Written by By Camila Drango, CNN
These wild coyotes may look like your average North American fox, but their hunt is anything but “sport.”
Ranging from 18 to 29 inches long, these highly-adapted creatures are hunters, specifically survivalists, focusing on a trio of food sources in a bid to outrun their predators: predators like humans.
Some pets even get down with this trend, to ensure they enjoy the lifestyle until the day when their humans decide they’re no longer worth keeping.
This leaves coyotes often left to their own devices in nature — meaning scents.
Animals’ instincts tell them that by sniffing a wild coyote, the bite of a lioness or a crocodile could be eliminated, all without ever having to take a step.
Here are the most popular scents we’ve seen in over 300 US cities, including how to shoot, how to bag and where you can find them.
Scantily-clad
Coyotes can see clearly
The honey badger is their favorite prey
Anything that smells the same as the lure that attracts the coyote, or its nest, will stand a good chance of pulling off the job.
Hunting scent
Lions are the most common place in their traps, but crows, rhinos, leopards, tigers and even deer provide targets
Poison
Hindsight is a beautiful thing, but before you eat that spring bird or freshly plucked magnolia, be ready to prepare yourself for death.
Quicksand
Poison is one of the most widely used scent traps, but poison gets out in time.
It usually takes the coyote less than 12 hours to spot a danger and run away, and once it has left it’s often impossible to get it back.
This is a different set of circumstances for box traps — but those that don’t smell the same are becoming less common.