He’s a trickster, all right

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

An animal column for the second week in a row. Sorry about that. At least I’m not writing about how much weight I’ve lost and how good-looking I’ve become.

Last Wednesday morning, probably about 4:45 a.m., I was sitting on my love seat, which is in front of a coffee table next to the big picture window in my living room. It’s my love seat because I’m basically the only human who sits here. My dog’s bed occupies half the seat. Alice is the dog I refered to last week when I mentioned that my dog don’t hunt (and yes, as of this writing, the bunny still occupies the space under The Hamptons, although a friend loaned me his pellet gun, and eventually, if I throw enough lead at him, the bunny is going to get irritated and move back across the street to the undeveloped canyon. Also, I finally found mothballs at K-Mart—that should inspire a relocation.

Really, the only reason I sit on this love seat is so I can set my laptop on the coffee table when it’s not on my lap. At any rate, I was sitting right here, as I am now, probably typing up the editor’s note about the bunny, when I looked out and saw a coyote ambulating up the middle of the street. I live in the Old Southwest, inside the McCarran loop, and I do have that canyon across the street, but I have never seen a coyote cruising up the street before. Once, at a similar hour, I saw a huge raccoon walking down the sidewalk.

None of this is here or there, but I was thinking about what Nancy Strickland said in 15 Minutes last week. That the bunnies are eating things they don’t usually eat because of the drought. If she’s right about that, I wonder if the reason I saw a coyote where I’ve never seen one is because coyotes are following the bunnies into new areas because of the winter’s drought.

There are two things about this line of thinking that are probably worthy of note. First, I would gladly pass along one bunny to a hungry coyote. Second, don’t coyotes hunt dogs that don’t hunt?