The detail that sticks is not the screaming. It is the wall.
In September 2024, Brittany Furlan, the comedian and Vine-era personality married to Mötley Crüe’s Tommy Lee, posted video of a coyote taking her English Cream Dachshund, Neena, from their own Los Angeles backyard. You can hear Furlan yelling “no, no, no.” You can hear her shouting to her husband that a coyote has Neena and that the dogs cannot be let out anymore. She climbed the wall and pulled her dog out of the animal’s mouth.
Neena survived. Furlan’s own explanation of why is the most instructive sentence in the whole story: the dog was heavy enough that the coyote could not get over the wall with her.
That is the margin. Not training, not a fence, not vigilance. A couple of pounds and a bit of masonry.
This is not a freak event
It is worth being precise about how common this actually is, because the two available narratives, “coyotes are ravening pet-killers” and “coyotes basically never bother pets,” are both wrong, and the truth is regionally specific.
Nationally, cats and dogs are a small part of what coyotes eat. Studies from Seattle to New York have put pets at under five percent of coyote diet, and in many urban systems the figure is closer to zero to two percent.
Los Angeles is the exception, and by a wide margin. A National Park Service study that examined more than 30,000 coyote scat samples across two sites over two and a half years found cat remains in 20 percent of urban coyote scat, versus four percent in suburban samples. Combined with garbage and ornamental fruit, human-associated food made up 60 to 75 percent of what urban LA coyotes were living on. In Culver City, residents reported 72 cats killed over 18 months.
So: if you live in a dense Western city with canyon edges and unsecured trash, you live somewhere coyotes have learned that the neighborhood is a food source, and small pets are part of that inventory. Furlan’s dog was not unlucky. She was on the menu.
A month earlier, a coyote had killed Nimbus, the Pomeranian belonging to the influencer Ashley Yi, which set off much the same conversation and produced much the same reaction: shock, followed by a rush to buy something.
What actually reduces the risk
The uncomfortable truth is that once a coyote has your dog, your options are terrible. Furlan got Neena back through a combination of physics and nerve, and it is not a plan anyone should count on. Everything that works, works before that moment.
Take the buffet down. Coyotes come into yards because yards feed them, directly or indirectly. Bird feeders draw rodents and rodents draw coyotes, so take them down. Collect fallen fruit. Lock the trash in closed bins. Scrub the grill and the patio where food gets dropped. And clean up after your dog, because waste left in the grass brings the rodents too. This is unglamorous and it is the single highest-leverage thing on the list.
Supervise, especially at the edges of the day. Coyotes are most active around sunrise and sunset. A small dog let out alone into a dark yard at 10 p.m. or 6 a.m. is the classic scenario. Go out with them. Turn on a light. Look before you open the door.
Assume the fence is not a barrier. Coyotes climb and jump remarkably well. A six-foot fence is a speed bump, not a wall, and a coyote carrying a nine-pound dog is a coyote who has to work considerably harder, which is precisely what saved Neena. Coyote rollers, extensions, and a fully enclosed run give you far more than height alone.
Consider a coyote vest for a small dog. These exist and they are not a gimmick.
“A coyote grabs a small dog by the nape and shakes, so armoring the nape and shoulders is aiming at the right thing,” says Dr. Ravi Mehta, DVM. “It is not full-body protection and it will not stop everything. But when I see a small dog survive one of these, it is usually because that first grab did not reach anything that mattered, and a spiked vest buys you exactly that.”
Know what to do in an encounter. Spot one on a walk and the first job is space: keep as much of it as you can. If the coyote comes closer, back away while keeping your eyes on it. Make yourself large and loud, raise your arms, stomp, shake your jacket, use an air horn, a whistle, or your phone’s alarm. Sudden noise is one of the more effective deterrents there is. Do not turn and run. Running triggers the pursuit response, and you will lose that race.
The vet part, if it happens
If your dog is bitten by a coyote, this is an emergency room visit even if the dog looks fine.
Coyote bites are puncture wounds, which means the visible damage is a fraction of the actual damage. The canine teeth go in, the jaws shake, and the tissue underneath is crushed and torn while the skin closes over it. Dogs bleed internally from bites that look like two small holes. Add a mouth full of bacteria, and you have a wound that is contaminated by definition.
So: go, even for a small dog who is walking and wagging. Go for the punctures, go for the crushing injury you cannot see, and go for the antibiotics. Ask your vet about rabies status while you are there, because a coyote bite is an exposure and your dog’s vaccine record matters.
The thing nobody wants to hear
Neena is safe. She spent the afternoon working through a box of treats while Furlan thanked people online for the concern, and it is a good ending.
But the reason there is a good ending is that a coyote could not clear a wall with an overweight Dachshund in its jaws. Furlan said as much, and she said it in the tone of a person who knows exactly how close it was.
That is not a plan. The plan is boring: bring in the food, watch the yard, go outside with the dog, and stop treating the fence as a settled question.
References
- “New Study Says Urban Coyotes Eat Garbage, Ornamental Fruit and Domestic Cats.” National Park Service, Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. nps.gov
- Larson, Rachel N., et al. “Spatiotemporal relationships of coyotes and free-ranging domestic cats as indicators of conflict in Culver City, California.” PeerJ, 2022. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- “Coyote.” Urban Coyote Research Project / Cook County, Illinois. urbancoyoteresearch.com
- “Keep Me Wild: Coyote.” California Department of Fish and Wildlife. wildlife.ca.gov
