Cougar
Habituation:
Not Your Beast in
the
Garden
Judging from social media citations about cougar
conflicts, there are two entrenched anomalies
poisoning the public's perception of our coexistence
with Puma concolor: the unprecedented, 2004 twin
attacks in a single day by a single cat in Orange
County, CA, and a habituation theory posed in
David Baron's sensationally successful Beast
in the Garden (2003), that cougar recolonization
of Colorado's Front Range was a plague paradigm
waiting to happen. It hasn't happened.
Since that January day in 2004, one person has
been killed by a mountain lion in the U.S., in
rural New Mexico, in 2008. The one long-range,
peer-reviewed study of the phenomenon
observed that the number of predation incidents
- 4-5 every year - is dropping. Meanwhile,
someone is killed in a vehicle collision with a
deer in the U.S. at least every other day; 20,000
are seriously injured annually. Rest assured, if
cougars were killing 3-4 people a week and
mauling 20,000 a year, big game militias
would be building pyramids again with the heads
of the slain marauders.
Telemetry data from research labs like U.C.
Santa Cruz's Puma Project is revealing
that San Francisco peninsula's suburban
cougars are habituating all right, habituating
- as Mattson, Logan and Sweanor suggest
- to minimize conflicts with us. Sentient
beings that they are, cougars get smarter
the longer we share neighborhoods (CRF
VP John Laundre calls them "the safest
neighbors"). And let's remember that it's
the trouble-prone youngsters who move the
boundaries, adolescents who were on the
leading edge of recolonization when Front
Range conflicts spiked in the 90's: primary
vertebrate population dynamics that never
get a mention in Beast in the Garden.
Despite the ghastly predictions, things have
sure simmered down in the Garden now for
three habituated generations.
Refreshing displays of wild felid
coexistence disarming the dystopian
habituation fantasy are cataloging monthly:
60 Minutes: Mountain Lions of L.A.
National Wildlife Federation's Beth Pratt's
"P-22 Has More Imagination Than I Do" TED Talk.
In the public's worst-case cougar scenario, a
Granada Hills, CA school is lock-downed when
a cat wanders onto campus. CA Bill 132
requires wildlife officials and first-responders to
remove marooned residential cougars with
non-lethal force. He was tranquilize
d, captured, and released back into the hills.
India's Wandering Lions: Nature's breathtaking
footage of starlit, communal lion-watching and
collaborative hunting between subsistence
farmers and the Gir Forest's last Asian lions.
National Geographic's How Wild Animals are
Hacking Life in the City.
And Heart of a Lion, Will Stolzenburg's
acclaimed new book on the young tom who
trekked 2,000 miles from the Black Hills to
Connecticut's Gold Coast seeking a mate,
without harming a human soul.
The Cougar Rewilding Foundation and
Wildlands Network are supporting Will on
his book tour through Connecticut &
New York. We'll be retracing the intrepid
cat's (dubbed Walker) fateful final week
on a memorial Connecticut hike
celebrating individuals like Walker &
L.A.'s P-22, and the urban tribe of Puma
concolor, who are teaching tribe Homo
sapien daily how to habituate with mountain
lions.
Look for the stars of Heart of a Lion,
Walker & P-22, to shine soon across
the Big Apple.
Christopher Spatz
Graphics courtesy of the Mountain Lion
Foundation's Amy Rodrigues
Thank you to Adirondack artist
Rod McGiver for the use of his Shadows
image on our masthead.
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