Arizona Mom Fights Off Coyote Attacking Her Daughter

A mom in Arizona was recently flying a kite with her 4-year-old daughter when the afternoon took a frightening turn. During their playful outing, a coyote began to approach and nip at her daughter, prompting the mother, Brittany Cardinal, to take action.

“We had gone outside because it was windy, and my daughter said, ‘Oh, let’s fly a kite,'” Cardinal recounted. It seemed like a fun, typical Sunday. But then, chaos ensued when Cardinal heard her daughter scream, and suddenly, the coyote was after the little girl.

In a panic, she scooped up her daughter and shouted at the coyote, expecting it to flee. When it didn’t, she took off her flip-flop and attempted to scare the animal away by swinging it.

As she struggled to get the coyote to back off, Cardinal ended up falling, and the animal bit her on the face. “I always hear people say, ‘You don’t feel the pain when trauma like that happens,’ and I have to say, I didn’t really feel much pain,” she noted. “I could just feel the pressure.” It’s a bit surreal, right? A moment that could be so harrowing and yet… the mind deals with it differently.

Eventually, both mom and daughter managed to escape the aggressive coyote and return home, although Cardinal sustained lacerations and puncture wounds from the bite.

In the wake of the incident, Arizona Game and Fish officials removed several coyotes from the area and are currently testing them for rabies. Fortunately, they acknowledged that Cardinal handled the situation appropriately by fighting back. She definitely did what she could, even if getting bitten wasn’t part of the plan. As Alex Flickinger from Arizona Game and Fish put it, “You fight back, you yell at the animal, be loud with it, throw rocks, whatever you have to do to get that animal to just run off.” It’s just that, well, sometimes these kinds of things can happen in the heat of the moment.