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Outside Magazine May 2003

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Stalker (cont.)


	Hounds Cooter and Buck pick up the cat's scent. (Antonin Kratochvil)

NATURAL HUMAN FEAR WAS NOT, in fact, what led to the kill-'em-all predator pogroms of western expansion. Rather, cougars were competition for game, and they ate livestock. Getting rid of them was a simple process: Run them down with dogs, tree them, and shoot them. By the turn of the century, the cougar had for all intents and purposes been erased east of the Mississippi. In North Carolina's Smoky Mountains, where the first cat was sighted in 1840, the last documented kill came in 1920. The Florida population hung on, but for the most part the eastern cougar was gone, and might have stayed gone if state agencies hadn't begun to stock and protect deer in the 1930s, inadvertently setting the table for the cat's eventual return.

Out west, the sheer vastness made mountain lions harder to kill off. But the predator wars continued well into the 1950s, with Arizona the last state to remove the $75 bounty on cougars in 1970. In 1964, when Hornocker, a young grizzly researcher in Montana, turned his attention to mountain lions, there was no season on cats; they could be shot on sight. Hornocker's friends and fellow biologists told him that studying the lion was not only impossible, but unwanted. "They were vermin all over the West," he says. "The only cougar I'd seen was a dead one hanging from the rafters of the Idaho Fish and Game office."

Hornocker continued anyway. He located 14 subjects in the Missoula Valley, only to have most of them killed by hunters. So in 1965, he relocated his project to Idaho's Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness Area, beginning a seminal ten-year study that demonstrated that, due to their extremely large territories—male lions will defend up to several hundred square miles and several female cats from feline intruders—cats didn't seriously affect elk and deer populations, much less livestock. His work helped to establish bag limits and create regulated hunting seasons, major factors in the cougar's comeback. Now, Hornocker predicts, "lions will hit the Mississippi in the next decade. The East and Midwest is beautiful cat country—full of deer and cover."

As fences, freeways, and McMansions crop up in the very hills and woods where lions have ridden out our attempts to erase them, conflicts are multiplying. After carving out a sub-rosa existence among us, and feasting on the non-native whitetail deer herds that have proliferated with development, cats risk becoming victims of their own success. Although hunting is less popular today, western states do allow it, and most have adopted a zero-tolerance policy toward cougars that enter urban areas—less controversial than hunting, but still lethal to cats. Even Hornocker endorses the policy. "I admire the folks in places like Boulder who take a 'they were here first' approach to lions in their backyards," the scientist says. "But it's a dangerous attitude, one that will change when a lion eats a child." If cats and humans are to coexist, he says, we need to be "up-front about euthanizing any cat that's lost its fear of humans."

There are small signs that cougars and humans can learn to use the same land. In California's Santa Ana Mountains, the Nature Conservancy has bought up 900 acres of the 2,300-acre Tenaja Corridor, a critical habitat link and one of the sites of Paul Beier's research, hoping to protect the cats from isolation. The Conservancy plans to sell 100 of those acres in five- to 50-acre parcels to buyers who agree to a cat-friendly development plan: build on only two acres of the land, limit fencing and exterior lighting, and keep mouthwatering pets indoors.

But in most places, biologists agree that living with lions is going to mean not only the removal of problem cats, but also a certain amount of hunting—a tough but necessary step to ensure the long-term health of a species in a land where, like it or not, human concerns are paramount. "I've never opposed hunting as long as it is done morally and ethically and with reverence for the quarry," Hornocker says. "But it has to be done on a sound biological basis."

World-renowned primatologist Jane Goodall disagrees. Goodall became interested in cougars in 2001 when, much to her horror, she learned that lions were still hunted in the West, and that in Texas, hunters could kill cats at any time and by any means, including poison. "To hear that they were shot by hunters with dogs, I just find this completely terrible," Goodall told ABC's World News Tonight in January. She and other advocates remind us that hunting orphans kittens, and the removal of an estimated 3,000 trophy cats a year in the West erodes the lion's delicate social structure and robs the population of prime genes. Goodall has lent her support to the Cougar Fund, a Jackson, Wyoming-based group cofounded by activist Cara Blessley Lowe and wildlife photographer Thomas Mangelsen, but because cougars are doing so well on their own, most other conservation groups focus instead on wolves, grizzlies, and other endangered species.

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