You know why you hate coyotes? Because they’re smarter than you. Warner Bros. cartoons notwithstanding, a coyote will catch a roadrunner, though why bother when you leave bowls of Alpo outdoors and don’t take the time to pick up the rotting avocados in your yard because, inexplicably, you don’t like avocados? Or maybe that’s a bad example. Let’s say it’s figs or persimmons. The point is, you’re feeding coyotes with your food trees.

There are worse, more tragic, ways to feed them, such as letting your cat out at night, or trolling for them with your chihuahua along the banks of the aptly named Coyote Creek at dusk or dawn.

On Oct. 12, Long Beach Animal Care Services is presenting a community seminar, “Living With Urban Coyotes” from 6 to 8:30 p.m. at the Wardlow Park Community Center, 3457 Stanbridge Ave.

It’s a good title for the seminar, because that’s what it all comes down to: living with them.

In the coyote world, there are two kinds of residents: Co-existers, and people who want to kill urban coyotes. The latter group probably has a nicer more euphemistic name for itself, but what they want to do is kill urban coyotes, so we’ll go with that.

We have written a bunch of times about the subject, to the point where coyote-killers made their Facebook pages private so they could talk about various ways of killing coyotes without us seeing them. Now those groups appear to have either gone into the Dark Web or just back to playing solitaire and watching their daytime stories on television and drinking gin out of jam jars.

The October seminar isn’t a real balanced affair, nor should it be, because there’s nothing to recommend killing urban coyotes. The more you kill them, the more they come back. It’s like (but not identical) to the case of fishermen carving up starfish and throwing the bits off a pier. Many of the pieces regenerated and pretty soon there was an overabundance of starfish.

Speakers at the event will include representatives from Animal Care Services, California Department of Fish and Wildlife and researchers from Loyola Marymount University Center for Urban Resilience (CURes), which co-existers should find interesting and coyote killers should watch just for kicks.

Currently funded by a one-year grant from the City of Long Beach, CURes’ research project, “Wildlife Services Coyote Management Project,” will develop a long-term coyote management program for Animal Care. The research team looks at data related to coyote distribution that has already been collected by local city wildlife officials. They will then add field data on coyote abundance, movement and distribution, through the use of game cameras. Analysis of coyote dietary components through scat collection will be performed.

It’s a pretty ambitious effort with a promising future, and we’ll try to keep up to speed on the study as it progresses. In the meantime (and even after all the studyin’ is done), we will have coyotes among us. On one hand, we, living three blocks from the Diagonal of the Coyotes, haven’t seen any on our block, which could be why we’re so blase about them. That, plus they’ve never eaten any of our dogs. We’ve gotta be honest, if they did hop our fence (which they can do) and attacked one or both of our dogs (at their own peril; we wouldn’t do it), we might feel differently. But until then, we’re happily coexisting with coyotes.