By Laura Goldman From Care2

Considering what might have happened to him, a not-so-wily coyote managed to get inside the Nashville Music City Center on a Sunday evening earlier this month, running past the convention center’s security checkpoints and into an exhibit hall where a boat show had just been held. Employees were able to confine the wayward coyote to a restroom by lowering a gate.

When Officer Brenna Hosey with the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department was dispatched to the convention center, she figured it was probably really just a stray German shepherd or other dog that had wandered into the building.

“I look around the corner and sure enough, like perched up on the sink, is a coyote,” Hosey told WKRN. She and some Metro Animal Control officers used catch poles to nudge the coyote off of the counter.

In many situations where a coyote is in the wrong place at the wrong time, it would be euthanized, but thanks to Hosey’s compassion, this coyote lucked out.

“I noticed how terrified he was and that bothered me,” she told WKRN. “I felt so bad for him. He was trembling and I could tell he just wanted to get out of there. He just didn’t know how.”

So, instead of giving the coyote a lethal injection, the officers led him to the back seat of Hosey’s patrol car. She drove him to a wooded area and released him there. No one, including the coyote, was injured.

Photos of the coyote in the Music City Center restroom have gone viral, with plenty of “amusing” comments. For example, people joked that, “Obviously there’s a roadrunner somewhere that tricked him,” and, “He was looking for Acme headquarters”).

Although there fortunately was a happy ending for this particular coyote, there’s really nothing very cute about the story behind the photo. Why did he run inside a noisy building filled with people? He may have been looking for food or warmth, as the temperature in Nashville dropped to a chilly 37 degrees the night of Jan. 13.

“He hadn’t done anything wrong,” Hosey told WKRN. “He’s a wild animal whose habitat is the woods, but Nashville is slowly moving out and some of those woods are being taken away, which isn’t a bad thing. But he had nowhere else to go and he ran to where he thought was going to be a safe place.”

Coyotes in the wild naturally avoid people, but as urban development has taken away their habitat, they’ve become a common sight in cities like Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles—and Nashville.

“I definitely don’t see this as something going away,” Metro Animal Control Director Lauren Blackstone told WSMV. “I think with the buildup of Nashville, and how quickly construction is happening, we’re just taking away their habitat, so they do have to go somewhere.”

Some major cities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, have coyote management plans in place that promote peaceful coexistence with these creatures. Residents are urged to never feed coyotes, to keep trash cans tightly covered and to take steps to protect their pets, among other safety measures. Sadly, city council members in the L.A. suburb of Torrance recently decided to ignore the fact that trapping does little to reduce coyote populations and voted to start culling them.

As for Nashville, “I don’t want to say coyotes in bathrooms are going to become the norm,” Blackstone told WVLT, “but because of intrusion into their habitat, it’s going to be close living.”

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Photo credit: Metropolitan Nashville Police Department/Facebook

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