Unwelcome Visitor at Valley’s Edge : Wildlife: Mountain lions are being sighted more frequently. Sometimes-tragic encounters across the state are renewing debate over managing the population.

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

And it’s 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 domain: 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 in the city-locked Santa Monica Mountains, where remains of deer killed by lions have been found amid the homes of 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 14 reported sightings in the Valley during 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 Sacramento jogger in April--has renewed a decades-old debate over man’s proper 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 in order to reduce the overcrowding, 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 nonetheless 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 support Prop. 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 the public’s evolving attitude toward large predators full circle.

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 persecution 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.”

It’s undisputed that the mountain lion has rebounded since state hunting was discontinued in 1959 and the bounty system dropped in 1963. From an estimate of 2,100 in the state Fish and Game Department’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. Once ranging all over North America below the Arctic Circle, the largest of the purring cats--as opposed to the larger roaring cats of Asia and Africa, like lions and tigers--was squeezed into the states west of the Rockies by encroaching settlers in the 19th Century and their numbers so reduced that they were rarely spotted by people, even in the wild.

Now, however, some researchers have said there may be more mountain lions on the loose in the western states than there were in frontier days.

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 development 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 Tujunga Canyon, an animal refuge where about 30 mountain lions are lodged, some of them pets that got too big for their owners and some wild animals trapped in cities. “They’re being pressured, so they’ve opted to live right next door to you.”

Sportsmen fume at what they see as the emotionalism of that analysis.

“When 117 passed, we knew there were going to be problems in the future,” said Dan Heal, a bow-and-arrow hunter from Chico, Calif., 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 up to 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--sometimes foraging right into the edge of growing suburbs.

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

But wildlife biologists contend 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 of the Mountain Lion Foundation.

Shy by nature and trained from infancy to hunt four-legged creatures, the big cats account for fewer injuries to people than lightning. Only seven attacks on human beings have been documented in California during this century, state game officials say.

But the acceleration of the rate of those encounters, and the terror they cause, has given the issue new prominence.

Six of the seven attacks have occurred since 1986, and four involved 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. Her body was partly eaten by a female mountain lion, who was later tracked down and killed. Experts speculated that Schoener ran past the hidden cat, stimulating its chase instinct, like a ball of yarn rolled in front of a house cat.

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

“What we are saying is the current law is emotional. It doesn’t give any possibility for scientific evidence to be used,” said Kevin Brown, an aide to Knowles. “We want to return responsibility for managing the mountain lion population to Fish and Game.”

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 buying 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 Fish and Game Department, 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. Some of their officers see it as a no-win dilemma.

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 a campaign to pass a law shielding local governments from such suits. Trial lawyers and hunters’ groups have opposed their bills.

Despite the fear that wild animals can arouse, standoffs with human beings almost always turn out badly for the beast.

State game officials, who have primary responsibility for removing wild animals from populated areas, kill an average of five to 10 mountain lions a year, said Terry Mansfield, director of the Department of Fish and Game.

It is within their authority to capture and remove the animal to a safe habitat. Seldom is that an option, however, because the mountain lion population has filled its habitat to overflowing, Mansfield said.

Today, the only significant management of the mountain lion population is accomplished by depredation permits, which 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.

Most of the depredation permits are issued in rural counties in the central and northern part of California. No lions have been killed under permit in Los Angeles, and neither have Los Angeles city officials had occasion to kill a lion.

Of the three lions trapped in urban areas of the San Fernando Valley in the past quarter-century, two showed up in the last six years, said Kroeplin, the wildlife officer for the area.

One of those climbed a tree behind a Chatsworth house in 1988 and the other was prowling a condominium at Tampa Avenue and Rinaldi Street in 1991. Both were released in the mountains, Kroeplin said.

With lion sightings increasing, Kroeplin fears such good fortune may not last.

As he walked down a fire road near Aliso Creek in Granada Hills last week, where two boys made the Valley’s most recent sighting, he observed only the tracks of humans, dogs and horses.

But what the tracks tell him is that unsuspecting people are dallying in the domain of a lethal predator. “These people come up here every day,” he said. “Someday there’s going to be a mountain lion going across here.”

His hope is that when the encounter is over, lion and human walk off unhurt, each to their own worlds.

Prowling Into Trouble Once thought to have practically vanished even in the wild, the mountain lion, or cougar, is bouncing back, and increasinly running into human beings. In the last 12 months, officials have confirmed 14 mountain lion sightings in urban areas of the San Fernando Valley. *Local Sightings Confirmed by L.A. Department of Animal Regulation *Population Statewide estimates for a sampling of years from 1920-’88. *Depredation Permits Permits issued for confirmed damage to property; number of lions taken from 1971-’88. Sources: California Department of Fish and Game and L.A. Department of Animal Regulation.