Coyotes have expanded into urban and suburban environments across North America, creating welfare challenges from human-wildlife conflict, road mortality, and mange disease.
Urban coyote welfare involves a distinctive conflict: the behavioral adaptations that allow coyotes to thrive in cities — reduced fear of humans, learned food-finding in human-modified landscapes — simultaneously put them at risk of lethal management when those adaptations cross habituation thresholds. A coyote that has learned to eat garbage and approach people is on a trajectory toward being killed for the behavior that its urban environment taught it. Secondary poisoning from rodenticides causes chronic internal hemorrhage in individual coyotes — a prolonged welfare harm that affects entire urban populations. Mange in urban coyotes causes intense suffering that can be treated in individuals through veterinary intervention when animals are accessible. The welfare-centered approach to urban coyote management is prevention: removing food attractants before habituation develops, hazing bold animals early, and eliminating rodenticide use.