Why Do Cities Hate Cougars? Part III

According to Jane Goodall’s foreword to Listening to Cougar , there were 7 attacks on humans between 1992 and 2002 – less than one a year and not all were fatalities. To put that number in perspective, 533 people were killed by hornets, bees, or wasps during roughly the same period and 208 by dogs.

Robert Busch explains in his book The Cougar Almanac that the majority of attacks involve juvenile cougars who have left the tutelage of their mothers, but have yet to master the art of hunting (much like our friend in South Dakota, a 2 year old male who may have also been pushed to the fringes by more dominate males). Other attacks, he says, are often perpetrated by mother cougars protecting their young. Several attacks including one in 1990 in Colorado and one in 1993 in California involved people jogging. Busch explains that cougars, like many other predators, have a natural chase instinct. It’s the same instinct that makes your house cat chase laser lights and pieces of string.

Overwhelmingly, these attacks also happened not in cities, but in rural areas or nature preserves. One of the most well known occurred in Caspers Wilderness Park in southern California in 1986 when a cougar snatched a five year old girl from alongside a creek in the park. Fortunately, she survived the attack. Surprisingly, the parents of the girl did not call for the extermination of cougars, but rather won a $2 million dollar suit against the county because they were not thoroughly warned about the possible danger of cougars.

How much of the policy of executing cougars who wander into cities has to do with sound wildlife management and concern for the public good, and how much has to do with governments striving to avoid potential lawsuits?

Why Do Cities Hate Cougars? Part II

When a cougar wanders into a city in the West, the policy for most wildlife management agencies is to euthanize the animal. The reason: "When a lion comes into a heavily populated area like this one, there is the potential for something to happen" (South Dakota GF&P Wildlife Manager). Although cougar attacks on humans do take place, they rarely (if ever) take place in heavily populated areas. Moreover, death from cougar attack averages less the 1 per year. Pretty good odds. Here is a list of the 10 ten causes of death not realated to illness or disease (according to the National Center for Health Statistics) that you are much, much more likely.

1) Unintentional Motor Vehicle Traffic, 2) Unintentional Poisoning, 3) Unintentional Fall, 4) Suicide by Firearm, 5) Homicide by Firearm, 6) Suicide Suffocation, 7) Unintentional Unspecified (whatever that means), 8) Suicide Poisoning, 9) Unintentional Suffocation, and 10) Unintentional Drowning.

You are about 43,000 times more likely to die from a traffic collision than you are from a cougar attack. I have yet to hear a case of the Department of Motor Vehicles euthanizing bad drivers, though.

Why Do Cities Hate Cougars?

So, I've been following this story about a cougar who wondered into a neighborhood in Rapid City, South Dakota a couple weeks back. The state's Game, Fish, and Parks people tranq'd the cat while it cowered in a tree and then took it to a vet to be euthanized. Read the full story here: http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/news/article_6e92575c-d55e-11de-9a96-001cc4c03286.html

About a week later, the Rapid City Journal published another article after some had asked the question "if the big cat was already out cold, why not just relocate it." And of course the bullshit answer given by GF&P, the supposed wildlife experts, was that relocation never worked. John Kanta from SD GF&P said that they have done it "6 times that I can think of" without success, which is code for "it might have been a failure before, but I don't really care enough to actually find out how many times we've tried. Now quit asking questions, so I can get back to aiding in the annihilation of a species or two." Here is the link to that story: http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/news/article_539ff74a-dbbe-11de-b893-001cc4c002e0.html

What may be more appalling is that Kanta says that the majority of citizen in the area support their cat killing program. Just read some of the comments from the second story. No surprise that the main argument made is the ever infamous "you don't live here, so you don't what it's like." Well, there is at least one person with a soul in the Black Hills area who wrote: "You're welcome to release the lion in my backyard. I chose to live in the beautiful Black Hills and share my property with quite an assortment of wildlife. I'm more concerned about gunhappy people shooting beagles, horses, etc, and deer jumping out in front of me while I drive..."

This citizen's statement helps remind us that wild animals like cougars did not invade our space, we invaded theirs.

I could go on and on, so look for more posts in relation to cougars in the near future.