Stoughton woman describes coyote attack: 'It had me trapped.'
STOUGHTON - Robin Totman said she had just pulled into her driveway and was about to get out of her car when a coyote attacked her.
"It was scary. There was definitely something wrong with the animal. I am not an expert, but you could tell maybe it was rabid," Totman said.
Totman's Highland Street neighborhood in Stoughton is a rural area.
"I tried to beep my horn to try, you know, to get it to go away or whatever, and really, it wouldn't go anywhere. It justhad me trapped," she said. Robin says she was stuck inside her car for about 15 minutes while the coyote went back and forth. She knew she couldn't get out of her car safely but wasn't sure what to do. "I tried to hurry up and put the window up. And the it just kept running back and forth. It ran to the door; it ran to the car; it scratched back up again," she said, adding that she called her husband and told him she was trapped in the car.
"We have seen a recent uptick this year - and in the past little over a year - of rabid coyote incidents," said Dave Wattles, a black bear and furbearer biologist for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife.
He says there's a high density of coyotes throughout the state and believes the coyote Totman encountered was rabid. "That kind of real aggression where it is kind of, it's going after, you know - whether it's her, the car, it's difficult to say - but with real fervor and aggression. That's an indication that that was a rabid animal," Wattles said.
Totman says the coyote eventually got distracted by a wild turkey and deer in her neighbors yard and chased them into the woods. "It was scary. I mean, I didn't know what to do. That was the main thing. I never encountered anything like that before," she said.
Officials say if you encounter a coyote, do everything you can to defend yourself and make lots of noise. Also, never feed them and clean up food sources around your property.
