The Seven-Pound Chihuahua Who Chased a Coyote

Her name is Lola. She weighs seven pounds, which I have personally verified on a postal scale, twice, because I did not believe her file the first time. Last Tuesday, while her owner was inside making chicken piccata, Lola noticed a coyote in her backyard. The coyote was, by visual estimate, ninety percent larger than Lola. The coyote did not stay long.

This is the story of how a small dog became, in a span of approximately twelve minutes, a local civic institution.

The Twelve Minutes That Made Lola a Legend

Lola lives with the Howard family in a cul-de-sac I am not allowed to name, because the Howards have been receiving casseroles at a rate they describe as "frankly unsustainable." She is a long-coated chihuahua, tan and white, with the small fixed expression of someone who has seen a lot. She is six years old. She has opinions.

On the evening in question, Mrs. Howard left the back door open while she did things to a chicken. The yard is fenced. The fence is six feet of cedar. The coyote did not know that the fence was six feet of cedar, or did not care, because the coyote came in over a corner where a planter had been pushed up against the boards. (The Howards have since moved the planter. They have also written the planter a small apology.)

What happened next has been reconstructed from the testimony of Mr. Howard, who saw it through a kitchen window with a wooden spoon in his hand. Lola, sitting on the deck, registered the coyote. She did not bark first and ask questions later. She skipped the asking entirely. She launched off the deck at what witnesses describe as "a small light brown blur," crossed thirty feet of lawn in a number of strides nobody bothered to count, and met the coyote in the middle of the yard.

The coyote, for a long moment, did the math. (I have done the math myself. The math does not favor Lola. Coyotes weigh between twenty and forty pounds and have, by training and biology, the entire predator skill tree unlocked. Lola has a pink harness with a small bow on it.) Then the coyote turned, ran, and jumped the fence in a single motion that Mr. Howard described as "genuinely athletic." Lola pursued to the fence line, where the planter had been, and barked at the spot the coyote had vacated for ten more minutes. Possibly eleven. Mr. Howard stopped checking.

There is a particular sound that a chihuahua makes when she has decided that something is over. It is not a triumphant sound. It is the sound of a small dog who has just remembered there might be more coyotes.

The Howards took Lola to the vet the next morning. The vet, a Dr. Patel, performed a thorough examination and found nothing at all. No injuries, no torn anything, no abrasions. "She didn't actually fight the coyote," Dr. Patel said. "She just told it to leave." He charged them eighty-seven dollars. They paid it gladly.

Why the Cascade of Stories Followed

By Wednesday morning the story was on the neighborhood's group chat. By Wednesday evening it was on a Facebook page called "Westwood Hills (real residents only)." By Thursday somebody named Karen had made a sign on cardboard that read PROTECTED BY LOLA in marker, and taped it to her own fence, two doors down from the Howards. By Friday there were fourteen of these signs. By the weekend, including a particularly elaborate one rendered in cross-stitch, the count had passed thirty. The cross-stitch one was framed.

What I did not expect, and which has been the most interesting part of the whole episode, is the cascade of stories that followed. A retired schoolteacher on Larkin Street told me, unprompted, that her chihuahua Geraldo has chased a hawk off her birdbath three separate times, twice while wearing a sweater. A man at the hardware store volunteered that his chihuahua, Captain Steve, once treed a UPS driver. A real estate agent reported that her chihuahua Honey has "a long-running feud" with a particular squirrel and has been keeping notes. (I did not ask to see the notes. I should have.)

Veterinarians and breed historians will tell you, if you let them, that the chihuahua personality is not actually small. The breed descends from the Techichi, a companion dog kept by the Toltec and later the Aztec, who survived in the high deserts of central Mexico by being more fierce than they had any right to be. Eight thousand years of selection for "do not get eaten" produces a particular kind of dog. Lola is that dog. Geraldo is that dog. Captain Steve, against all visible evidence, is that dog.

Lola is fine. Lola is in fact better than fine. Lola has, since the incident, gained approximately one ounce of swagger, which on a seven-pound dog reads as roughly eight percent more swagger than was previously available, and which she now deploys at every opportunity. She walks taller. She holds eye contact with German shepherds. She has refused, on three separate occasions, to wear the small bow.

What I think the neighborhood actually loves about this story is not the bravery, though the bravery is real. What we love is that for ten minutes on a Tuesday evening, an animal smaller than a loaf of bread decided that her yard was her yard, that the coyote had not been invited, and that there was a procedure for this. We do not, most of us, have a procedure. Lola has a procedure.

There are forty-one PROTECTED BY LOLA signs on the block now, by my count, although several have started to weather and one has been replaced because a child left it in the rain. Mrs. Howard tells me that strangers stop her at the grocery store to ask if Lola is the Lola. Mr. Howard has stopped buying chicken piccata ingredients. The planter is still inside the house. Lola, I am told, sleeps on her back, which a small dog only does in places it has decided are absolutely safe. The Howards' yard is one of those places. The neighborhood, increasingly, is another.

If you have your own seven-pound legend at home, explore more chihuahua stories from the neighborhood, or subscribe to get the next dispatch in your inbox.