15 thoughts on “Wild Animals, Confused People”

  1. A mountain lion living on a diet of stray cats? No such thing as feline solidarity, I guess. ;^)

    We’ve got ’em around here, too — one got hit by a car in ’02, not only within the city limits of KC MO but in the part of the city north of the Missouri River, which means it crossed the river somehow. If they can do that, they can turn up anywhere.

    Lots of mountain lion news stories here.

  2. So, they have enough time and resources to build a metal cage for videotaping the predator, but not to buy a gun and learn to shoot to protect their son? And they “don’t want the animal killed, but relocated”? Why, so somebody else has this problem?

  3. If the cougar is crouching outside a bedroom window and staring at the 6-year old son, sounds like ample opportunity to get in a clean shot. Yeeks! What are they waiting for?

  4. They don’t want it killed?? If it’s tranquilized and turned loose somewhere, how do they know it won’t come back or go to another family’s home? It’s not like it’s going to be relocated to another state…it’s clearly become fearless of humans, so it’s going to remain a danger. If a large cat were stalking my family, I’d shoot it (actually, get my husband to shoot it). But then, I’m in Texas.

  5. Instapundit’s rich links Jonathan refers to includes Kirsten Mortenson’s “Animal Rights”.

    But most of all, we need to stop projecting our own unmet emotional needs on these creatures. We need to accept that their experience is so fundamentally foreign to ours that, truly, we cannot begin to fathom it. We need to understand that it is precisely this foreignness that makes them so fascinating, and stop trying to turn them into toothless teddy bears, and Tom and Jerry funny-antics-nobody-ever-gets-eaten, and existentially-aware Wilburs, and talking Bambis still missing Mother. That’s not what animals are. It’s just not.The rather obvious parallel with the tendency of several newspapers to describe the “inclusiveness” of the Canadian bombers arrested last week reminds us that modern man is not so much sensitive as narcisstic & self-projecting. And, of course, narcissism is not a useful & often a suicidal approach.

    By the way, does the greater area of forest now than a hundred years ago – mentioned in several of those pieces – change the climate in any discernible way?

  6. Sorry, I screwed up – the last sentence of Mortensen’s post was “It’s just not.” I stepped all over her rhythm – which makes that last sentence stronger & attributed to her parallels she might not want to make. (Preview is our friend.)

  7. Ginny – probably not, as most of that land was cultivated, and therefore green most of the time. I’m not sure what the relative CO2 consumption is for crops vs trees, but this site seems to indicate that trees convert more carbon in the beginning of their life. It was proabably a wash in terms of the old farms vs. the new forests.

    I live in one such forest, and I have a problem with bobcats, coyotes, and bears. I’d not hesitate to shoot one to protect my family.

  8. Any major predator that is that comfortable getting that close to humans is a danger as long as it is alive.

    When I was child we often found cougar tracks out in the fields but never closer than a hundred yards to an often used building or habitation. As long as the animals stayed distant nobody bothered them even though they might pick off the occasional lamb or goat. Had we see tracks near the buildings, however, we would have hunted the animal down. Had we seen one near a building in the daylight we would have killed it on the spot.

    Merely relocating such an animal will only relocate the problem because the real problem is that a particular animal has lost its fear of humans. It has stopped thinking of us as predators and started thinking of us as prey.

  9. Thanks, John. Another question: what about before and after irrigation? Before not cultivated, great expanses making quite different exchanges than now.

  10. Ginny – when I think forest I think East Coast and NW, the Midwest is either still cultivated or would become grasslands, so I’d say that there was minimal irrigation. But that’s just a guess with no data.

  11. John, I’m surprised to find that some people don’t think the plains and Platte River corridor aren’t the center of the universe. Well, what can I say.

  12. What does this family expect renting in that kind of area. It is nice to see authorities responding in some way, but come on: Get Your Gun!

  13. Have heard that a nearby woman has had an alligator hanging around and called animal control. They showed up three days later (the big green thing had moved on (?) or just wasn’t right there at the time). (Personally, I wouldn’t have hesitated to get the shotgun out).

    We have 40 lb. and 70 lb. boys staying with us this summer and the situation makes me pause.

    It helps to some extenet that we also have 40 lb. and 80 lb. dogs. Last year I went to investigate the uproar that the dogs were making and found the kids playing within a couple of yards of a “pygmy rattler” snake. The boys were unaware of the snake.

  14. I have no problem with these folks deciding to volunteer their son and themselves to be tasty morsels for the lion, that’s their perogative, and will improve the gene pool.

    I sincerely hope, however, that they are never allowed to get another pet cat. That would be most cruel to the pet.

    Does anyone else suspect that if they vote, they vote democrat or green?

  15. Don’t you just love it? “We don’t want the poor animal killed, oh no! We wouldn’t want that on our conscience! Just trap it and move it somewhere else so it can eat someone ELSE’S kid. THEN you can shoot it so it’s not on our heads.”

Comments are closed.