Hi Seal Beach,
If you’ve stopped by the Seal Beach Police Department lobby lately, you might have noticed something new on the counter—small cowbells. No, we’re not starting a marching band. These cowbells are part of our ongoing effort to help residents live safely alongside our neighborhood coyotes, and we’re giving them away for free.
So why cowbells? It all comes down to a technique called hazing. Hazing doesn’t mean harming an animal—it means scaring it in a safe way so it learns to keep its distance from people. Coyotes are naturally wary of humans, but when they lose that fear because they’re being fed or left undisturbed, that’s when we start to see problems. A sudden noise—like the clang of a cowbell—reminds them that people are not to be approached. The goal is to reinforce their natural behavior and keep that healthy boundary between coyotes and humans…