But that isn't doable in the suburbs.  If people would only learn to keep their garbage and compost piles secure, not leave food out for Rover, and make a terrific racket any time they see a coyote, they wouldn't be so interested in back yards.  But it seems to be impossible to get people to follow that advice.

And fwiw, it's not that two 25-pound animals couldn't take an adult person down, as you say, but that they're not normally in the habit of looking at something that big as prey.  Why bother when there's so many delicious small mammals around? (They eat fruit, too, btw, I've learned.  They particularly like apples!)  It's possible that hiker inadvertently got close to a den of puppies or something that made the animals think she was a threat.  Who knows.

This fact had to be faced when re-introducing the nearly extinct Mexican gray wolf (the Lobo)to its former range in Arizona/New Mexico. The number of Mexican wolves that had not been interbred with dogs was very low. They existed only in a small captive population.

As far as anyone can tell, wolves and coyotes do not interbreed with domestic dogs.

Interspecific hybridization

Coyotes will sometimes mate with domestic dogs, usually in areas like Texas and Oklahoma, where the coyotes are plentiful and the breeding season is extended because of the warm weather. The resulting hybrids, called coydogs, maintain the coyote's predatory nature, along with the dog's lack of timidity toward humans, making them a more serious threat to livestock than pure-blooded animals. This cross-breeding has the added effect of confusing the breeding cycle. Coyotes usually breed only once a year, while coydogs will breed year-round, producing many more pups than a wild coyote. Differences in the ears and tail are generally what can be used to distinguish coydogs from domestic/feral dogs or pure coyotes.[24] Breeding experiments in Germany with poodles, coyotes, and later on with the resulting dog-coyote hybrids showed that unlike wolfdogs, coydogs show a decrease in fertility, significant communication problems as well as an increase of genetic diseases after three generations of interbreeding.[25]

Coyotes have also been known on occasion to mate with wolves, though this is less common than with dogs, due to the wolf's hostility to the coyote. The offspring, known as a coywolf, is generally intermediate in size to both parents, being larger than a pure coyote, but smaller than a pure wolf. A study showed that of 100 coyotes collected in Maine, 22 had half or more wolf ancestry, and one was 89 percent wolf. A theory has been proposed that the large eastern coyotes in Canada are actually hybrids of the smaller western coyotes and wolves that met and mated decades ago as the coyotes moved toward New England from their earlier western ranges.[20] The Red Wolf is thought by certain scientists to be in fact a wolf/coyote hybrid rather than a unique species. Strong evidence for hybridization was found through genetic testing, which showed that red wolves have only 5% of their alleles unique from either gray wolves or coyotes. Genetic distance calculations have indicated that red wolves are intermediate between coyotes and gray wolves, and that they bear great similarity to wolf/coyote hybrids in southern Quebec and Minnesota. Analyses of mitochondrial DNA showed that existing red wolf populations are predominantly coyote in origin.[26]

History

"Idiot" originally referred to "layman, person lacking professional skill", "person so mentally deficient as to be incapable of ordinary reasoning". Declining to take part in public life, such as democratic government of the polis (city state), such as the Athenian democracy, was considered dishonorable. "Idiots" were seen as having bad judgment in public and political matters. Over time, the term "idiot" shifted away from its original connotation of selfishness and came to refer to individuals with overall bad judgment-individuals who are "stupid". In modern English usage, the terms "idiot" and "idiocy" describe an extreme folly or stupidity, and its symptoms (foolish or stupid utterance or deed). In psychology, it is a historical term for the state or condition now called profound mental retardation.[1]

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