A coyote was spotted this week casually dining in the Stanford Shopping Center parking lot, picking through discarded food like it had a Yelp reservation. Welcome to the Bay Area, where even the wildlife is adapting to our cost of living by scavenging luxury mall scraps.

Let's be clear about what's happening here: this isn't some charming wildlife encounter. As one Bay Area resident put it bluntly, the animal wasn't eating "leftover food" so much as "garbage some pig tossed out of their car." And that's the real issue — human behavior is drawing predators into populated spaces, creating a public safety problem that nobody seems interested in addressing.

Coyotes have been getting bolder across the Bay Area in recent years. Sightings in suburban parking lots, neighborhood streets, and even schoolyards are becoming routine. Another local noted that "coyotes have been getting much bolder lately," which tracks with what wildlife officials have been saying for a while now. When wild animals lose their fear of humans, encounters escalate. It's not a matter of if, but when someone's pet — or worse, a small child — ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

So what's the plan? If history is any guide: nothing. Local governments will issue the same toothless advisory they always do — don't feed wildlife, make loud noises, look big. Meanwhile, the actual drivers of the problem — overflowing public trash cans, lax waste management, and people literally throwing food out of car windows — go unaddressed.

This is a microcosm of how the Bay Area handles virtually every quality-of-life issue. Identify the problem, shrug, publish a flyer, move on. We spend millions on consultants and commissions for issues that often have straightforward solutions: more trash receptacles, better cleanup schedules, and actual enforcement of littering laws.

A coyote at a shopping mall is funny until it isn't. Let's maybe handle this one before it stops being a quirky photo op.