This is largely true today, but it wasn’t always so. Up until the early 1900′s a dog was more-or-less absolute protection from a mountain lion; any size dog would scare off a lion. The reason for this was wolves. Wolves are the only natural predators of lions; they hunt them in packs, kill them and eat them. Fear of wolves evidently translated to fear of dogs. Once all the wolves were gone, lions (who learn how and what to hunt, what to fear, etc., from their mother), have, over time, lost their fear of dogs. Similarly, human hunted and killed lions for thousands of years, and were therefore feared. Now, not so much.

Maybe the deer, I don’t think that cougars spend much time thinking about dogs, except maybe as appetizers.

We had one case where the deer jumped, went through the trucks windshield, and killed the driver. You need to be driving something like an MRAP.

Re: white-tailed deer everywhere… In addition to being a major road hazard and destructive to gardens (they eat everyfreakinthing!) the ones in my area are not particularly afraid of humans. I take daily walks in a 200+ acre park that is crawling with deer. They do not run away at the sight or sound of humans as a matter of course. In fact, the alpha females in each little family group can be quite aggressive. If you get too close they’ll turn to face you, thump the ground, and make a hissing sort of noise to warn you off.

CWD supposedly transmits some disease to humans if it could make the jump of the species barrier (through Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease). But nobody seems to have any proof that CWD can make the jump. They never forbade people to eat venison after the fall hunt and everybody does (up here at least). I myself love (and partake in) venison sausage every fall which is usually cut with pork fat. I haven’t heard much about CWD in the news for a couple of years, which tells me that nobody seems to care too much about it any more.

He deserved it.

Would be nice to have ubiquitous home-kit testing for such things. There’s a whole herd of pâté de foie gras-on-the-hoof hanging out by a bike trail about a block from where I live, and if I carried, I’d never lack for venison, either. Though I suppose the duly constituted authorities might question the occasional gunshots, followed by the sight of me dragging a couple of hundred pounds of deer down the street.

Robert: “a reduction in crime” — especially assault and battery by large felines! Also sounds like the coyote will concentrate the geese in the cities.

Dan: I know that lions are kind of scary. But if you leave their favorite food out in quantity they will show up. I think it is better to have lions eat the deer than have cars and people wrecked by the @#$% things. The only alternative is to declare r-o-s to be vermin and put a bounty on them. The upside of lions is that more people will start exercising their 2nd amendment rights, which will lead to a reduction in crime.

Harvesting deer and Canadian geese (two pestiferous animals that could use culling) sounds good in theory. Do they generally have diseases that make them risky as sources of meat? Or are they OK to eat?

I agree that deer can be destructive. My impression is that the formerly-Canadian* geese may be worse, though. They do block traffic — sometimes by walking across a major street, sometimes by just landing in the middle of one and not moving — and, being gregarious, leave veritable moraines of excrement where they congregate.

The larger question here, and I really ought to break down and order The Beast in the Garden before yammering on too much about it, is whether all these varmints (who, as noted in other comments, were still quite shy of humans within most of our lifetimes) are in some sense making an economic decision to tolerate humans, automobiles, etc in return for a steady year-round food supply. Almost a self-domestication process like the one cats adopted five millenia back in the Nile Valley. Except that they’re not near as cuddly.

* @#^&*%$ illegals! ;^)

We did have a long hard winter this year so hopefully that will bring down the population, but I am not counting on it from the numbers I have seen already this year.

I am with Robert Schwartz – I hate these pests. They already wrecked one of my cars and the car/deer accidents are skyrocketing. But I am not necessarily down with Schwartz’s comment about the mountain lions/cougars eating the deer. I will have a somewhat scary follow up post on this in the next day or so.

I call them rats on stilts. The real threat they pose is to drivers and cars. A number of motorists have died as a result of collisions with the things.

I am hoping for the return of large animal predators like cougars and wolves. I think they would be much less dangerous to humans than the deer. It would also pump up Rummel’s business.

I began realizing what was happening when I first spent significant time in an environment like the one Shannon describes, in this case the Las Colinas “edge city” northwest of Dallas, circa 1989. Within, literally, a stone’s throw of a six-lane highway I saw great blue heron, beaver, coyote, and hawk. Smaller trees in the office park had to have heavy mesh guards to keep the beaver from chewing them all down.

The situation in KC is now similar, perhaps exacerbated by the already-low population density, around 1/5 that of Chicago, and large unoccupied areas inside the city, especially along and near tributaries of the Missouri and Kaw. Various large birds and mammals find 1) abundant food 2) relatively mild climate 3) few predators 4) humans who aren’t legally allowed to shoot at them. Result: deer in my yard (and at least two hit by cars within a block of my house in the last three years), hawks perching from streetlights on busy highways, great blue heron on the creek a two-minute walk from my house, pestilential “Canada” geese who stay year-round (Sprint hired an Australian sheepdog named Shayla and her handler to keep them from blocking traffic at the corporate headquarters), coyote all over the place out in the country (they do, so far, stay out of the city), bobcats (also generally rural) …

… and constant rumors of mountain lion. A few years back a car hit one up on, I think, I-29 not far north of downtown. Initial expectation was that it was somebody’s exotic pet, but examination of its paw pads found so much wear that the conclusion was that it had walked here from Colorado. Looking at a map establishes that it crossed the Missouri River. If they can do that, they can go anywhere on the continent. And eventually will, given the enormous deer population (divide your state’s human population by 4 for a starter estimate).

Re Lex’s comments, I have read that the Ozarks was mostly grassland as late as the 1920s; by the time I was growing up in the 1960s it was nearly all forest, if somewhat open, savanna-like forest due to poor soil quality. Much of northern Missouri is now reverting to forest as well as marginally-efficient farms are taken out of production. I have also read that much of the land there is being bought up for use as hunting retreats.

Question for hunters: during deer season, does your state require that you bring in a doe before taking a buck? I believe that is the law now in either or both Missouri and Kansas.

Coastal NJ. Wildlife has made a huge “comeback” around here. I see things anymore I never imagined. Summer before last I saw two gray squirrels team up and attack a bluejay nest. Just tore it up while the jays fought and screamed. See birds after one another all the time. And those darned, ugly turkey vultures are everywhere.