Early Wednesday morning the circle of life came calling on my street in the form of three hungry coyotes. The trio caught and quickly killed my pudgy cat Chuy, who liked to prowl around the yard right before dawn menacing grasshoppers and beetles. He was a big boy-- 15 pounds of tough tom -- but as he was getting older it was turning to flab. It all happened quickly, and for that I'm grateful.

All I found in the morning was a lot of Chuy fur and a wide arch of bright red arterial blood splashes. It turned out the whole scene was witnessed by my neighbor as the attack occured right outside his bedroom window. Chuy was born a feral cat, and died like one. It was certainy a more noble death that being posioned by tainted kibble.

It had been a while since I've seen a coyote on my street just a few blocks from Elysian Park. And I had relaxed my vigilance with Chuy. Plus, I reasoned that early morning was safest since there were virtually no cars to run him over. I now know that I might not see them, but coyotes are pretty frequent visitors to Echo Park and other L.A. neighborhoods, and that they generally hunt in the predawn hours.

I don't blame the coyotes, as they were doing what they do. Besides Chuy was surely a tasty treat. If I was a coyote I'd want to eat him too. But it did make me do some thinking about life and death and the existence of animals both wild and "tamed" in the city. I may have anthropomorphized the crazy, twitchy shoe-eating special needs cat, but I knew that he was never truly tamed and was only happy when he had total freedom of indoors and outdoors. And I knew his need to spend the early morning hours outside would likely mean his end one day.

The point of all of this is that it's good to remember that while we live in an enormous metropolis characterized by miles of concrete, we co-existence with many wild animals _ whether we know it or not. In my Echo Park neighborhood I have regular visits from a family of racoons (one of whom came in through the pet door to snack on some kibble last weekend), skunks, possums, snakes, lizards, rats, squirrel, hummingbirds, mockingbirds, owls, foxes, hawks, deer and coyotes. They live in our shadows, hunt (sometimes our pets) by night, and burrow away in dens hidden in vegetation. That they live in such vast numbers in this urban sprawl is both sublime and mundane. This is survival. This is what nature does.

And experts say that this hot dry summer could make it all the more dangerous for pets.

I'd like to think that if I had known coyotes were prowling I would have kept Chuy inside. But it's unlikely. I tried locking him inside from time to time and he was miserable. In the end I decided that quality of life, with as much protection as one could give a pet, was preferably to mere quantity. And in his short little life, Chuy lived more fully than most of us will in all our decades.

Chuy
July 15, 2003 - April 25, 2007
RIP. I sure miss you.