Mark Elbroch - The Cougar Conundrum: Sharing the World with a Successful Predator

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2020 Mark Elbroch

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Keywords: Island Press, cougar, conundrum, wildlife management, conservation, puma, mountain lion, panther, coexistence, big cats, advocacy, keystone species, ecosystem services, tolerance, predator-prey, carnivores, ecology, predation, depredation, apex predator, biodiversity, ecosystem health, resilience, hunting, harvest, human-wildlife conflict, lethal control, democracy, Pittman-Roberts Act, Teaming with Wildlife, Teddy Roosevelt, Maurice Hornocker, misinformation, social media, attacks, human fatalities, livestock, Torres del Paine, human safety, ecosystem engineer, houndsman, hound hunting, inclusivity, Panthera

For Enzo and Avery, and for mountain lions everywhere

And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a mountain lion.

D. H. Lawrence, Mountain Lion

Puma, cougar, panther, mountain lion, catamount, mountain screamer, painter, red tiger, len, and leopardo are just several of the more than eighty common names that describe a graceful, stealthy predator that inhabits the largest range of any terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere. Common names remain regional. In Florida, these animals are called panthers, and in the Pacific Northwest, cougars. In much of the remaining West, they are most often called mountain lions, or just lions for short. Taxonomists call this species Puma concolor. The genus name Puma means powerful animal in an old Incan dialect. The species name concolor means single color and is meant to describe the uniform pelage of adult animals.

In late 2017, Steve Ecklund, host of a Canadian hunting television show, The Edge, posted public pictures on Facebook of himself and the dead mountain lion he had killed. He is an enthusiastic hunter and sportsman, hes an ambassador for Cabelas, the hunting equipment retail giant, and hed posted similar images of other animals hed hunted many times before. But unexpectedly, this one caused a surge of public backlash that even included Laureen Harper, the wife of the former prime minister. She took the time to post this on Twitter: What a creep Must be compensating for something, small penis probably. Its a low blow to attack a mans genitalia.

I barely registered the spike in social media surrounding Ecklund and his trophy mountain lion, excepting that friends kept sending me links to the various articles about the incident. The year 2017 had already been full of sensational news about mountain lions attacking pets and livestock, as well as warnings about protecting children following mountain lion sightings in various Western neighborhoods. One lion was killed in urban downtown Salt Lake Citythat incident raised some eyebrowsand there had been real excitement around a YouTube video of an encounter with a mountain lion on the High Sierra Trail in California.

A pair of hikers glimpsed a mountain lion on the trail before them. That wasnt unusual, but then they pursued it when it trotted away from them. Around the next corner, they found themselves much too close to the animal, which had lain on the slope above the trail. The encounter was peaceful and the cat did not show any signs of aggression that I could see in the videos I perused. Nevertheless, there were the inevitable debates about whether the hikers had acted appropriately or been foolish and were lucky to have survived.

There is a near-constant back-and-forth on various social media outlets between groups of individuals with different opinions about mountain lions, and nowadays I only half listenits like the static you hear on a handheld receiver, which every biologist learns is a distraction from the real signal indicating the direction of the animal you are looking for.

At the same time that Ecklund found himself the center of a cyberstorm, I was trying very hard to block out any lurid news about mountain lions so I could write a book on the little-known social behaviors of the species. Simultaneously, however, the Humane Society of the United States was initiating a signature campaign to end bobcat and mountain lion hunting in Arizona, and Safari Club International was petitioning the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth District to reverse the ban on mountain lion hunting in California. These developments were more difficult to ignore. They represented bolder, more-strategic efforts to impact mountain lion management that were being orchestrated by lobby groups representing different private-citizen stakeholders. Both efforts failed, but I followed them closely.

In early 2018 there was a further distraction when the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFW) announced the extinction of the eastern cougar, a subspecies of mountain lion. I found myself sucked into debates and confusion over the ruling and its implications for mountain lions across North America. The truth is that recent genetic research has shown that there never was a distinct eastern cougar in the first place, and that the media was emphasizing all the wrong aspects of the ruling. Then in May 2018, a mountain lion attacked two mountain bikers in Washington State, killing one. A fellow researcher dispatched the animal, which was a young male grossly underweight but otherwise healthy. It was the first mountain lion fatality in Washington State in some ninety years, but the media spread the story and its associated drama from coast to coast. Then it was back to pet and livestock attacks and more fear-mongering public warnings about mountain lions that had been spotted in Western neighborhoods, some near schools. By the time authorities in Oregon had announced the heartbreaking news that a mountain lion had killed a woman in Mount Hood National Forest in September, Id given up writing a book about mountain lion social behaviors. She was the first person ever killed by a mountain lion in Oregon, but given that she was the second person killed by a mountain lion in the United States in 2018, the incident resulted in renewed debate over mountain lion hunting. Every mountain lion story in the news eventually comes down to hunting.