Woman Accidentally Drives 20 Minutes With Coyote Stuck To Car
She knew JUST what to do when she found him 🙌💗
Last week, Georgie Knox’s morning commute was disturbed in one of the worst ways possible. In the early hours of September 3, a coyote darted in front of her car and she didn’t have time to swerve.
“I heard a crunch and believed I ran over and killed it,” Knox wrote in a Facebook post. “Upon stopping at a traffic light by my work, a construction woman notified me that there was, in fact, a coyote still embedded in my car.”
Knox immediately got out of her car, and couldn’t believe what she saw. Not only was an adult coyote trapped in her car’s grille — but he was alive. “This poor little guy was looking up and blinking at me,” Knox explained in her post.
The coyote had likely been lodged in the grille for 20 to 25 minutes, hitching a ride as Knox drove from her home in Airdrie, Canada, to Calgary at highway speeds. Luckily, the conscientious motorist knew exactly what she needed to do to save the helpless animal.
Knox called the Alberta Fish and Wildlife Department, and in a matter of minutes a responding officer was on the scene, along with the Calgary police as backup. “The officer has been involved in many rescues over the years, but this is the first time he’d seen a coyote stuck into a car like that,” Brendan Cox, public affairs officer with Alberta Fish and Wildlife, told The Dodo.
The officer was quickly able to extract the coyote by pushing in the plastic grille and pulling him out of the front of the vehicle. After a careful assessment, the officer concluded that, unlike Knox’s car, the coyote was unharmed.
With no signs of injury or disease detected, the coyote was released back into the same approximate area from which he came — but, this time, away from traffic. Knox’s Facebook post detailing the amazing rescue has quickly gone viral, with nearly 400,000 likes and 200,000 shares in just four days.
How the coyote managed to survive the collision is still a mystery. “It must have just been a perfect storm of all the factors involved,” Cox said. “The car being low enough, and the grille being big and soft enough that the coyote could get scooped up instead of having a more serious impact.”
Knox, however, has another idea why the coyote was spared. “Clearly Mother Nature has other plans for this special little guy!”