Cougar Attacks

It seems that the number of humans attacked by cougars has been on the rise since 1980, and David Baron, author of "The Beast in the Garden", has a provocative theory to account for this:

"We are seeing a fundamental shift in mountain lion behavior," Baron said in an interview last week. "What I would say is, what we're seeing now is unnatural compared to how lions behaved for probably the last 10,000 years."

Baron bases his conclusions on research in the area of Boulder, Colo., by Michael Sanders and Jim Halfpenny. The scientists collected reports of cougar sightings and encounters in the late 1980s and early '90s, and found that the big cats, normally elusive and largely nocturnal, appeared to change not long after bounty hunting ended.

Around the same time, deer hunting fell to low levels, and deer - to the delight of many, excluding gardeners and unlucky motorists - began appearing more frequently in and around town.

Deer are mountain lions' main prey; where they go, cougars will follow. Soon, mountain lion encounters were reported in daylight hours. Scary confrontations were reported more frequently, closer to town. Dogs and cats were added to the cougars' menu.

It all adds up, Baron says, to a trend visible in California, Colorado and other Western states: As the mountain lions grow accustomed to human presence, they are more prone to attack.

[.......]

In the Western United States and Canada, there were 29 cougar attacks from 1890 to 1970. From 1971 to 1980, there were 14. The next decade saw 22 attacks; and from 1991 to 2000, there were 41. Since the start of 2001, there have been five attacks.

Baron's theory is questioned by Todd Malmsbury, a spokesman for the Colorado Division of Wildlife, who thinks the increase in cougar attacks is less a matter of changed species behavior, and more a matter of a greater frequency of lion/human contacts.

One of Baron's more sobering and compelling observations, at least for me, is that lions are beginning to treat humans like prey - stalking them, ambushing them and dragging them off to be consumed in the same way they would treat a deer. I find this persuasive evidence of behavioral change.

The actual number of cougar attacks on humans and their domesticated animals has hardly reached epidemic proportions. But the upward trend is disturbing, and we're likely to hear about cougars attacking humans more and more often. If you think about it - more deer living closer to humans, and more cougars familiarizing themselves with harmless humans - it makes sense.

Brian