Now they're having memorial services for the lion. Makes me ashamed to live in Palo Alto. Wait til one grabs their dog or one of their kids. The deer population is plummeting in this state (at least in my area) and nobody wants to blame the cats.
Russ

When I made the statement on the Wolves in Minnesota thread, that in my opinion the only Good cougar is a dead cougar, I got all sorts of flack from guys in the central or eastern part of the country.

They thought I was being unrealistic, and a little overly blood thirsty, and that my disdain for cougars was because I wanted to just be able to have millions of deer to hunt.

Funny none of them have piped up on this thread when it is pointed out that they did kill people. It happened very close to where my parents live in the Winter time in So Cal. They live at Lake Tahoe in the summer.

The only ones who are saying anything are those of us that live in areas that these nuisance animals have got to be thinned out dramatically. Or else they will die out when they have killed all the other game their is to eat, and they will be migrating into human habitat, to kill livestock and house pets.

They already do that at times now.

seafire

Lions can and do kill people, but with only 13 attacks on humans in 114 years, I'd say CA has bigger problems. Hell, more people are killed by bee stings in a year than that. By your "the only good cougar is a dead cougar" logic, we should be doing everything possible to eradicate bees, along with any other animal that might kill a person. I just don't buy it. While I don't agree with the ban on lion hunting (it is utterly ridiculous), they do have their place in the ecosystem, just as other predators do. As for killing all the game there is to eat, that's a little far-fetched. Predator-prey relationships have been around for millions of years and the predators haven't hunted the prey to extinction (with the exception of humans, of course). It seems like any time game populations decrease at all, the blame goes instantly to predators. While I am not so naive to believe that predators have no effect, they obviously do, people tend to forget that there are a lot of other things that kill elk, deer, antelope, etc. (accidents, disease, starvations, drought, poaching, need I go on?). Maybe it's because predators are the easiest to do something about (kill a mountain lion, it can't kill any more deer, poodles, joggers, etc.) It's a lot more difficult to tackle problems like long term habitat loss and degradation or wildlife diseases.

We get a lot of the same logic down here concerning sharks. Funny how shark attacks are a passing news item, and a cat attack is world headlines. Not trying to work anyone up, just an observation.

If you look objectively at predators in nature though, it seems that all higher predators kill other high predators every chance they get, especially if they hunt similar prey. Think wolves vs. bears, lions vs. heyenas, humans vs. everything else, etc. It reduces the competition. Seems to work when you include humans as well!

Gutshot;

You sound like a person who must be a transplant to Wyoming. I can definitely assume you are not a native Wyoming rancher. Your response sounds like what I'd expect from one of the Greenpeace crowd, who drives a Hummer and Lives in Jackson Hole after being wealthy somewhere else and became part of the Democratic "lets get back to Nature crowd".

Don't get me wrong, that is cool. However I can't buy the logic that a hunter, who has actually been around the environments of these cats or wolves, or someone who owns a ranch and does so for a living ( not a 60,000 acre getaway spread, or retirement 'ranch') can defend them.

NOt being a biologist, I can't tell you why their presence has caused such a shift in the "eco system" as they want to call it. All I can tell you is that one species lives on eating another. The one doing the eating has no real nature predator except man, which is not allowed to do anything about it based on laws passed by people who don't have a clue, except they think they are doing something for the 'world'.

Then the one who is the predator is flourishing hand over fist, and the ones that are its prey, are disappearing at an alarming rate.

It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out the only way that trend is going to reverse itself.

Even if I didn't hunt, all I know is that deer do not harm people, or destroy livestock etc. Sure they may raid crops but that is more easily and humanely taken care of, by proper fencing etc, there is only one way to stop wolves and cougars.

Of those people killed by cougars in California in a 114 yrs if that statistic is right, how many have been in recent years, say the last ten?

People who say it is not a problem evidently don't live around it. Living in San Francisco or LA is not the same prospective as living in the mountains of California, the high country.

It shows the sad state of the publics awareness and common sense, when that mother was killed while out jogging, and then the state tracked down the cougar and killed it. The cougar was female and had cubs also, so it was a mom.

So the local bank set up a fund for donations to the mother's family since she had been killed. People in San Francisco ( miles away) set up a fund, for the safe care of the cougar's cubs. In California, with the urbanite mind set, HUMAN's donated twice as much money to the care of the cougar cubs as they did to the woman that had been killed by the cougar!
In a ratio of 2 to ONE!

And then all of these San Fran " liberals" who needed a hair cut anyway ( the 60s and the hippie days are over people!)
are out shouting that the woman was killed, because it wasHER FAULT! The reasoning was she was out jogging on a road in the cougar's environment.

I guess the people who defend the killer instead of its victims are the same type who can defend a killer like Saddam Hussein and then criticize the nation that had the guts to take him out of power, especially when it is their own nation.

They all have a different set of values than I was raised with, that is for sure. Of course drugs has not been a part of my or my family's life style either. So my 'warped' prospective does not have that to blame it all on.

Kill the killers, not the victims.

the way I see it.

Seafire,
You are correct in your assumption that I am not a native Wyoming rancher. However, your other assumptions are a just a bit off base. I am no transplant, I was born and raised in southwest Wyoming. I'm not a member of Greenpeace, I don't drive a Hummer, and I'm not rich enough to live anywhere near Jackson Hole. Oh yeah, I'm not on drugs either.

How do you think predator and prey species co-existed before man came into the picture? It was a self-regulating system, the prey species would figure out strategies for avoiding predation, and plenty of them would survive to produce future generations. If you study any predator-prey biology, you see that as the prey species declines in population, the predator populations then stabilize and decline as well. It makes sense because there isn't as much for them to eat. Also, many people forget that predators go for the easiest prey possible, which means that healthy, robust prey animals have a much lower risk of predation and are more likely to successfully reproduce.

Now I'm not saying that there is not a place for hunting predators, I've already said I think banning mountain lion hunting in California was ridiculous. I just don't believe we should try to completely eradicate everything with fangs and claws. The biggest threats to wildlife (both predators and prey) are human-caused. Using Wyoming as an example, over the last 30 years, there has been a huge amount of developement on critical wildlife habitat. Ranches are being sold and subdivided to build large numbers of homes on areas that were once prime winter ranges. Thousands of oil and gas wells are being drilled throughout the state, with little or no mitigation by the companies doing the drilling. People are building houses on traditional antelope and deer migration routes, just assuming the critters will find another way to get to their winter range, which they won't. Point is, there's an incredibly big picture out there when it comes to successfully managing game herds, and predator management is only a small part of that picture. There are a lot of other problems that need to be tackled out there.

Why is it people want to forget that man has been the top predator for maybe a million years? It�s nonsense to talk about what has happened or not without man. It is more nonsense not to hunt predators and claim that the result is natural. We are the top predators of the all the predators. We are relevant in all the ecosystems.

Boha

Well its hard to say wether gutshot is from jackson,drives a hummer or is a treehugger. One thing for sure, he is a stupid fucker,you can bank on that.

Skinner,

So very true. Mountain Lions need to be given Big Game status is what I meant. The survey I was talking about was the one funded by the Sierra Club done in the fall of 1968. It stated that there were only 9 Mountain Lions left in California. I used to have a copy of the survey but over time it was either thrown away or lost in moving. If I find it I will post copies on every hunting/shooting forum I can find on the net. This is the same survey that stated that the California Black Bear population was on the decline and may never recover. From a survey taken in 2001 there is now a Black Bear population estimated between 27,500-32,500. This ranks California in the top five for Black Bears. I supposed someone will say that these will disappear soon too. Lawdog