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EDITORIAL: When it comes to wildlife, we can only do so much to help

Residents of the South Surrey neighbourhood at 24 Avenue and 141 Street did all they could to aid three coyote pups

Mother Nature can be many things – magnificent, beautiful and inspiring among them.

But, as anyone who has spent any time in wilderness areas can tell us, she can also seem very cruel – at least from a soft-hearted human perspective. Survival of the fittest is the hard, unyielding law of the wild, no matter how much we would wish it otherwise.

Residents of the South Surrey neighbourhood at 24 Avenue and 141 Street – concerned this week about the fate of three emaciated coyote pups seen wandering for days near the roadway – showed all the commendable empathy humans can sometimes muster for our fellow creatures.

Like them, we can all feel sad that two of the pups had to be euthanized after being captured and taken to Critter Care wildlife rescue agency, and that survival chances for the third are slim.

But this is a case with no good outcome and no easy answers – further evidence of the complicated, out-of-sync relationship between suburban humans and the wildlife we find on our doorsteps.

If the pups had been orphaned by the actions of man – as the recent death of a whale on White Rock beach could be traced to its long struggles with an entangled fishing line –  we might at least have found some emotional release in blaming the encroachment of so-called civilization.

Yet it appears these coyote pups were not orphaned but simply neglected by the adult female – presumably the mother – spotted with them on several occasions.

The female showed no inclination to mother the pups, and that, in nature, was a virtual guarantee they would perish.

In the wild, nature would have taken its course without any of us being the wiser.

Could the adult coyote’s indifference in some way be an indirect result of human disturbance of nature? We will likely never know.

But it’s equally sure we could not have done much to help them. Feeding coyotes – which some felt, understandably, compelled to do in this case – is actually illegal. BC Ministry of Environment guidelines note that providing food to them, either directly or by not sufficiently securing garbage, compost or pet food, can only lead to troublesome interaction later on.

We must remember that coyotes are also predators by nature. Had these pups survived, would it have been only to be seen as an undesirable menace by well-meaning humans, once our domestic pets started becoming their prey?