In November 2012, some Half Moon Bay residents reported cats under their porch. Mountain lion-type cats. Cougars. Pumas. Panthers. Catamounts. (The different names have political implications. I’ll try to use them randomly.) Sheriffs confirmed cats under the porch and called the California Department of Fish & Game (DFG).
The DFG advised keeping people and pets out of the area, and seeing if they would go away. They didn’t. (It was raining.) DFG game wardens came out. (Based on location, it’s possible these wardens usually dealt with marine species. Fish, mussels, squid. Licensing. Poaching. Not pumas.) Someone estimated the cubs were 10 months old and 25-30 pounds.
Let’s just say you didn’t see me and I didn’t eat you, okay?
DFG spokesperson Janice Mackey said the wardens noticed that the cats had “blank stares.” A sure sign of sociopathy. “Wardens were noticing that the cats were displaying some odd behavior,” she said. “Normally when we encounter lions and we give them a way out, we never see them again. These cats were acting very habituated, like they had been in the area quite awhile.”
As “a last resort,” the wardens shot them. “We gave the cats every opportunity to get out of there, but this was very much a public safety threat.” The tranquilizer option was rejected, because it takes a few minutes for animals to be knocked out, and they didn’t want agitated cougars near people and pets.
Although the DFG said the cubs were acting oddly, Rebecca Dmytryk of WildRescue said a few days later, “their described behavior, allowing humans to approach… is not unusual for motherless, starving, or otherwise desperate young.” (Disclosure: I volunteer with WildRescue, but I haven’t shown this post to anyone there. As a volunteer I’ve met nothing scarier than a teenaged skunk. Which was kind of blank-eyed, come to think of it.)
(Captive animal.) Just don’t LOOK under your porch if you don’t want to know.
Almost a month later, the DFG released necropsy results. The cubs were about 4 months old, and weighed “13 and 14 pounds, a little bigger than house cats,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle. Actually, many house cats weigh more. The late Zeus Kaiser weighed 22 pounds.
So those were kittens. People were upset.
There was an [apology]. “With the necropsy reports, I now realize these animals were smaller than assumed,” said DFG director Charlton Bonam. “I regret this unfortunate incident in Half Moon Bay for all involved. The Department intends to learn from this experience.”
Tony Warrington, a DFG Assistant chief of enforcement, said, “In a perfect world, we would have had further non-lethal options available.” Bonam said the department was reviewing their guidelines on how to respond to mountain lion and bear reports.
Not a great apology. Bonham realizes that the animals were smaller than assumed? Indeed. The department should have – and could have – gotten better information before shooting. Someone who knew more about panther cubs could have been called in. He doesn’t address that issue.
Bonham “regret[s] this unfortunate incident” – that’s vague and distancing language. Who doesn’t regret an unfortunate incident?
Warrington’s “In a perfect world” doesn’t help. “In a perfect world” puts us on notice that this isn’t a perfect world, and it never will be perfect. There’ll always be something to cry about, so butch up, bunky.
But it was hopeful that they spoke of learning from the experience. DFG was clearly unhappy and embarrassed about the shooting and the reactions to it. That seemed sincere.
Any menacing of humans that needs to be done, WILL BE DONE BY ME.
I didn’t write about this apology then because it was depressing – people hate kitten-blasting – and the apology didn’t help matters.
What could they have done instead of shooting the cubs? Without a mother, they were too young to fend for themselves. State law currently forbids rehabilitating and releasing catamounts, so if they were to live, it would have to be in captivity.
In January, state senator Jerry Hill (those cubs were in his district) introduced a bill to “require state Fish and Wildlife wardens to tranquilize and relocate errant pumas instead of killing them.” (On January 1, 2013, California’s Department of Fish and Game changed its name to Department of Fish and Wildlife.)
The bill would authorize DFW to work with veterinarians, wildlife conservation groups, and shelters in cases where cougars present potential human conflict. Which would mean involving people with the experience to tell a bewildered baby from a blank-eyed killer.
At the beginning of March, DFW announced a draft policy giving wardens leeway to do things with mountain lions besides shoot them. It establishes a team of experts for wardens to consult. It says they will study the feasibility of rehabilitation and release, in case that becomes legal. It shows DFW learning from experiences like Half Moon Bay, just as they said they would. You heard that right.
Please don’t take my picture while I am frolicking.
Mountain lions present a pile of issues. They kill people. Rarely, but they do. Everyone is against that. Sometimes they kill animals we own, livestock and pets, also widely unpopular. (Disclosure: my sister lives where there are pumas, most of whom live on deer. Sometimes one gets the idea to specialize in livestock. Twice, a cougar has killed my sister’s goats/sheep. Each time, it came back the next night for seconds, and was shot by a county trapper. I did not show this post to my sister. Nor to any panthers.)
Mountain lions are also dangerous to bighorn sheep populations. Sometimes a mountain lion will start to specialize in bighorns. Such a cat can make a horrible dent in a bighorn herd, especially if the cat is feeding cubs (and teaching them to specialize in bighorns). There’s a less obvious harm. Bighorns are worriers, and when they detect lion predation, they may move to higher, barer elevations, where it’s harder for the lions to sneak up on them – but where it’s also harder for the lambs, so fewer lambs survive.
A case-by-case approach makes sense, but the blow-them-all-away approach to catamounts has dominated for a long time. That’s why it’s illegal to rehabilitate and release cougars in most states. A few states have more nuanced policies toward Felis concolor.
In March a young mountain lion was noted hiding in a bush in an Almaden back yard. It was estimated to be 15-20 pounds. A DFW warden called Wildlife Emergency Services (WES) in for help in capturing it. The cub was netted, taken to a wildlife rehabilitation center, sedated, and examined. He was skinny, dehydrated, and covered with ticks. (WildRescue changed its name to Wildlife Emergency Services.)
Later he was transferred to DFW’s Wildlife Investigations facility. When he was in better shape, DFW sent him to Arizona, to live in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.
Another, older catamount was detected and captured in Santa Cruz in May. DFW supervised, with assistance from police, WES, and U.C. Santa Cruz’s Puma Project. He was collared and released “in a location nearby, but in much more suitable habitat.”
So although the DFW apology wasn’t very good, the follow-through was amazing. A government agency reviewed its policies, made changes, and put them into practice. Without delay. I’m impressed. Since “here’s why this won’t happen again” is a powerful part of apology, I’m going back to raise their grade.
Oh I am so glad this story had a relatively happy ending!
Me too! That was a harrowing one.
I’m gonna say “Butch up, bunky” a lot now.
Oh, I remember, Kittengate was rough. (It’s Half Moon Bay; it needed a political-sounding name.) There was literal weeping and possibly some gnashing of teeth. It seemed like a bunch of stupid people went up and killed babies. Since this isn’t quite what happened, and they were within the right of the law – which I, and very few people screaming at them likely knew about, their bravery in even releasing a necropsy report is kind of astounding. And I agree: well done, them. They’re not adept at apologizing, but they are miles about the larger government in doing something about the screw-ups they’ve made, and getting right on it.
Last summer there was a mountain lion – that’s what we call them in our neck of the woods – stalking deer around a very woody neighborhood near us. We all got notes to simply stay vigilant at dawn and dusk, and to carry big sticks. Really, that’s just advice for life. ☺
I’m happy this has a happy ending, too.
WEll, I am the sister of mention above. I live in a very rural area, and one which just happens to be not far from a den that frequently has multiple mountain lions (dual-generation presumably.) These cats are rarely seen, and I got excited (in a good way) when I was lucky enough to catch a glimpse of one. I happily listened one night last week, when I heard one outside vocalizing. I hypothesized that it was looking for love, not dinner, because shouting while out hunting would be a poor strategy.
I have had livestock killed by catamounts on two occasions.
1) About five years ago, we had a lion kill a goat, kill and eat a sheep, and bite another sheep on the head (she survived a couple of amazing puncture wounds.) We called the federal trapper, who cam and examined the kills and confirmed that they were lion kills (we have also lost goats to coyotes, bobcats, and most aggravating of all – neighbor dogs.) He explained that he believed this was a cat he had been trying to get for over a month. During that span, this cat had killed at least a dozen calves, and about 40 goats. It had killed 28 goats in a single night at one unfortunate rancher’s place…it had eaten one of them. Do not forget for a minute that these are cats, and it is NOT unusual for them to kill more animals than they could possibly eat. THe trapper asked my permission to sit over the kill and try to get the cat. Considering the devastation it had wrought in that short period of time, I felt that its demise was inevitable, and I agreed. The cat was killed that night when it returned to feed. It was a very large (about 140 lbs) male in pretty good condition. It had carried the carcass (no drag marks) about 200 yards and eaten it about 50 yards from my neighbors lighted back door. They had dogs and children there.
We had no further troubles with Pumas until March of this year. One of my neighbors had reported losing pet sheep and a goat on several nights over about a ten day period. (Much of the federal trapper’s attention was on a cat on the other side county who had started stalking a hiker, and who subsequently stalked the game warden sent in to assess the problem.) I locked up my stock at night as best I could. At one point they reported that they thought the cat was no longer an issue, and I stopped locking up my stock. It turns out they were mistaken, and I went out to feed and found three dead goats (one was a personal favorite, one was a young doe worth $1000- $1500, and the third was a beloved and totally sweet matriarch). None of these animals had any noticeable blood on them, they were not eaten, and my first guess was that these were not predation deaths. Closer looks proved otherwise. Not only had one of the goats been dragged about 25 feet, but there was a big obvious puddy paw print a few feet away.
Once again the federal trapper came for a look. When he skinned back the hide (to assess bite patterns) on the carcasses, a strange thing emerged. There were no large punctures (from canine teeth) which is the usual method of kill. There were a bunch of what I would call “nip” marks, that did not even go all the way through the skin. At least one of the goats had had its neck broken, presumably by a powerful whack of the foreleg. I surmised at that point that there was something wrong with this cat’s mouth. The kills at my neighbors had the same characteristics, and the method of eating the carcasses was similarly odd. We surmise that the cat was planning to eat the goat it had dragged, but abandoned it when it inadvertently backed into the hot wire fencing. YOWL!
A trap was set but the cat did not return. A few nights later the cat killed the 6th or 7th sheep at my neighbors (my ungrateful critters were locked up again). This time the cat returned to his kill and was shot by the federal trapper. The cat indeed had serious dental issues which explained both its method and need for killing livestock.
I understand that I live in lion territory. I accept a certain degree of risk for all of us in this relationship. WHile I have no desire to lose animals to a puma, an occasional loss, to a cat who killed and ate what it needed might piss me off briefly, but I would consider it fair exchange for living here. The only two cats who have actually caused me trouble, were a bit different. One was on a major killing spree, and the other was handicapped. I fear that their deaths were pretty much inevitable.
In the future, we may have to just suffer the predation. It has been proposed to completely prohibit killing mountain lions in the state, even by federal trappers and in the case of predation, human threat, etc
I don’t believe a complete prohibition on killing mountain lions will ever pass (nor do I think it should). Cougars who genuinely threaten people with more than blank stares are never going to be accepted. Livestock-killers similarly won’t get a pass. The bighorn sheep-killers are a more obscure case, but I think they also need to tackled unless bighorn populations rebound in an unlikely way….
The federal tracker seemed to believe it was actually quite likely to pass in the very near future. Either that or they will simply remove all funding to employ trackers in the first place. I think human killing lions will indeed never be tolerated, but there is definitely a major push to say that livestock living in puma territory is going to have to take its chances. It has already been made illegal for even the federal tracker to use dogs when trying to locate a problem animal. (They did not attack the lion with the dogs.)
As with many such prohibitions, outlawing the killing of problem lions, is not likely to have exactly its intended effects. I’m sure that some livestock owners will decide to handle the problem themselves, illegally. I REALLY don’t want my neighbors out trying to kill lions. I think it is particularly dangerous for all involved, and I am not sure they will even kill the right lions. Just getting a clean line of sight around here, with as many houses and pastures of livestock as there are, is no easy matter. I certainly do not have either the means, the desire, or the necessary skill. My neighbors? These are not life-long ranchers out on a 10,000 acre spread in Montana.
I have a great deal of confidence in the federal tracker who has dealt with the problems in my area. He is extremely competent. He is compassionate. He is careful. And I do not get the impression he wants to blaze away at just any lion.
Having donated livestock to the local lion population, I have a strong opinion on this matter. In our area, it does not appear to be mothers feeding cubs that cause problems, but wandering males. The problem with re-locating these wandering male lions to another wild location is, they wander back. Also, the trap they are captured in lends itself to the lions breaking their canine teeth in their efforts to escape. Now you have a handicapped lion. Not a happy ending in my view…
I’m reminded of a story by Laura Lemay (mtrbike on the well)
Everyone should go read it. It’s long, and it takes a while to get to the mountain lion, but it’s very funny.
http://blog.lauralemay.com/2009/05/mutton-war.html
That is such a great story. Paintball! Rotten eggs! The short reign of the hydrangea!