she leaps about in frustration. Then she freezes; she flattens; she pees on the floor."

I'm glad I can cross off cat pee on my scavenger hunt of waste products in this book.

"Had I more time, I could probably learn to distinguish between the different deer in the field...But if I knew each one by sight, my affections would become more complicated, as would my ability to race at them, yelling."
Oh, so knowing more about them would actually make you care about being a decent human towards nature? Wow, who would have thought? And you DON'T want to do that? Bad naturalist at work here.

"I say, Bring on the coyotes. But don't make them feel too welcome. And don't leave out food for them--no mouse bodies, no young cats left out overnight--or the experiment will backfire, and they'll settle into the easier life, feeding off us instead."

I appreciate the acknowledgement not to feed wildlife, but you literally just did that a few chapters back and haven't said you shouldn't have directly. Bad tone too

I'm glad she's noticing the hypocrisy of her thoughts now. Maybe there's hope for her yet.

Also, in keeping with the update theme, on deer: "I'll even line the perimeter with a stream of my own pee before I'll call in a hunter to shoot them."

This episode with the cat...I could see it was a potential disaster laced with negligence. She got lucky that the cat was just hunting and not being hunted. The unawareness of birds around her, as a naturalist who supposedly knows a lot, staggers me. I'm convinced she actually knows very little about many animals, compared to what she's trying to convey in this book.

"We stand overlooking a lake where otters have traveled, their fishy-smelling scat on the small peninsula very near us."

Just more scat. Nothing new to see here.

More fascination with animal babies than human babies, but you criticized your students about reacting more to animal death than human death?
Also, "Yet I suspect that it's something far more primitive, some subconscious belief in having the power to create reality, that my desire to see a coyote has somehow brought them this close." So...an illusion of control? When you previously said humans don't control nature?

So a puppy she traveled with had one bout of aggressive behavior shown, mildly, as a warning...and THAT is the memory she best has of it? Other memories that are positive are lightly discussed, but aren't the focus. So she is attracted to aggression? And reading literature (even Jack London's) does not make you an expert on dog handling. It really doesn't.

"An expert tracker might walk these same woods and sniff out scent posts and piss patches and know who territory she's on or what animal has recently passed by. Occasionally I've picked out the rancid odor of raccoon or the acrid pee of cats. But for the most part, the naming of smells eludes me."
So we know that you aren't 100% the scat whisperer now. Good to know.

"Coyote scat, in three discrete piles, snaps me out of my thinking as fast as though I'd heard the animal howl...I don't need calipers to confirm the source, though a more serious tracker might whip them out...I'm careful, and this time I bring none of the evidence home."
Wait...are you referring to the bones you usually find in it or...do you take scat home with you? This section is unclear on that and I'm perturbed