That is such a great story. Paintball! Rotten eggs! The short reign of the hydrangea!

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

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.

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….

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

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.

I’m gonna say “Butch up, bunky” a lot now.