Joliet, IL Animal Ordinances: Coyote Management (2026)

Section 20-2 defines 'wild animal' to include, without limitation, coyotes, deer, feral cats, foxes, groundhogs, opossums, raccoons, skunks, and waterfowl. Section 20-34 explains the division's purpose: protecting community health, safety, and welfare, and the animals themselves, by discouraging feeding that creates unnatural concentrations, spreads disease, damages vegetation, or lures waterfowl away from natural habitat into yards or public property. It expressly does not reach incidental or sporadic feeding, such as tossing ducks a single piece of bread or hanging an ear of corn on a squirrel feeder, or feeding songbirds from a well-maintained feeder.

Section 20-35(a) then makes it unlawful and a declared nuisance to feed any wild animal or waterfowl on private or public property in a manner that creates an unclean, unsafe, or unsanitary condition on the feeder's own property, a neighbor's property, or city property, while 20-35(b) exempts feeding songbirds from a well-maintained, weather-protected feeder. Section 20-36 sets the penalty. Because coyotes and deer are folded into this general 'wild animal' definition, the ordinance is the only place Joliet's Code regulates them: the city has no separate coyote cull, trapping, or hazing ordinance, and no dedicated deer-management program appears in the Code of Ordinances. Enforcement runs through the same nuisance-abatement notice process used for other Chapter 20 nuisances, not through animal control field operations targeting coyotes directly.