Katie Kasch has seen coyotes kill calves and even run cattle to death on her farm in Wildwood, Ga.

Then one morning this month she woke up to find a pile of feathers outside the chicken coop.

“When they attacked my rooster, it got personal,” said Ms. Kasch, 24, a fourth-generation farmer.

She took care of the problem a night later with a single blast from “grandmother’s 410 shotgun.”

“I’ve never killed anything before, not even a bug on purpose,” she said. “But the more I think about it, this is my farm. I love this land and I don’t want to lose the farm to the coyotes.”

Coyotes, once found primarily in the Great Plains and Western states, today are well established throughout Georgia and Tennessee. And their population is on the rise.

“We’ve had coyotes for more than 30 years, but their population has taken off since the 1980s,” said David Gregory, a senior wildlife biologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. “They’ve figured out how to survive and thrive in our urban habitat.”

A “stable population of coyotes” is spread out across both urban and rural parts of Hamilton County, said Greg Atchley, a wildlife manager with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency.

“They are downtown, on Moccasin Bend, on Signal Mountain, everywhere,” he said. “I get calls all the time from people seeing coyotes and reporting a spate of missing cats and small dogs in a neighborhood.”

Unlike cartoon character Wile E. Coyote chasing a the Roadrunner, real coyotes will feed on almost anything — garbage, pet food, small animals and birds.

“We’ve created an ideal habitat for them with tons of squirrels, birds and mice, plus fruits, bugs and Big Macs,” Mr. Gregory said. “For a coyote, it is like an unending buffet.”

People also see coyotes more because the animals have “gotten comfortable living around us,” Mr. Gregory said.

“Thirty years ago, the smells and sounds of people might have scared them off, but not anymore,” he said. “They are being acclimatized to the urban landscape.”

In rural areas, ranchers worry about coyotes spooking horses and livestock, causing them to run headlong into or through fences. To keep coyotes at bay, some landowners are buying burros or donkeys to patrol their pastures.

“Burros are more often put out with sheep or goats because they will go after a coyote,” said Dr. Rob Knarr, Jr., of East Ridge Animal Hospital. “Most of the time coyotes are a problem with cats and smaller dogs; they are too small to mess with grown cattle or horses.”

Donkeys are seldom an option for coyote control in subdivisions, but they are seen in more rural areas.

“Donkeys have a dislike for dogs and for coyotes,” said Jathan Morrison, who raises miniature donkeys near Rock Spring, Ga. “It is bred in them to be wary of a dog-like animal. I’ve had a lot of farmers buy a donkey and turn them out in pastures with their cows.”

While coyotes can be a threat, the majority of them have a diet consisting primarily of small rodents and fruits, not livestock or pets, said TWRA Region I Manager Gary Cook.

Because coyotes are not endangered, they can be hunted all year, he said.

“You can’t reduce the overall population of coyotes, but you can eliminate those individual coyotes that are getting into trouble with man,” Mr. Cook said.