Research and Collaborations
Collaboration: Lauren Van Patter
Lauren Van Patter, PhD, completed her doctorate at Queen's University working with The Lives of Animals Research Group. Lauren's research engages mixed methods from the social and biological sciences to investigate human-animal relations and animals in society. Her dissertation explored the context and experiences of humans and coyotes living together in urban environments. It is premised on the idea that social and ecological dynamics are inextricably linked and should be investigated holistically. Thus, interviews with residents living around urban coyotes were paired with camera trap data and field observations to explore both human and animal social and spatial dynamics. In collaborating with Coyote Watch Canada, members of the Canid Response Team were engaged as citizen scientists whose experience with public outreach and coyote management provided valuable insights into coyote-human interactions in case study communities. Overall, Lauren's approach is committed to compassionate coexistence and multispecies justice. Her research seeks to generate findings that are empirically rigorous, ethically generated, grounded in cutting edge more-than-human social theory, and hold practical value in informing compassionate human-animal relationships, policies, and practices.
CWC has collaborated on and supported a number of coyote research projects. You can read about the findings here:
Gazetas, Calliope (2014) Traces of Being: People and Coyotes in Urban and Suburban Canada. Masters thesis, OCAD University. Access here
Sampson, L., & Van Patter, L. (2020). Advancing Best Practices for aversion conditioning (humane hazing) to mitigate human-coyote conflict in urban areas. Human-Wildlife Interactions, 14(2), 166–183. Access here
Van Patter, L. & Sampson, L. (2020). Working towards human-coyote coexistence in cities. The Conversation. Access here
Van Patter, L. (2021). (Re)storying the More-than-human City: Urban Coyotes in Canada. PhD Thesis, Queen's University. Access here
Van Patter, L. (2021). Individual animal geographies for the more-than-human city: Storying synanthropy and cynanthropy with urban coyotes. Environment and Planning E: Nature & Space. DOI: 10.1177/25148486211049441. Access here
