Brittany Cardinal has spoken out about the coyote attack that left her with facial wounds and her daughter unharmed.
Cardinal, 35, of Surprise, Arizona, was enjoying a windy Sept. 6 afternoon with her four-year-old girl when the ordinary day turned violent. The pair had stepped outside to fly a kite, a simple pleasure that collapsed into chaos within seconds.
“We had gone outside because it was windy. And my daughter’s like, ‘Oh, let’s fly a kite,'” Cardinal told WWNY-TV.
The mother heard her child scream. She turned to find a coyote biting at the little girl.
“I picked her up, of course,” Cardinal said. “And then I started yelling at it, thinking, of course, it was going to go away, but then it didn’t.”
With no weapon in reach, Cardinal yanked the flip-flop from her foot and swung it wildly at the animal, screaming as loud as she could. The coyote refused to retreat. During the struggle, Cardinal fell to the ground. The animal seized its opening and clamped its jaws onto her face.
“I always hear people say, ‘You don’t feel the pain when trauma like that happens,’ and I mean, I really didn’t feel any pain. I just felt like the pressure of it,” she said.
Despite bleeding from lacerations and puncture wounds, Cardinal kept fighting. She and her daughter managed to back away and run for their home to get help.
“There was no hesitation at all. I don’t even think I thought about anything. I think you, like a mom, try to protect your kid,” Cardinal recalled.
Her daughter escaped the ordeal completely uninjured. Cardinal, however, bore the physical cost of the confrontation.
Arizona Game and Fish officials told WWNY-TV the attack marked the first recorded coyote attack on a person in the Phoenix area since December 2023. The trigger for the animal’s aggression remains unknown. Wildlife officers have since removed several coyotes from the neighborhood and are testing them for rabies.
Alex Flickinger, public affairs community liaison for Arizona Game and Fish, said Cardinal’s response matched official guidance precisely.
“You fight back, you yell at the animal, be loud with it, throw rocks, whatever you have to do to get that animal to just run off,” Flickinger said.
Cardinal has since changed her daily routine. She now carries pepper spray at all times.
The Sept. 6 attack unfolded rapidly after Cardinal and her daughter went outside for kite-flying in their Surprise neighborhood. What began as a peaceful mother-daughter moment in the wind deteriorated when the coyote appeared and targeted the child. Cardinal’s instinctive grab for her footwear as an improvised weapon, her continued resistance even after being knocked down and bitten in the face, and her eventual retreat with her daughter to safety all transpired in a compressed span of terror that left the mother wounded but her child untouched.
Cardinal has not indicated whether her family plans to relocate from the area.