UPDATE: Please allow me to preface the following post by stating that prior to my writing it, I was not aware that the lone hiker that I describe below had pulled a hoax on authorities; he was not attacked by a mountain lion. Despite this galling evidence, the following post is still pertinent to hiking in mountain lion country.

Last Saturday a local hiker was attacked by a mountain lion in Palo Alto’s Foothills Park. The hiker was hiking alone. Yesterday, in response to the incident, a number of area parks and preserves were temporarily shut down and an animal tracker was hired by Palo Alto city officials to hunt the mountain lion down and kill it. I vehemently disagree with this knee-jerk tactic.

Late this morning, a fellow hiker posted the names of the closed parks on a local bulletin board, mentioning that the Midpeninsula Open Space District is working closely with Foothills Park staff and that the California Department of Fish and Game will reopen these preserves and facilities as soon as it is safe.

The posting was meant well. To me, however, it was only half the story. I felt compelled to tell the other half, so I contributed a post of my own:

The reason that these local parks and preserves are temporarily closed is so an “animal tracker” (read: “hunter”) can kill the mountain lion without interference. It’s a shame that our first instinct, as a society, is to kill a big cat rather than trap it humanely and release it in a more remote area. We have to get used to the fact that wilderness isn’t wilderness if we keep killing what’s wild in it.

My fellow hiker wrote me directly:

In receiving my volunteer trail crew training, it was explained to us that, more often than not, when the animals responsible for the attacks on humans are caught, they are found to be injured or demented. This drives them into behavior patterns they normally wouldn’t have…like attacking humans. In these cases, they typically prefer to put the animal down. Some of the other cases, where the animal has been killed and no attacks were involved, I would agree, seems a bit excessive.

A-ha! “When the animals…are caught…[we] typically prefer to put the animal down.” Hence my argument.

Let’s face it: oftentimes the explanations we hear and read are biased only toward humans, not toward the animal. When you’re truly hungry—as a top-of-the-food-chain predator might be in times of drought—you’ll do what is necessary to eat. That’s just true nature at work.

A non-rescuscible injured cat I can understand euthanizing. Maybe. But pronouncing an animal to be demented is, I feel, a subjective, narrow-minded, human-centric, and therefore wholly inappropriate judgment that merely serves to perpetuate our human fear of nature and our unwarranted desire to control it—i.e., sanitize the outdoor experience—rather than embrace it. It is issues like this that regularly remind me that it’s we humans who need to reconsider our own behavior patterns.

I said as much in response to my fellow hiker’s email, and received the following response:

Demented animals are determined to be so by the results of lab tests and autopsy, not arbitrary pronouncements. Each case has to be assessed individually.

I felt as if my argument had fallen overboard into The Sea of Missed Points. So I hoisted it back aboard:

Therefore, it would seem that to be pronounced demented, the cougar is likely killed first. That scenario smacks of being a typical application of misguided human-centric “shoot first and ask questions later” logic rather than a consideration of the life and needs of the animal itself. Typical human behavior, yet still wholly inappropriate.

I’d sure like to learn of a cougar who attacked a human but whose life was spared.

We have to remember that we humans are visitors in the cougar’s habitat; it is not the other way around. Soon, I suppose—perhaps by the hour of this posting—there will be one less local cougar merely because we as a society have chosen to react with extreme prejudice to its choice of menu. I’m sure the accosted hiker knows how lucky he was despite his decision to hike alone in an area where mountain lion warnings are clearly posted. But, sadly, it is the mountain lion’s demise that will be exchanged for this hiker’s lucky break.

I haven’t even begun to mention what happens to a local ecosystem when you remove its top predator. But an increase in highway fatalities due to excessive deer populations springs to mind.

So why do we even choose to capture these big cats? They are not demented; they do not run afoul of natural law. But we humans do it without regard.

We seem to continue, as a society, to act as sociopaths against Nature. We jump to conclusions based on our own point of view. We gun down what we don’t understand. We often say “live and let live”; why don’t we mean it?

So when a mountain lion attacks, why do we shoot first and ask questions later? I am hereby asking, people.

We need cougars in our local hills. Let Nature take its course. Take pictures, not lives. And don’t hike alone.

Related post: Cougar!

~winehiker