2-year-old in critical condition after coyote attack in Dallas
A 2-year-old child is hospitalized in critical condition after a coyote attack in Dallas, local police said Tuesday. The attack comes less than a week after a young girl was attacked by a coyote in California.
The Dallas Police Department told CBS News that officers responded at 8:28 a.m. on Tuesday to a report of an animal attack. They found that a 2-year-old child, who had been sitting on a front porch, had been attacked by a coyote.
Police said an officer then located the coyote and began firing at it. The animal retreated into the woods, and it's not yet clear if it was struck. Police said local officials are "actively searching" for the coyote, but warned residents nearby to "consider this animal extremely dangerous."
The news of the new coyote attack comes just hours after California officials said they had located and killed a coyote that attacked a young girl near the Huntington Beach Pier last Thursday. According to The Associated Press, the coyote "came out of nowhere" and attacked the girl after she had wandered just a few feet away from her mother, leaving her hospitalized with non-life threatening bites to her head and face.
"There was, like, a coyote right around here, we saw it, and then all of the sudden it went in by this, like, family," witness Garie Joncon told CBS Los Angeles. "And there was, like, a kid on the ground. And then, like five minutes later, we walked back, whole crowd around a baby. Baby evidently got, like, bit, and there was just blood all over its face."
According to the Humane Society, coyote attacks on humans are very rare. The Humane Society said there are only two recorded instances in the U.S. and Canada of humans being killed by coyotes: a child in Southern California in the 1980s and a 19-year old woman in Nova Scotia in 2009.