Canadian Jogger, Police Can't Tell Difference Between Real Coyotes and Cardboard

I worry about the safety of Canadian citizens. It seems you can't jog in some Canadian towns without being attacked by cardboard coyotes.

Last summer, the city of Sarnia, Ontario (across the border from Port Huron, Mich.) put up two cardboard cutouts of a coyote as a way to scare off Canada geese in a park.

They were gone a few weeks later.

"We just figured vandals took them," Tery McCallum, director of community services told The (Kitchener) Record this week. "You can't put up any really fancy signs in the park because they usually disappear." (Or are attacked by much larger packing material animals.)

But it wasn't vandals. Turns out it was their brothers and sisters in bureaucracy, the Sarnia Police Department.

Apparently, a jogger was running through the park one morning, and was startled by the cutouts. So she ran to a nearby construction site, failing to notice the two-dimensional coyotes had not followed. She told one of the construction workers the coyote had "barked" at her.

(Is she sure it wasn't one of the construction workers whistling at her?)

According to the story in The Record, the worker called the police, who arrived on the scene and surrounded the coyote, resulting in a three hour standoff.

Not really. They realized the coyotes were made of cardboard, and not knowing they had been installed as scarecrows (or is that scaregeese?), read the coyotes their rights and took them off to a cardboard zoo.

Police are now undergoing extensive training to deal with Sarnia's newest threat, polystyrene bears.

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