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In Jim Butcher's foreword in the short story collection Shadowed Souls, he discusses an event in which a pack of coyotes surrounds his home in an attempt to prey on his pet dog.

This story seems a bit farfetched to be real, and I wouldn't put it past Jim to make up such a story just to have a little bit of umph for a book. So, has Jim Butcher expressed whether this story about the coyotes is real, made up, or somewhere in between? If it is made up, does he explain WHY he made it up?

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In essence, yes.

There might be a bit of poetic licence in the foreword to his short stories - I wouldn't be surprised if he somewhat exaggerated the description of events for dramatic effect - but the bare bones of the story, about coyotes attacking his dog, does seem to be true. At least, he posted about it on Twitter at the time and everyone seemed to take it completely seriously.

  • Frost survived a coyote attack Saturday PM. Broke a tooth on the coyote. Came out with battle scars. #GoodDog

    -- 18 March 2014

  • Coyotes just tried for Frost again. At least three of them, one of them a pup. Parents probably teaching pups to hunt. He's okay.

    -- 8 August 2014

See also the other tweets sent in response, and his responses to those. In both threads, other people raise the possibility of him using a gun against the coyotes to defend his dog, and he says that wouldn't be legal inside city limits, but he did yell at the coyotes to try to scare them away, and he was close to his dog when the attacks happened. So although the passage about him going out with a loaded gun probably isn't true, the whole thing certainly seems to be a serious issue rather than something he just made up for a story.

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  • yeah, the tweets paint a slightly different picture than what's in fore foreword, but good to know that there's at least some element of truth to it. thank you!
    – DForck42
    Mar 31, 2017 at 17:31

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