Enough.
“I have extreme dismay at your article today. Why are you supporting such an irresponsible person?”
You would think I had written completely sympathetically about, oh, a serial killer.
I never once endorsed what she was doing. And maybe it is just a function of the way my brain works, but I really liked that story.
“Oh, my God, this is ridiculous. I live in that neighborhood, and that cat was out on the street 365 days a year. I predicted many months ago it would never make it. Forget the coyotes. I am now more afraid of this crazy person walking the neighborhood with a gun at night.”
I have written perhaps way too many coyote columns, yet I had never encountered a story like Linda Whitebread’s.
Many of you know exactly who she is because my telephone is still ringing about her.
For those of you who missed it, she is a 50-year-old Centennial woman whose cat, Sebastian, was killed in June by coyotes.
A familiar story, no? It is exactly what I thought until the woman began telling me what she was doing to cope with her loss.
“Keep your cats indoors. Period. I have six, and they never go outside, and not one of them have been killed. Maybe it is just my luck.”
Whitebread, utterly heartbroken, last month began going out every night and staying out until dawn to hunt down and harass coyotes in her neighborhood.
She initially did so with night-vision binoculars and a big gun, she said, until one day she was visited by police officers, who told her pretty much to knock it off.
She put the gun away but still went out, eventually meeting up with and spending nights with other like-minded people whose cats had met the same fate.
Mostly I found it all awfully strange. And yes, I did feel for the woman who, despite what you might think, in my book is a very nice and decent person.
“Ms. Whitebread killed her own cat. The coyotes were merely the instruments of its death.”
It was the point of dozens of callers: Coyotes simply do what coyotes do. And now this crazy woman wants to kill them?
She is still at it, Whitebread says, though she now usually quits by midnight. She stopped going out for several days after the column ran, she said, having convinced herself that officers in unmarked police cars were tailing her.
She insists she knew nothing of the coyotes’ presence prior to Sebastian being killed. She has two other cats left. They now never go outside, she says.
She is hunting coyotes because no one, no agency — she called nine, she says — will do anything to manage the population.
“It will take a child being killed or disfigured before anyone will do something,” she said. “If that happened and I had turned a blind eye like everyone else, I couldn’t live with myself.”
“What will you write if a stray bullet from Whitebread’s gun kills or injures someone?”
She refuses to say whether she now takes her gun along.
“I don’t want to kill them. I love wildlife,” she says. “But no one knows how big and bad a problem it is. It’s why I had to do it.”
She says she doesn’t know how long she will keep at it. Maybe it will be when she stops seeing and hearing of pets being taken by coyotes out of their backyards or off their leashes, she says.
“People may not agree with me. That’s OK. At least I am standing up for something.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
