The Women Who Get Eaten by Coyotes

The pathology of empathy for predators

In 2009, Taylor Mitchell, a 19-year-old woman, went hiking in a Canadian park on a public trail and was attacked by coyotes. Some hikers heard her screams as she was assaulted for half an hour, but did nothing to help, when rescue finally arrived, she was conscious and bleeding badly.

The young woman was airlifted to the hospital, but did not survive.

Under pressure from environmentalists, Canada, like parts of the United States, had allowed coyotes and wolves to expand their territories, especially the coyote-wolf hybrids who had killed Taylor, and the animals had become increasingly aggressive, wiping out their natural prey, and eventually stalking and attacking humans. The attack on the young woman was one of a series.

Taylor’s mother however pleaded with the authorities to spare the coyotes who had killed her daughter. “When the decision had been made to kill the pack of coyotes, I clearly heard Taylor’s voice say, ‘Please don’t, this is their space.’ She wouldn’t have wanted their demise, especially as a result of her own,” she wrote. “She was passionate about animals, was an environmentalist.”

“We really have a lot of sympathy for her perspective,” a Parks Canada field superintendent replied.

In partnership with the David Suzuki Foundation, Taylor’s mother, whose daughter was an aspiring folk singer, created a legacy trust to help educate the public about “the delicate balance between human and wildlife interaction”. The Suzuki Foundation currently advocates against culling wolves and coyotes in Canada despite multiple animal attacks on people and children.

An entry on the Facebook page for the Taylor Mitchell Trust called for protecting wolves. A repost from the Wolf Conservation Center claimed that “thousands of species are scrambling to survive against a sole enemy: humans.”

An earlier coyote attack in Los Angeles however showed the true cruelty of environmentalists when Kelly Keen, a 3-year-old girl, was dragged out of her home in Glendale by a coyote and killed. Since the killing of the little girl proved inconvenient to the animal rights cause and her mother was much less pliable than Taylor’s mother, and supported culling coyotes, animal rights activists took to spreading conspiracy theories blaming her death on her parents.

The matter came to a head at a Glendale City Council meeting when a former child actress turned activist associated with the domestic terrorist group Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), which targeted animal testing research by bombing homes and cars, claimed that the coyote was innocent and blamed the child’s killing on her parents. The Candace Owens-style stunt alienated many people, but showed the depths that animal rights activists were sinking to.

“Never in the 500-year history of the United States, before 1981 or since, anywhere, anytime, has another coyote killed a human being. How can any reasonable person believe that nearly a quarter of a century ago, a coyote for the first time EVER IN HISTORY comes into Glendale and kills a human child? Why has it never happened again? I think you are silly for believing such a far-fetched tale, and can only continue to marvel at the vehemence with which I have been attacked for exposing the fallacy of this story,” the child actress activist argued in a Los Angeles Times letter, and sneered, “My lawyers are standing by to make a spectacle of the issue if that is what the Keens prefer.”

Prior to the letter, there had been multiple coyote attacks on small children in California, including an attempt to drag away a 3-year-old boy in Palo Alto, a coyote who ripped into a 4-year-old girl’s face in Lake Tahoe, and an attack on a school playground in San Clemente.

In 2018, a coyote attacked a 3-year-old boy in a suburban New York playground. An off-duty police officer “jumped on top of it, clutched its neck and slammed its head on the ground.”

Earlier this year, a 4-year-old boy was attacked in another part of Southern California in his own driveway, much as Kelly had been, but his mother managed to chase the coyote away. That same coyote had previously attacked another little boy. Earlier this month, a coyote attacked a 2-year-old boy at a playground in Canada, mauling his face: weeks after another coyote had attacked another child. Animal rights activists continue to deflect or to blame the parents.

The stories about the coyotes who try to attack and eat women and children, and the women who furiously defend them, is about more than animals or environmentalists, it’s the story of how pathological empathy buttressed by ideology can be used to defend perpetrators even when, unlike criminals or terrorists, they can’t make their own case.

Pathological empathy can be shaped by enemy propaganda, as we have seen after 9/11 and Oct 7, but exists within the pathological mind that chooses to empathize with killers over victims.

The ‘women who run with wolves’, the title of a bestselling 90s book, sometimes get eaten by wolves, and sometimes, like the women who find other girls as prey for cults, predators and pimps, who love and champion Luigi Mangione, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Andrew Tate, who marry Muslim men, join ISIS, and keep sex slaves for them, fight to protect the wolves.

There are women who protect children from wolves because they love children more than wolves and those who protect the wolves that eat children because they love wolves more than children. Some part of them empathizes more with the wolf stalking the child than the child being dragged away by a wolf. Understanding that gets at the heart of the political pathology.

The problem is not that liberals feel too much, that they’re ‘bleeding hearts’, in the old cliche, it’s that leading figures who claim to be liberals malignantly identify with destructive forces and disguise that malice, even from themselves, as empathy and compassion, channeling their darker instincts into activism, while coldly dismissing the pain of victims like the children.

Acting as useful idiots alongside them are liberals who are ‘bleeding hearts’, whose empathy does not operate in an ordered moral hierarchy, but in the disordered oppressed-oppressor paradigms of Marxism which is designed to make predators seem like the victims, and whatever established order that exists, whether it’s America, Western Civilization or the human race, seem like an oppressive order that must be overturned to bring forth a better world.

Coyotes, unlike Islamic terrorists or serial killers, are neither good nor evil: they’re animals. But like terrorists and serial killers, given signs of human weakness, they will treat us as prey.

And when it comes to a physically superior group, moral weakness is the greatest weakness. A people physically incapable of protecting their children can still struggle to survive through sheer persistence, but a people who are morally incapable of protecting their children are doomed.

Civilization at its most basic is a choice between the wolves and our children. From the packed Planned Parenthood clinics and rallies for criminals, terrorists and for the environment, the wolves are winning.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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Read my book ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left’ to discover the true origins of the American Left.