When Monalisa Paul adopted her ragdoll cat Bear two years ago, she thought they were the perfect match.

“He would never scratch, he would never bite,” Paul said. “He would always want to sleep next to you – very cuddly.”

Bear was a house cat who occasionally went out into the yard of Paul’s building at 13th and Granville in Vancouver. One night last week, Bear went out. While Paul was looking for him, a neighbor told her she saw a coyote carrying the cat in its mouth.

That same day, she spotted Bear’s Airtag collar in some bushes at 14th Street and Pine.

“I picked him up off the ground and Bear was hanging by his collar, just his head and body. I couldn’t find his tail,” Paul said. “I screamed and just jumped out of the bush.”

Neighbors helped her recover what was left of Bear’s mangled body, and she posted about the coyote attack online.

“500 people responded to those posts, saying, ‘Oh, I lost my cat last year to a coyote,’ ‘I lost my cat three months ago,’ and ‘I lost my cat four months ago,’” Paul said.

Vancouver has had problems with aggressive coyotes in Stanley Park, which led to a controversial extermination in 2021. But Paul believes more needs to be done to control the population in the city’s downtown.

“We’ve seen them during the day in places like Granville, which is so populated,” she said. Ideally, Paul wants the city to trap and neuter urban coyotes.

“Or at least keep track of how many puppies there are, how many adults there are, and where they are,” she said.

CTV News asked the city for data on coyote encounters and attacks on pets in densely populated areas like south Granville. The response was an emailed statement that simply stated that coyotes live throughout the city year-round, have adapted to the urban environment and prey on small animals.

Paul worries that people could also be hurt. “They’re approaching people in broad daylight. What if it’s a mom walking her dog with her kid?” she said.

She urges city officials to warn residents if coyotes are killing pets in their neighborhood, because she would never have allowed Bear outside if she had known the danger lurking nearby.