Massachusetts officer shoots pet husky mistaken for coyote; owner disputes necessity

On the afternoon of November 19th, a police dispatcher in Northbridge, Massachusetts received a call about a coyote in someone's residential backyard. An animal control officer, a veteran with years of experience tracking wildlife in the area, responded to the report. He entered the woods behind the property, searching for the animal. When he spotted what he believed to be a coyote in what he assessed as a threatening stance, he fired. Only after the shooting did he examine the animal more closely and realize his mistake: the creature at his feet was not a coyote at all, but a pet dog wearing a flea collar.

The dog was a husky named Odin, not yet a year old, belonging to Kirk Rumford of Northbridge. When police located Rumford to inform him of what had happened, the owner's shock turned to anger. He believed the shooting was unnecessary and that non-lethal methods could have been deployed instead. More than that, Rumford disputed the officer's judgment entirely. A coyote and his husky, he argued, looked nothing alike. "My dog would have been the most gorgeous coyote ever, on steroids," Rumford said. "It's huge compared to that. My dog was beautiful. He looked like a wolf if anything, and there are no wolves in Massachusetts."

Rumford described Odin as a "knucklehead" and a "loveable klutz"—a dog with a gentle temperament who loved playing with other animals. The loss has drawn sympathy from his community, and Rumford has said he hopes the incident will push authorities to reconsider their protocols and prevent similar tragedies.

Police Chief Timothy Labrie, however, defended the officer's actions. He said it was reasonable for the animal control officer to mistake the dog for a coyote given the circumstances and the officer's experience. The department will not discipline the officer. Labrie instead shifted responsibility toward pet owners, urging them to keep dogs secured in fenced yards, to supervise them closely, and to attach identifying markers if their animals tend to roam into wooded areas. "We do have leash laws," Labrie said. "At the end of the day if you can keep your fenced-in areas secure, keep an eye on your dog, do whatever methods that you can use to keep your dog in your yard."

The shooting occurred against a backdrop of rising coyote activity across Massachusetts and much of the country. Northbridge, a town of roughly 16,000 people about 43 miles west of Boston, has experienced what Labrie described as "a little bit of an uptick in coyote calls" in recent years. The cause remains unclear. One nearby town, Nahant, made headlines by becoming the first municipality in Massachusetts to contract with the federal government to actively kill coyotes after residents reported the animals had killed pets and posed what they considered a dangerous nuisance.

Scientists have noted that coyotes in Eastern states appear to be developing increasingly wolf-like characteristics as they have moved into ecological niches near the top of the food chain. They are also notoriously difficult to control. A study published this month in the journal Ecography, led by Remington Moll, an assistant professor of natural resources at the University of New Hampshire, suggested that intensive hunting of coyotes may not reduce their populations and could actually increase them. "Intensive coyote removal can obviously reduce populations in the short-term, but removal can also result in younger coyote populations with higher reproduction and immigration rates," Moll said. The research points to a paradox: the more aggressively communities pursue coyote removal, the more they may inadvertently encourage population growth through accelerated breeding and migration patterns.