Friends, that's a coyote.

Look, we get it. The Bay Area housing crisis has all of us a little scrambled, and maybe that extends to our wildlife identification skills. But the scraggly canine chilling near GGP is not an adoptable stray — it's a wild predator that would very much like to eat your cat.

Coyotes have been a fixture in and around Golden Gate Park for years. They're part of the urban ecosystem, and they actually serve a useful purpose. As one local put it, "I really hope they help keep the mice population in check. I hate mice." Fair point. San Francisco's rodent situation isn't winning any awards, and coyotes are doing unpaid pest control work that the city certainly isn't budgeting for. Free market wildlife management, if you will.

The internet, naturally, had a field day. "That's everyone's dog and he lives outside," one SF resident declared, capturing the communal spirit of a city that can't agree on a bus lane but will collectively adopt a wild animal. Another local cracked, "If not friend, why friend shaped?" — which, honestly, is the kind of airtight logic we respect.

But seriously: don't approach coyotes. Don't feed them. And for the love of all that is holy, don't try to leash one. San Francisco Animal Care & Control has enough on its plate without fielding calls about someone's new "rescue" gnawing through their apartment door.

Coyotes are generally harmless to humans if left alone, but they can pose risks to small pets. Keep dogs leashed in the park and cats indoors — advice that applies basically always in a city where a coyote sighting is the least chaotic thing happening on any given Tuesday.

Nature is handling this one just fine without government intervention. Let the coyote do its thing.