‘It just had me trapped’: Stoughton woman says coyote tried to attack her in her yard

Local News

Robin Totman said she was stuck in her car for 15 minutes as the coyote tried to get at her.

A Stoughton woman is sharing her experience after she says a coyote tried to attack her in her yard earlier this month. 

Robin Totman posted about the incident on Facebook on October 3 warning fellow residents of the Highland Street area. 

“He was jumping up on my car trying to get in,” she wrote. “I was stuck in my car for 15 minutes unable to get out until a deer in the woods caught his attention.”

Totman told WBZ she’d just pulled into her driveway and was about to get out of the vehicle when the coyote tried to get at her.

“I tried to beep my horn to try, you know, to get it to go away or whatever, and really, it wouldn’t go anywhere. It just had me trapped,” she told the station. “I tried to hurry up and put the window up. And it just kept running back and forth. It ran to the door; it ran to the car; it scratched back up again.” 

Totman said she called her husband and told him she was trapped in her car, according to WBZ. She said the coyote ran after a wild turkey and deer in the neighbor’s yard, chasing them into the woods. 

“It was scary. I mean, I didn’t know what to do. That was the main thing. I never encountered anything like that before,” she said.

Totman told the Brockton Enterprise that she and her family have decided to carry pepper spray after the incident. 

MassWildlife‘s black bear and furbearer biologist Dave Wattles told WBZ he believes Totman had an encounter with a coyote that was rabid. 

“That kind of real aggression where it is kind of, it’s going after, you know – whether it’s her,  the car, it’s difficult to say – but with real fervor and aggression. That’s an indication that that was a rabid animal,” he told the station. 

He said there’s been an uptick in the last year or so in reports of rabid coyote incidents.

He told the Enterprise that Stoughton Animal Control hadn’t received any other reports of a coyote attacking residents in the area.

“Fortunately, if this animal was rabid, rabies is relatively fast acting,” Wattles told the newspaper. “By now, the animal would have already died.”

Massachusetts officials say if you encounter a coyote in your backyard or neighborhood, to reinforce the animal’s natural fear of humans by making loud noises, spraying it with a hose, or tossing small objects near it, and physically chasing it away. 

“The goal is to scare the animal away, not hurt it,” MassWildLife states on its website. “Children should calmly leave the area (do not run) and find an adult to haze the coyote. Never attempt to touch, tame, or feed a wild animal.