Dad Of The Year

1 min read

Behold, fathers: this is what God put you here to do:

A coyote attacked a pair of dogs, bit a woman and skirmished with a vehicle before being killed by a father defending his family on a walk on Monday…
[Ian] O’Reilly, his wife, and three young children were hiking at Jude’s Pond when the coyote went after his young son. “It actually caught the hood of his jacket and was able to pull him down,” O’Reilly said.
O’Reilly wife grabbed the kids before the animal could bite anyone and dad found himself eye to eye with the snarling beast.
“I did kick him square in the jaw once that put him to the ground and I was able to jump on him after that,” O’Reilly said.
As his wife called 911, O’Reilly strangled the coyote during several minutes that seemed surreal at best.

Surreal, to be sure. But also instructive.

’tis but a scratch

Dads, God put you here to defend your wife and kids. Sometimes they must be protected from beasts of the four-legged type. Other times – much more often – it’s from the two-legged type from whom you must keep them safe.
God gives you the authority in your family. But he also gives you the responsibility to strangle* that coyote with your bare hands. The danger to you is secondary. Whether the beast has rabies is immaterial. It doesn’t even matter if you’re scared to death. What matters is that you stand between the danger and those whom God has put in your care.
I don’t know if Mr. O’Reilley is a religious man. In a real sense, it doesn’t matter: we are whom God made us whether we believe or not. But in another sense I hope that he is. For he is a great example of the love that Christ showed for us: self-sacrifice to preserve us from a danger we could not face ourselves.
* shooting it is a better option, if not as good a story.

El Borak is an historian by training, an IT Director by vocation, and a writer when the mood strikes him. He lives in rural Kansas with his wife of thirty years, where he works to fix the little things.

6 Comments

  1. When a bull, that had gotten loose from someone, came trotting thru the yard near the kids, it hit me like a thunderclap to get more firepower than the 22LR rifle I had. A short time later bought a Remington 870 12 gauge and a bunch of slugs and buckshot. Since then we had a few encounters with coyotes, which my AR15 took care of.

  2. There’s a bunch of lunatics on social media trying to condemn the guy for killing the coyote. “It was just acting according to it’s nature, he shouldn’t have been in its territory, etc” Well, thank God, this man was also acting according to his nature. Not sure how on earth one’s value system gets so screwed up that a coyote’s life is more valuable than a child’s.

  3. No one of Consequence
    Not sure how on earth one’s value system gets so screwed up that a coyote’s life is more valuable than a child’s.

    they want to reduce world population to something like 500 million people. they want a LOT of people’s children dead.

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