The U.S. Now Has More Lions Than Africa

I tossed the latest copy of Earth Dog - Running Dog magazine into the truck on the way to work this morning, and was flipping through it at a traffic light when I opened it up to see the picture at left. Hey, I know that fellow!

And sure enough I do -- it's John B., who I see once a year at the only dog trial I go to, the JRTCA Nationals.

That's a 200-pound stock-predating Mountain Lion John hunted in Arizona a few years back (subscribe to Earth Dog - Running Dog magazine if you want to read the full story).

John's Mountain Lion got me to thinking about the rise of Cougar populations here in the U.S.

As regular readers might recall, a Mountain Lion was recently shot in Chicago, and roadkills in Iowa prove they have gotten that far east as well.

Rumors of Mountain Lions in Appalachia remain (as yet) unfounded, but it is agreed by all that it is only a matter of time before they come here. With over over 2 million acres of contiguous National Forest in Virginia and West Virginia alone, and plenty of deer, they will not want for food or space!

On a hunch, I did a little research and confirmed what I suspected: there are now more lions in the United States than there are all in all of Africa.

Now granted that Puma concolor and Panthera leo are a different genus of big cat, but a Mountain Lion is no small animal; it is, in fact, the fourth largest big cat in the world.

Right now there are more than 30,000 Mountain Lions in the U.S., and their numbers are slowly growing despite the fact that hunting these large animals is legal (if controlled by permit) in 10 of the 11 western states where they reside.

All in all, about 3,500 Mountain Lions a year are shot by U.S. hunters, and another 800 or so are killed by vehicle impacts.

A slow steady increase in Mountain Lions is excellent news, and the kind of thing we can live with provided the populations are allowed to expand in the right direction (i.e on public lands) and away from farms, ranches and suburbs.

The return of the Mountain Lion (along with the concurrent rise in bear, wolf, coyote, turkey, eagle, hawk, osprey, deer, elk, and beaver populations) is proof-positive that the American way of science-based wildlife management has been a roaring success.

This is not to say, of course, that there will never be human-wildlife conflicts. There always will be with large meat-eating predators.

Problem lions, wolves and bears will always have to be shot, but regulated hunting and culling of these animals does no long-term harm provided the slaughter is not indiscriminate and the wild habitat they require is preserved as large unbroken blocks of land.

The real threat to animals like Mountain Lions is not regulated hunted; it is unregulated population growth which results in more roads, more water consumption, and more sprawl.

If we protect the habitat, the wildlife will generally take care of itself.

But to take care of the habitat, we have to control ourselves.

We cannot allow U.S. population growth (largely driven by immigration) to increase our numbers to the point that humans become like locusts on the land. If we plough and graze fence post to fence post, fragment the forests, drain the rivers and streams for irrigation, and put in roads every mile or two (with shopping centers in between), it is not just Mountain Lion we will lose; it is wild America as we know it and love it.

And, to put on a point on it, it will not take much human population growth in Arizona, where this mountain lion was shot, to wreck things forever.

As John McCain recently noted, Arizona is already so dry the trees have been known to chase the dogs!

So heads up; human population growth is what is killing off Africa's lions.

Now that we have a healthy Mountain Lion population in the American West, let's make sure we do not allow human population growth to kill off our lions as well.

Let's not worry about sustainable levels of hunting, while ignoring unsustainable rates of immigration.

Yet, as far as I can tell, that is exactly what every Mountain Lion and Cougar protection organization in America is now doing. Talk about missing the forest for the trees!

A repost from 2008.

• Related Posts:
  ** Drawing the Line at the Border for Wildlife's Sake
  ** The Real Threat to Hunting in America
  ** One Million More Local Residents
  ** Comparative Demography, Geology & Ecology

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Connecticut Mountain Lion Was a Wild Animal

Necropsy on Connecticut mountain lion

The latest news about the mountain lion that was killed when it was struck by a SUV mear Milford, Connecticut, is that DNA tests shows it originated in South Dakotas and traveled to Connecticut through Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Connecticut moutain lion hit by SUV near Milford.

This specific mountain lion was in the wild in Minnesota in 2009 -- the last time it was positively identified from its DNA. Sightings of a mountain lion in Michigan in January and May of 2010 are believed to be this animal.

Michigan Mountain Lion caught on camera, Jan 18, 2010,

To say I am amazed it putting in midly.  I was certain this was going to turn out to an escaped pet from  New York.

The mountain lions in the Black Hills of South Dakota have broken out before, you may recall, with one young male being shot in downtown Chicago a few years back.  Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection director notes:

The journey of this mountain lion is a testament to the wonders of nature and the tenacity and adaptability of this species. This mountain lion traveled a distance of more than 1,500 miles from its original home in South Dakota – representing one of the longest movements ever recorded for a land mammal and nearly double the distance ever recorded for a dispersing mountain lion.

I should say! This lean young male weighed in at 140-pounds and had messed with a Porcupine sometime in not-too-distant past, as quills were found buried under the animals tissue.

• Related Posts:
  ** The Mountain Lions of Connecticut?
  ** A Mountain Lion Meets His Match
  ** Big Cat Sighting in the UK Proves REAL
  ** P.T. Barnum and the Beastiaries of the Imagination
  ** The Beast of Exmoor and Other Nonsense
  ** The Lion of Dartmoor
  ** Kentucky Big Cat Claims are Bogus
  ** Hear Hooves? Don't Assume Zebra!
  ** The U.S. Now Has More Lions Than Africa. 

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Mule vs Cougar?

The story as given here turns out to be a lie:

A couple living in Montana were outside with a mule and 2 dogs. He with a gun (he is a hunter), she with a camera. A cougar that was nearby decided that he would have a dog for dinner.

The hunter saw the animal so he wanted to shoot in the air to scare the beast but did not even have time to do that -- the cougar was already approaching a dog. Here is the incredible part of the story: the mule snatched the cougar up by the tail and started whirling him around banging its head on the ground repeatedly. Then the mule dropped it on the ground, stomped on it and held it by the throat. The mule got down on his knees and began to bite the creature a dozen times. The poor animal could not do anything ...

The hunter did not even need to shoot and the woman was able to take these 4 exceptional pictures.

It seems the lion was already dead when the mule tossed it around. The real story is supposed to be this one.
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Wild Cougar Shot in Chicago

A 122-pound male cougar was shot in a bustling, trendy North Side Chicago neighborhood on Monday night. Where did the animal come from? Biologists say they suspect DNA tests will show it is the same one spotted numerous times in Wisconsin making its way toward Illinois over the past three months (click on map at right for sighting notes and calendar), and that he is a wild cougar that came from the Black Hills of South Dakota, meaning this is an animal that traveled more than 1,000 miles.

Young male predators typically move out on long migrations in search of new territories and mates, and it's been known for a long time that cougars are coming East.

The Midwest and East were part of the original home range of the cougar, and we certainly have enough wild game and wild lands to support a returning population. And Mother Nature, bless her heart, does abhor a vacuum.

Since 1990, about 40 cougar sightings have been confirmed, mostly in Iowa, Minnesota and Missouri, but there are rumors and some small sign that a few animals may already be in Maine, New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. No conclusive evidence yet, and it may only be leaping at shadows (probably is), but there is no doubt that cougar are coming East. On that point, we can be sure.

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Coffee and Provocation

Disrespecting Tintin:
Snowy (Milou), Tintin's dog, did not make the first list of inductees into the "Dog Walk of Fame." Dogs that did make the cut, include such lesser canines as Greyfriars Bobby, Gromit of the Wallace and Gromit films, Toto from The Wizard of Oz, Lassie, and Fang from the Harry Potter films. The fact that "Fang" was allowed to beat out Snowy/Milou suggests the whole thing is rigged and certainly a travesty. Adding insult to injury we find Bullseye from the movie Oliver made the cut, as well as two two ne'er-do-well dogs best relegated to a "where are they now?" special: Chance and Shadow from the saccharine-sweet Homeward Bound movies. Upon investigation, it was no surprise to find that the whole thing is a put up job by the U.K. Kennel Club working in conjunction with Sky Movies. You will note that all the dogs are big box-office movie dogs, while Tintin's Milou/Snowy was more of a literary dog (if a comic book can be described as literature, and I think it can). Balto? Gelert? Argos? Hachikō? Cerberus? These barbarians have never heard of them. In any case, the light-weight celluloid dogs that made the cut this year will be honored with a bench and plaque in London's Battersea Park, with more benches and plaques added in subsequent years. Hopefully Tintin, our favorite terrierman, will be added next year. Blistering barnacles!

Indiana Cougar: Real or Fake?
I rarely give a nod to incredible assertions, but sometimes an unlikely story is too easily written off. It seems a cougar has been spotted (repeatedly) in Indiana and a photograph has even been taken (a very grainy one). Some folks are quick to dismiss the claim, but not so fast: there are special circumstances here. It seems that a 70-pound female cougar named Donner escaped the Exotic Feline Rescue Center near Center Point just 80 miles away in January. The director of the Exotic Feline Rescue Center says she thinks her escaped cougar is dead, but she has no proof to support this claim, as the escaped cat was never found. It would not be hard for a young cougar to find deer and other food in Indiana, even if it were just roadkill. One wonders if the Center is simply trying to avoid liability and responsibility if something bad occurs. In any case, a naturally occuring wild cougar in Indiana is not out of the range of possibility either; roadkill lions have confirmed their presence in Iowa, and camera traps have confirmed their presence in Minnsesota. Rangers in Michigan and Illinois have seen lions in their states as well.

He's Dead Either Way:
There's a Lyle Lovett lyric that goes: "Was that the yacht club/Or just a fishing boat ; Was that the leg of lamb/Or was it a billy goat ; Was that a snail baby/ Or escargot?" Its the kind of lyric Kenton Carnegie might appreciate if he were alive today. Sadly, Carnegie is dead, either the first semi-confirmed person in North American to have been killed by a wolf, or else just one more name in a small sea of people killed by a black bear. No one will ever be sure, as no one witnessed the attack, and wolf and bear experts disagree. An autopsy (if that's what it can be called after someone has been ripped apart by a wild animal) shows Carnegie's stomach, kidneys and intestines had been eaten. Bear experts claim these are the "organs of choice" preferred by black bears, while wolves are supposed to prefer the liver, heart and lungs which have more fat in them. I am pretty certain neither bears nor wolves read such reports. Wolf-kill advocates will note that a coroner's inquest ruled that the killing was by a wolf, but in fact this may have been weighed to some degree by the natural desire of all parties at the inquest to make news and history. This is not to say that a wolf cannot kill a human; they most certainly can, and they have certainly done so in Europe. It's just that in 200 years, there has yet to be a confirmed case of a fatal wolf attack on a human in North America. And, like it or not, there still isn't a confirmed fatal attack by a wolf on a human in this hemisphere. I have no doubt it will happen one day, but it has not yet.

The Cut and Run Irish:
In other news, while Ulster boxer John "The Derry Destroyer" Duddy was in America training for a fight, he encountered a black bear on the side of the road. Did he lay down and play dead as he was told to do if he saw a bear? He did not! Did he go "bear knuckle" and punch it out with the bruin? He did not! Instead, he ran like a girl. And probably for no reason. Bears are all over the Poconos, where this occured, and they rarely do anything more violent that rip down a bird feeder and turn over a few garbage cans. More people are killed by golf balls in America every year than are killed by black bears, and it's not like we don't have a huge population of the animals to work with; over 500,000 wild black bears roaming all across the U.S. That works out to be one black bear for every 600 people in America.

"Crocodile Hunter" on Oz Stamp:
Australia has put Steve Irwin and family on one of the ugliest stamps ever made which also seems to feature a magazine cover in some sort of strange cross-promotion. Proceeds from the sale of the 50 cent stamp will go to Irwin's conservation charity, Wildlife Warriors, but it seems to me that they have denigrated the Australia's postal system and the memory of Steve Irwin more than they the charity (or the animals) will ever benefit. Enough is enough!

Good News from the Sudan:
Good news from the Sudan? Can it be? Well yes. Apparently after an end to 20 years of fighting, the wildlife of Sudan is beginning to return. Sudan's wildlife service estimates that 7,000 elephants have returned, along with an estimated 1,500 giraffes and 500 oryx antelopes. Lions, leopards and a wide variety of gazelles have also returned, and hippo numbers are again starting to rise. Elephants live a long time, and they remember, which means that older elephants have been able to lead younger members of their herds back to their historical haunts from neighboring Uganda. Another bit of good news is that Africa’s elephant population seems to be rebounding a bit thanks to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, which outlawed ivory sales worldwide beginning in 1989. Elephant populations across Africa (which is nine time bigger than the U.S.) may now number 400,000..

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