Officials Kill Cougar Found in Yorba Linda Neighborhood

A 120-pound mountain lion was shot to death Wednesday morning as it crouched by a hedge in a quiet Yorba Linda neighborhood.

The female cougar had been roaming the area as children left for school, authorities said. Police--on the scene since initial reports at 6:30 a.m.--ordered children back inside and used bullhorns to warn residents to stay indoors.

Just after 8 a.m., a game warden and six officers converged on the animal on the front lawn of a house at 20711 Via Sonrisa and fired four shotgun rounds, said Pat Moore, a spokesman for the state Department of Fish and Game.

“The streets were full of children walking to school,” said Bob Ashabraner, 36, who lives directly across from the house. Ashabraner said only his block was cordoned off.

Dana Chapman, 32, another resident who saw the cat bounding into the garden where it was finally killed, said she got a call from neighbor Chris Tanner at about 7 a.m. to keep her children indoors.

She said Tanner was picking up the newspapers when the cougar bounded past her, across her front lawn.

“She could see wet paw prints as big as her hand” on the driveway, Chapman said.

Coyotes, skunks and even raccoons occasionally appear around the 6-year-old tract a quarter-mile from the undeveloped Chino Hills, Chapman said. “But I never expected something this big!”

Moore said the cougar was killed rather than tranquilized because tranquilizer darts take effect only after 15 to 20 minutes, and the warden at the scene was afraid the cat would injure someone.

The cougar’s body was taken to the Fish and Game Department’s Victorville facility and frozen pending a routine necropsy, Moore said.

After the shooting, Ashabraner said, his 7-year-old son “went to his room and cried a bit.”

And at nearby Travis Ranch Elementary School, secretary Sue Jones said children were upset that the cougar had been killed. She also said parents called and sent notes explaining the reason for their children’s tardiness.

“One little boy brought in a shotgun (shell) casing to share with his class,” she said.

Larry Sitton, a wildlife biologist with the Fish and Game Department who authorized the shooting, said the department receives about a dozen reports annually of cougars in populated areas in Southern California. The last stray cougar shot in Orange County, about nine months ago, had attacked a poodle.

According to Sitton, cougar ventures into urban areas have become more frequent in the past five years, partly because of constraints on cougar hunting, he said.

Wednesday’s incident comes in the midst of heated controversy among sportsmen, wildlife protection groups and the state Fish and Game Commission over whether a 16-year moratorium on cougar hunting in California should be lifted.

Urban development increasingly has encroached “into (the mountain lions’) back yard. . . . The carrying capacity of the land is being exceeded,” Sitton said. “Cougars are having to venture into marginal territories just to make ends meet.”

Moore said cougars are “very secretive and don’t like people” and that the cat shot Wednesday “may have been hungry and was looking for a pet or pet food.”

The Orange County Board of Supervisors last fall approved a $154,000 cougar-population study in up to 10,000 acres of undeveloped land, mostly in southern Orange County.

A 5-year-old El Toro girl and a 6-year-old Huntington Beach boy were mauled in separate attacks in 1986 in the Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Regional Park east of San Juan Capistrano. The park was closed then reopened last year with more stringent rules on adult supervision of children when authorities decided the cats had left the area. Numerous sightings of and close encounters with cougars have occurred at O’Neill Regional Park in Trabuco Canyon.