A Coyote's Life

A friend sent me a website called Daily Coyote. Wyoming is a long way from Florida and a coyote will never be a dog, but this one was rescued as a 10 day old pup and the photos on the site are so beautiful, I wanted to share it with you. Shreve Stockton, the woman who took Charlie in has kept a daily photo journal of his life, which she posts on her blog. I don't agree with domesticating a wild animal, but after reading the back history on this story, I think I would have been tempted to follow her path. The pup was brought to her door by someone who said both parents had been killed by a rancher. She intended to let the coyote go if he seemed destined for the wild, but he adapted readily to her life and when she thought about the coyotes being killed in her area by ranchers and the mass slaughter resulting from overhead hunts in planes and helicopters, she couldn't turn him loose.

Charlie's caretaker is benefiting from his existence by selling photos and t-shirts and ads on her site. She has a book coming out in November called Daily Coyote. She was accused by an anonymous reader of pimping the coyote. She posted that response and put it on a t-shirt. Before you peg her an opportunist, read the Q&A section on her blog to get a sense of how devoted she is to Charlie and think about how hard it is to make a living as a writer, which is her profession. If you visit her site, click on the September archives to look at the early photos of Charlie as a pup. They're worth the extra time.