What they say: Removing coyotes is proven not to work.

What's true: Indiscriminate regional culling has a poor record. We're not asking for a cull across the GTHA.

Toronto removed two specific animals in Liberty Village in early May 2025 and the attacks stopped. That's targeted removal of identified habituated individuals — a different intervention with different evidence.

A peer-reviewed paper published this July puts numbers to it. Between November 2024 and May 2025 the City logged at least 335 incidents, including 106 involving menacing or stalking, 43 attacks, 2 dog deaths and 2 human attacks. Two coyotes were euthanized in early May. Aggressive encounters ceased immediately, the two remaining animals were no longer seen, and neither the City's 311 data nor the community reporting system recorded a single incident after the first week of May.

On "new ones will just move in": The expert panel used this argument. The paper's authors say it misses the point — the goal is removing specific problem animals, not lowering the population. Coyotes that move into a vacated territory shouldn't cause problems if the cause of habituation, access to human food, has been dealt with. Claims that removal triggers compensatory breeding or a surge of newcomers aren't supported when the removal is targeted at problem individuals.

The question they won't answer: If targeted removal doesn't work, why did the City do it, and why did it work?

Source: Murray, Foucault & Patton (2026), Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 14:1885888 — https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2026.1885888