Lions Pose Dilemma for Game Wardens

Which to use--nerve-stunning dart or fatal shotgun blast?

That question, faced last week by a state game warden when a mountain lion showed up on a Valencia patio, is one that brings deep values into conflict.

Shooting to kill is certain to horrify onlookers and arouse the wrath of animal rights activists who believe wild strays should be transported back to their habitat. Yet the humane solution--the much touted tranquilizer darts designed to drug the animal into harmlessness--may lead to injury or even death to humans.

And if the animal escapes, what happens to the next small child it encounters?

That was a chance the game warden in last week’s incident chose not to take; he shot the mountain lion to death.

But it turns out that even the “humane” solution often is merely a stay of execution: Darted lions are later killed, quietly and out of sight of the public and the cameras.

The gun-or-dart question confronts the state’s peace officers and game wardens with increasing frequency, as an expanding population of mountain lions--and occasionally black bears--pushes from the state’s rugged open spaces into expanding suburban neighborhoods, bringing pets and people face to face with potentially deadly predators.

After a mountain lion’s 1994 fatal attack on a jogger near Sacramento--the state’s first in 80 years--a second woman was killed by a mountain lion near San Diego just a few months later. Since then, dozens of mountain lions have been tracked and shot after threatening people. Sightings have proliferated in mountainside communities.

In response to the rising number of confrontations, state game officials are preparing a new policy that will define a progressive scale of threats to help wardens decide when to immobilize and when to kill outright.

Yet behind the apparent dilemma lies a little-known but harsh reality. Even mountain lions hauled away alive after being felled by a syringe of nonlethal anesthetic are not on their way back to the forest.

“Generally we don’t capture and release,” said Ken Zanzi, assistant chief of wildlife management in the state Department of Fish and Game.

Instead, the dart is used to remove the animal without traumatizing onlookers or exposing anyone to an errant gunshot.

“Then it would be dispatched after that, humanely,” Zanzi said.

The drugged animals are given a lethal injection or, if the serum is not available, a bullet to the head, he said.

Rarely does one of these majestic predators--also known as cougars, pumas, painters and catamounts--live long after being caught in a populated area, and the few survivors spend the rest of their lives in cages, he said.

“Where there is an institution that would house that animal--and those places are getting very difficult to find anymore--we’ll try to make arrangements to have it placed, especially kittens from a mountain lion or cubs from a black bear,” Zanzi said.

(Bears are different. Because they may have just wandered into town scouting for food, as opposed to being driven out by other bears, darted bears are usually trucked back to the woods, Zanzi said.) When it comes to mountain lions, the state’s wildlife managers say they must kill the animals rather than release them because they believe the state’s mountain lion habitat already has more animals than it can support, a sad result of the rebound of the population after hunting of the animals was outlawed in 1972.

Officials contend that summarily dropping a new cougar into another’s territory would have one of several unpleasant results. Because cougars are territorial and will fight for exclusive hunting rights in large areas, one could be killed in combat. The alternatives are that one of them would starve or be driven out of the wilderness into a populated area, which is probably what began the problem in the first place.

In all cases, a lion dies.

The reasoning is hard even for mountain lion lovers to refute.

“It’s true they don’t have a place to go,” said Lynn Sadler, executive director of the Mountain Lion Foundation. “There’s no wonderful solution.”

Animal advocates and the state’s wildlife officials don’t see eye to eye on what to do about the overcrowded cougar habitat. The Department of Fish and Game proposes “mountain lion management.”

Translated from bureaucratese, that means allowing hunters to reduce the population to what the environment can support, which would require repeal of a proposition passed by voters in 1972.

To preserve hunting ranges for the lions, Sadler is focusing on saving wildlife habitat from further encroachment through public education.

“Our polling shows people care very deeply about wildlife, but they don’t necessarily think through the consequences of their decisions,” Sadler said. “People move out to the country to get away from it all, and they don’t even think about the fact that they are smack in the middle of an ecosystem and that animals are going to die.”

For now, though, all the signs suggest that game wardens--as well as less highly trained police and animal control officers--will increasingly find themselves under pressure to make quick decisions, even in areas that have been urbanized for decades.

The Fish and Game Department does not keep statistics on how many lions have been darted as opposed to shot. But during the two years before last week’s incident, mountain lions had been shot in Arcadia, Altadena, La Crescenta and Fillmore.

Attacks on people are also climbing. Of 11 this century, two occurred in 1909, two in 1986 and the remaining seven since 1992.

In such attacks, the animal is routinely tracked and killed.

Less clear-cut are situations where lions show up in populated areas, potentially endangering people, pets and livestock, but do not attack. Although such sightings remain fairly rare and not well-documented, they too appear to be multiplying. Since 1994, The Times has reported sightings in Ventura, Conejo Valley, Tujunga, Arcadia, Thousand Oaks, Porter Ranch, Granada Hills and Irvine.

When a threat to pets or livestock has been verified, the Fish and Game Department can issue a permit allowing a rancher or farmer to kill the animal.

The number of lions killed under these depredation permits grew steadily from seven in 1972 to 73 in 1993, and then to 122 in 1994, the last year for which there are records.

But Fish and Game wardens or local officers can kill a mountain lion only when it is perceived to be an imminent threat to public health or safety.

In these cases, whether an animal is shot to death in someone’s backyard or removed for a more clinical demise is left to the warden’s discretion--within a general principle.

“Our No. 1 concern is public safety; then our concern would be toward that animal,” said Bob Teagle, capture specialist for the Fish and Game Department’s Wildlife Investigations Laboratory near Sacramento.

To ensure that animals are immobilized as often as possible, rather than shot, Teagle trains wardens, veterinarians and biologists in the use of dart guns and other capturing equipment.

A cadre of darting experts equipped with special rifles and a nerve-blocking drug is ready throughout the state to respond to a threatening lion.

The game warden’s decision last Tuesday to shoot the lion that showed up in Valencia drew stiff criticism from a Los Angeles Zoo veterinarian who was rushing to assist with a dart gun.

Calling the warden “trigger-happy,” veterinarian Gary Kuehn said he could have saved the animal if game officials had awaited his arrival, only a few minutes later. The killing prompted dozens of angry phone calls to the Department of Fish and Game’s regional office in Long Beach.

State game officials defended the decision, saying they acted only after failing to drive the animal into an open area where it would pose less of a hazard to people.

“We do have dart guns, but we didn’t want this cat running around through the neighborhood,” said Lt. Tony Warrington.

Despite the protests, leading mountain lion advocates, including Sadler of the Mountain Lion Foundation, declined to criticize. “It’s a tough call,” said Paul Beier, a wildlife biologist at Northern Arizona University who has studied Southern California’s large cats.

“From a humane point of view, we would all like to see animals not killed,” Beier said. “Still, probably only once in a game warden’s career would he have to deal with a mountain lion in a suburban situation. I’m just loath to second-guess what he does.”

Even under good conditions, darting isn’t easy, said Teagle, who has confronted six mountain lions in his career and successfully knocked each one out with a syringe.

Not only does the marksman need to calculate the drug dose based on the size and apparent vigor of the animal, he must compensate for wind, range and the size of the dart, a medical syringe with a built-in charge that injects the drug.

Because conditions vary so widely, Teagle said, he always takes a practice shot before aiming for the real target.

Notwithstanding his own preference for darting, Teagle doesn’t fault any officer who makes the other choice.

“Some situations, quite frankly, I probably should have shot the animal,” he said.

There have been occasions, he said, when he was casually talking to a property owner, and “next thing you know, you have a mountain lion 10 feet away from you.”

At that point, the choices are few:

“Back up, try to chase it away, or shoot it,” Teagle said.

“It’s no different than a police officer that has a felon cornered.”