Too Close to Home : Mountain Lions’ Contact With Humans Increases as Their Numbers Grow

It is fast and silent and kills its prey by slicing its fangs between the neck bones, snapping the spinal cord.

And it is not, as you might think, confined to a distant and inaccessible wilderness.

With increasing frequency, North America’s most efficient four-legged killer, the mountain lion, is prowling areas that human beings think of as their domains: suburban neighborhoods, urban open spaces, sometimes even the shopping mall.

Just last month, two 12-year-old boys came upon a mountain lion in a canyon behind their Granada Hills homes. Days later, police officers shot one that wandered into a shopping mall in Montclair.

After years in which the big cats were presumed to have vanished from the mountainous fringes of Los Angeles, animal officials are increasingly finding signs of a resurgent population throughout the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, the Santa Susanas and even the city-locked Santa Monica Mountains, where remains of deer killed by lions have been found amid homes in Encino.

“I’m getting more complaints during the past 12 months than I have ever had,” said Dennis Kroeplin, San Fernando Valley wildlife specialist for the Los Angeles Department of Animal Regulation. Kroeplin says he has confirmed more than a dozen reported sightings in the city in that time by either spotting the lion himself or identifying the paw prints left behind.

Across the state, face-to-face encounters are on the rise too, and that trend--brought into horrifying focus by the fatal attack on a jogger near Sacramento in April--has renewed a decades-old debate over man’s relationship with the large predators.

Hunters and livestock interests attribute the recent spate of attacks on humans to a ban on mountain lion hunting that has been in effect in California, one way or another, since 1971. They argue that it is time to resume hunting to reduce lion overpopulation, which they blame for forcing the animals into areas where they encounter humans.

“I think the attacks speak for themselves,” said Paige Lewis, director of communications for the Wildlife Legislative Fund for America, a hunters’ lobbying group. “The incidents are going to continue to rise until people realize there is just not enough habitat to support that wildlife.”

But while they acknowledge that lion-human contacts are rising, many animal rights activists and wildlife biologists characterize the risks as an acceptable price for preserving the wildest of the wild.

To minimize the hazards, they advocate programs to teach defensive behavior to those who live or vacation in mountain lion country, although they do not object to trapping or killing individual animals that threaten people or livestock.

At the same time, they adamantly draw the line at sport hunting, which is usually done with packs of dogs that track and tree the lion, allowing the hunter to shoot it at close range.

“We just don’t think that is a proper use of wildlife heritage in this day and age,” said Mark Palmer, executive director of the Mountain Lion Foundation, which was formed by environmental groups in 1986 to pass Proposition 117, the 1990 state initiative that prohibits mountain lion hunting.

The voters in effect endorsed a hunting moratorium originally imposed by the Legislature in 1971, bringing full circle the public’s evolving attitude toward large predators.

To California’s early settlers, the mountain lion--also called cougar, puma, panther, painter and catamount--was just a dangerous varmint.

“They were competitors for deer and competitors for livestock,” said wildlife biologist Paul Beier, a mountain lion specialist in Northern Arizona University’s forestry department. “There wasn’t a whole lot of thought in it. You saw a predator and you shot it.”

Early in this century, California made eradication a policy, offering bounties and sending four state hunters into the field to kill mountain lions.

The effect of the eradication remains a matter of conjecture because no scientific lion census was done until 1971. One estimate set the California population at only 600 in 1920. Beier, though an advocate of protection, now doubts that the mountain lion was ever that close to extinction.

“They’re very durable,” he said. “If there’s a few of them out there in the wilderness, they’ll find each other and have cubs.”

Undisputed is the mountain lion’s rebound since state hunting was discontinued in 1959 and the bounty system dropped in 1963. From a population estimated at 2,100 in the state Department of Fish and Game’s first formal count in 1971, mountain lions now number as many as 6,000.

California’s experience is part of a mountain lion comeback across the western United States and Canada.

While the population boom is still being researched by wildlife biologists, the causes of the recent increase in conflicts between mountain lions and humans is fiercely debated by conservationists and hunters.

Animal welfare activists focus on the continued spread of suburban developments into previously wild areas and the popularity of hiking and camping.

“Our ever-expanding encroachment makes it very difficult for an animal to make a living out there,” said Martine Collette, founder of the Wildlife Waystation in Little Tujnga Canyon, an animal refuge where about 30 mountain lions are lodged, some of them pets that got too big for their owners and some of them wild animals trapped in cities. “They’re being pressured, so they’ve opted to live right next door to you.”

Sportsmen fume at that analysis.

“When (Proposition) 117 passed, we knew there were going to be problems in the future,” said Dan Heal, a Chico bow-and-arrow hunter and chairman of the California Sportsmen’s Task Force. “We forecast right then that if you don’t manage a population, it’s going to overflow its range.”

Hunters argue that mountain lion habitat is already taken up by solitary adult males who command as much as 100 square miles of territory each. Younger males are forced to look elsewhere for a home, often ending up on the undesirable fringes of the wild lands--meaning that they forage into the edge of growing suburbs in some places.

A managed hunt, sportsmen say, would clear out territories for the young lions, keeping them in the wild and coincidentally generate revenue from license fees with which the state could pay for research to protect the species.

But wildlife biologists contend that there is no evidence of a correlation between hunting and human safety. California is the only state where no hunting is allowed, but other states have just as many lion attacks on humans, they say.

“All of the attacks in California have occurred in regional or state parks where you don’t allow hunting anyway,” said Palmer.

Viewed from the detached perspective of the wildlife biologist, mountain lion attacks are not a particularly serious problem.

“Now that we have changed our attitudes about predators, we have to realize that there will be risks,” said Beier of Northern Arizona University. “You’re never going to get the risk to zero unless we eliminate mountain lions.”

Shy by nature and trained from infancy to hunt four-legged creatures, the big cats account for fewer human injuries than lightning. Only seven attacks on human beings have been documented in California this century, state game officials say. Six of the seven attacks have occurred since 1986, four involving children. A boy and a girl were mauled that year in an Orange County park. A 1992 attack in Santa Barbara County and a 1993 attack in San Diego County left two boys slightly injured.

Most recently, a woman apparently saved her husband’s life in late August by slaying a rabid mountain lion with a kitchen knife when it attacked a group of campers near San Rios in Mendocino County, biting off her husband’s thumb.

California’s first documented mountain lion fatality occurred in April when Barbara Schoener, a 40-year-old mother of two, was killed while jogging in a wilderness area near Sacramento.

Schoener’s death sparked her hometown legislator, Assemblyman David Knowles (R-Placerville), to introduce legislation aimed at repealing the 25-year-old ban on hunting.

The bill aroused widespread opposition from conservationists, not only because they are repelled by hunting but because it would also have abolished a land acquisition fund that has steered millions of dollars into the purchase of wildlife habitat, including $50 million worth in the Santa Monica Mountains.

An Assembly committee killed it on a party line vote, Republicans for and Democrats opposed.

Fuming over the failure of the bill, Heal of the Sportsmen’s Task Force predicted that “it’s just a matter of time before some child is taken and then we’re going to see the problem finished.”

Caught in the middle of these rhetorical salvos are agencies such as the Department of Animal Regulation in Los Angeles and the state Department of Fish and Game, charged with protecting wild animals as well as the public.

Facing the condemnation of animal rights activists if they kill a wild animal unnecessarily, they are also fearful of being held liable if someone is injured in an attack on public land.

After a mountain lion attacked 10-year-old Laura Small in 1986--leaving her partially paralyzed and blind in one eye--Orange County lost a $2-million lawsuit, judged negligent for failing to post warnings that lions might lurk in Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park.

Since then, the county has been unsuccessful in efforts to pass a law shielding local governments from such suits. Trial lawyers and hunters’ groups have opposed their bills.

At the other extreme, Azusa police officers were assailed by animal rights activists in May when they pumped 14 shotgun rounds into a 350-pound black bear that wandered onto a residential street and was unaffected by two tranquilizer darts.

Today, the only significant management of the mountain lion population is accomplished by depredation permits that authorize property owners to kill mountain lions that threaten livestock or pets. The number of lions killed by permit has grown steadily from five in 1971 to 74 last year, and will probably rise again this year, Mansfield said.