"Welcome to the future of urban living".............. "Predators are turning up in cities everywhere, and living among us mostly without incident". "A mountain lion roams the Hollywood Hills and has his own Facebook page". ..........."Coyotes have turned all of Chicago into their territory"................."Are humans equally capable of adapting?" .............Our friend and head of the Chicago Urban Coyote Study, Stan Gehrt estimates there are about 4,000 coyotes that make the "Windy City" home.....He states that "complaints have tapered off as city residents have become accustomed to their new neighbors"....... "The coyotes don’t bite or threaten people(as a rule), though they can be aggressive toward dogs".............. "But dogs in Cook County, which includes Chicago, bite about 3,000 people every year................We continue to chew up wildlife habitat, simultaneously encroaching on existing protected areas via highway building, oil and gas exploration, etc, etc.........In just the last 65 years, our human population has quadrupled from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 7 billion today to a projected 10 billion by mid 21st century..............We keep squeezing the wildlife into smaller and smaller concentric circles and one result is that some of the species are going to attempt to adapt to(or are already doing so) to the urban matrix we have put in place

Sent by rick.meril@gmail.com: click on underlined link to read article CONTRIBUTING OP-ED WRITER Bright Lights, Big Predators BY RICHARD CONNIFF Four-legged refugees now prowl  cities.  Can we adapt?