Cougars

[Lallans]

Today real cougars (not the human variety) enter my life with the official announcement that the big cats have been confirmed as having returned to Ontario. I spend a lot of time in the outdoors here, where even a decade back we were confident in the Farley Mowat-inspired notion that large predators such as bears and wolves (and by association, cougars) don't attack humans but events have proved that gentleman wrong. Even the coyotes who moved in in the last 25 years or so have taken a liking to menacing smaller humans, most cases going unreported if no blood was spilled. And now we have cougars... these are still really rare here and seem harder to find than ivory billed woodpeckers, even for the government professionals, but I've read accounts indicating that they are becoming increasingly troublesome to people out west- what might we expect when cougars are fully restored to our eastern habitats? Should I start shopping for a rearview mirror for hiking? A backwards walking dog?

[BoldHighlander]

Get yourself a big walking stick

We haven't had a big cat sighting in town for about 3 or 4 years now, but with the urban growth of the area, & the ban on hound hunting, the cougar population mushroomed (which accounted for them moving into the outskirts of town).
At one point we had one living on Sehome Hill, which is a wooded green space surrounded by a highly urban neighborhood, the college, & a high school!

It seemed they lost their fear of man & dogs around here, and at a popular lake & park about 7 years ago, two women on a nature walk were attacked by a big cat. The only thing that kept it from doing serious damage was one woman's walking staff keeping it just out of reach! When my daughter's grade school class had a field trip there, I'd go along & walk the trail in the back of the pack, watching both for stragglers and the brush & trees. Better to be safe than sorry

The deer population in the area has mushroomed too (real road hazards), so this might account for the decline in local cougar sightings (they're not hunting further out for chow). I don't know...

Anyhow, unless you have the factors we had here, you'll probably be alright. Usually big cats are very solitary & really don't like human contact.
I remember as a kid (about 11 or 12 yrs old) while spending the summer at my grandfather's farm in the SW part of this state, we were going up into the woods to check the spring level where the communities water was piped in from. While trudging up the hillside, we had a big cat (close but unseen) "scream" at us....liked to scare me half to death (and just as the old tales say, it did sound like a woman's scream). My grandfather, a man of the woods (a life long hunter & logger, both in the Ozarks & here in Washington state), paused, said "its just a cougar, probably warning us off from a fresh kill", and he just continued on his way.
We never did see that big cat, nor were troubled by it on the way back down.
I'll never forget that close encounter.

(Sorry for the long winded response, I got on a roll )

[Lallans]

Get yourself a big walking stick

We haven't had a big cat sighting in town for about 3 or 4 years now, but with the urban growth of the area, & the ban on hound hunting, the cougar population mushroomed (which accounted for them moving into the outskirts of town).
At one point we had one living on Sehome Hill, which is a wooded green space surrounded by a highly urban neighborhood, the college, & a high school!

It seemed they lost their fear of man & dogs around here, and at a popular lake & park about 7 years ago, two women on a nature walk were attacked by a big cat. The only thing that kept it from doing serious damage was one woman's walking staff keeping it just out of reach! When my daughter's grade school class had a field trip there, I'd go along & walk the trail in the back of the pack, watching both for stragglers and the brush & trees. Better to be safe than sorry

The deer population in the area has mushroomed too (real road hazards), so this might account for the decline in local cougar sightings (they're not hunting further out for chow). I don't know...

Anyhow, unless you have the factors we had here, you'll probably be alright. Usually big cats are very solitary & really don't like human contact.
I remember as a kid (about 11 or 12 yrs old) while spending the summer at my grandfather's farm in the SW part of this state, we were going up into the woods to check the spring level where the communities water was piped in from. While trudging up the hillside, we had a big cat (close but unseen) "scream" at us....liked to scare me half to death (and just as the old tales say, it did sound like a woman's scream). My grandfather, a man of the woods (a life long hunter & logger, both in the Ozarks & here in Washington state), paused, said "its just a cougar, probably warning us off from a fresh kill", and he just continued on his way.
We never did see that big cat, nor were troubled by it on the way back down.
I'll never forget that close encounter.

(Sorry for the long winded response, I got on a roll )

I generally do carry a big stick, for balance, for beating off the mosquitos found here, and against the possibility of rabid fox attacks- I see those poor creatures occasionally but so far have been lucky in that they weren't in the biting phase or whatever it is. I have other 'sticks' that carry things like 00 buck, but that is mostly discouraged in Ontario these days. Anyway the encouraging news is that larger humans do seem to be immune from most wildlife-related problems, so clearly I should continue working hard to gain weight

[BoldHighlander]

I generally do carry a big stick, for balance, for beating off the mosquitos found here,

Do they get that big there?!
(I'm picturing an old Sci-Fi B-movie )

and against the possibility of rabid fox attacks- I see those poor creatures occasionally but so far have been lucky in that they weren't in the biting phase or whatever it is.

Wow! I never realized that about them, though I read about a recent fox-biting attack on a couple of children (in their house) in England....

I have other 'sticks' that carry things like 00 buck,

You just brought to mind a metal band I listened to back in the early 80's called Krokus. They had a song entitled "The Long Stick Goes Boom"

Anyway the encouraging news is that larger humans do seem to be immune from most wildlife-related problems, so clearly I should continue working hard to gain weight

I'll give you some of mine (I need to lose about 20 lbs)

[sydnie7]

Fair amount of cougar aka mountain lion problems in Southern California as the population pushes into "their" foothill territory. Read an interesting article about how the typical behavior of a jogger can attract a cat attack -- the movement gets the cat interested, then when the jogger stops to tie a shoe, stretch, etc. the person bending down makes them a more attractively sized target. Bam!

So. . . gain weight (check), stop jogging (check), and carry that big stick I got from Kilted Carver (check). I'm good!

[Vegan Scot]

I know full well what a minority I am here on X Marks. Perhaps all the more reason for me to voice my opinion from within the fray. Two quotes immediately sprang to mind while reading through this thread, both from the gadfly and defender of the American West, Edward Abbey.

"The rancher strings barbed wire across the range, drills wells and bulldozes stock ponds everywhere, drives off the elk and antelope and bighorn sheep, poisons coyotes and prairie dogs, shoots eagle and bear and cougar on sight, supplants the native bluestem and grama grass with tumbleweed, cow ****, cheat grass, snakeweed, anthills, poverty weed, mud and dust and flies--and then leans back and smiles broadly at the Tee Vee cameras and tells us how much he loves the West."

"We need coyotes more than we need, let us say, more people, of whom we already have an extravagant surplus, or more domesticated dogs, which in all fairness could and should be ground up into hamburger and used as emergency coyote food, to raise their spirits and perhaps improve the tenor of their predawn howling."

Perhaps the same could and should be said of cougars...

[Alan H]

I know full well what a minority I am here on X Marks. Perhaps all the more reason for me to voice my opinion from within the fray. Two quotes immediately sprang to mind while reading through this thread, both from the gadfly and defender of the American West, Edward Abbey.

"The rancher strings barbed wire across the range, drills wells and bulldozes stock ponds everywhere, drives off the elk and antelope and bighorn sheep, poisons coyotes and prairie dogs, shoots eagle and bear and cougar on sight, supplants the native bluestem and grama grass with tumbleweed, cow ****, cheat grass, snakeweed, anthills, poverty weed, mud and dust and flies--and then leans back and smiles broadly at the Tee Vee cameras and tells us how much he loves the West."

"We need coyotes more than we need, let us say, more people, of whom we already have an extravagant surplus, or more domesticated dogs, which in all fairness could and should be ground up into hamburger and used as emergency coyote food, to raise their spirits and perhaps improve the tenor of their predawn howling."

Perhaps the same could and should be said of cougars...

You'n me, brother. We're on the same page.

I vote for more cougars, coyotes, ants, butterflies, gophers, trees, bunch grass, grasshoppers, lizards, hawks and bats...

and a LOT fewer humans.

[Alan H]

I figure that if a coyote thinks I might make a meal, then I'm absolutely entitled to beat the crap out of the animal and convince it otherwise. I, too, am an animal and will act like one to preserve my life.

That doesn't change my opinion that there are WAY too many people. Too many people results in a huge destruction of biological diversity, and I am one of those wierdos that doesn't think that just because we're human, we're any more important or "worthy" than any other species that lives on the planet.

[wildrover]

I figure that if a coyote thinks I might make a meal, then I'm absolutely entitled to beat the crap out of the animal and convince it otherwise. I, too, am an animal and will act like one to preserve my life.

Three words:

FULL-MASK-SPORRAN

[auld argonian]

That doesn't change my opinion that there are WAY too many people. .

Yeah...but the hard part here is finding any that want to volunteer to leave...anybody?

Remember out ol' buddy Thomas Robert Malthus? The one who suggested that there will always be disasters to help "thin the herd" now and again? We've gotten too good at getting through disasters so there's a lot more of us covering a lot more area.

But Bro. Canuck's last post reminds me of the Thylacoleo sightings in the Land Down Under. The marsupial tiger supposedly went extinct back in the 1930's but people are still spotting them out there in the outback. Mike Smith, a local songwriter, did a great tune a while back titled "There's A Panther In Michigan" about sightings back in the last decades of the 20th Century.

(M. Smith)
Chorus: There's a panther in Michigan. Don't that make your Halloween?
There's a panther in Michigan, although he is seldom seen
And he's following the water in the ways of the Indian,
And he's crossing the border to Indiana.
There's an awful lot of cover down along the Raisin river.
We would set up on the one side, he'd show up on the other.
I know people used to wonder why we couldn't catch the panther,
There's an awful lot of cover down along the Raisin river.
When a farmer in Manchester called, I was there in minutes,
Following the trail of feathers
Through the high grass when he screamed.
Thirty-four years in law enforcement, I've never been so scared.
I could see where he was going by the way the grass was moving.
Chorus:
Now, people who know panthers say that they are lazy hunters,
And they will take a prey that's wounded over one that's healthy,
And he might take a child, playing in a sand-box,
For some kind of wounded critter down along the Raisin river.
Test drivers saw the panther at the Chrysler proving grounds.
It was during hunting season. He was out there on the track,
And he knew if he went in there, he'd be safe from hunters.
He's an uncanny animal.
Chorus:


Best

AA