A 100-pound mountain lion can kill an
800-pound elk. Keep that in mind the next time you go hiking in
cougar territory.
If you are alone and unarmed, and one of
these powerful predators attacks you — intent on killing and
eating you, rather than merely trying to drive you away from its
offspring or a previous kill — the contest likely will be as
lopsided as if you had waded into traffic to wrestle a pickup
truck. Worse, actually, because the odds are that you will never
even know until the cougar bites into the back of your
neck.
Whether such prowess leaves you horrified or
reverent depends on your attitudes regarding the role of wildlife
and nature in a human-dominated world. Mountain lions are among the
few remaining species on the planet that persist in occasionally
regarding humans as food — grizzly bears, sharks, lions, tigers
and crocodiles pretty much fill out the roster — and like all big
predators they test our philosophical boundaries in a way that most
creatures do not.
With respect to cougars, at least, it is
a test many Westerners and Californians in particular should get
used to taking. Recent attacks on two bicyclists in the mountains
of Orange County are but the most recent reminder that we live in
an era without historical precedent when it comes to the
relationship between big predators and human beings in North
America.
Never before have so many people lived so close
to so many potentially dangerous animals while simultaneously
lacking the desire to exterminate them.
The potential
consequences of that historically unique set of circumstances form
the theme of a gripping, well-researched book by journalist David
Baron, a National Public Radio reporter who is currently a visiting
scholar at Boston University’s Knight Center for Science
Journalism.
“The Beast in the Garden” is on one level a
detailed examination of events in the late 1980s and early
‘90s in Colorado., where a series of mountain lion attacks on
pets and people climaxed with the death of a high school student.
More broadly, however, it is an analysis of how population growth,
development patterns and changing attitudes about nature are
contributing to a growing number of deadly encounters throughout
the urbanizing West.
Many Californians will recognize
something of their own state in Baron’s description of Boulder: a
liberal community with a laid-back vibe, socially tolerant,
determined to live in harmony with its natural surroundings and —
not incidentally — sprawling by leaps and bounds into the wild
lands along the Rocky Mountain foothills.
As people moved
into the habitat of deer, coyotes, raccoons and other creatures,
the animals found themselves residents of suburbia. They thrived
there among the fruit trees, vegetable gardens and well-watered
landscaping, and it was not long before the top predator in the
local ecosystem followed its prey into people’s yards.
Homeowners soon began to see lions leaping onto their porches to
attack pet dogs, or found lions perched unconcernedly in their
trees or reclining on their picnic tables. And before long, lions
began menacing people. The escalating series of encounters, which
Baron’s book relates with the suspenseful pacing of a good
thriller, eventually included the fatal 1991 attack on 18-year-old
Scott Lancaster in Idaho Springs, Colo.
Lancaster was
killed and partially consumed by a healthy mountain lion just off
the high school campus. It was the first recorded fatal attack in
Colorado history, and it challenged the belief among most American
wildlife managers that mountain lions posed no real threat to
humans. Additional challenges to that assumption soon came from
other states, including Montana and California.
One
wildlife biologist quoted in Baron’s book, University of California
professor Lee Fitzhugh, has suggested that because they are no
longer widely hunted or hazed by humans, cougars are learning to
regard people as prey. Reporters following up on the fatal Orange
County incident of a week ago have cited his data showing a marked
escalation of attacks since California banned mountain lion hunting
— still very rare, but three times as many since 1971, as during
the preceding century.
Those numbers alone do not prove a
behavioral change; they may merely reflect the fact that there are
more lions and more people in California than there were 30 years
ago.
What the data and Baron’s book suggest, however, is
that Westerners need to think long and hard about the degree of
risk they are willing to assume when they buy homes or venture onto
trails, as well as what strategies they are willing to accept to
reduce that risk.
John Krist is a contributor to Writers
on the Range, a service of High Country news (hcn.org). He is a
reporter and columnist for the Ventura County Star in
California.
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