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I did not know where to post this. Since I live in a small town in northern California that is semi rural, this seemed like a good place.
This morning at 10 am my next door neighbor Leslie called to tell me that Gary next door to her had seen a mountain lion in their back yard and that it had taken one of his pygmy goats and over the weekend they had also lost three outdoor cats. I called all my neighbors that I had numbers for to tell them to lock up their animals and keep their kids indoors. When I left for work at noon the Department of Fish and Game was waiting for a kill permit from the department of Agriculture, meanwhile the CHP, the local sheriffs a helicopter and a tracker with his three search dogs were preparing to hunt it down. At around 4 pm the cougar was flushed out when it came back to retrieve the goat that it had buried under a pile of leaves. It jumped over a fence into Leslie's back yard startling her cousin Chuck, then jumped their side gate and surprised Leslie in her front yard and my partner Larry watched the cat run across their driveway and cross the street to another street. The tracker and his dogs followed it, tracked it down and shot it. In our little knot of seven homes their are 11 dogs, were 7 cats at least, my chickens and rabbits and a neighbors chickens and Gary's goats and another neighbor down the street a few houses also has goats. This mountain lion must have thought he had died and gone to heaven when he found our neighborhood. The scary thing is there is also a day care center on the other side of a small parking lot from where the goat was killed. Everyone has said that the cat was much larger than our dog Dutch and he is a 26 inch tall, 100 pound Chesapeake Bay retriever. Three of my neighbors took pictures of the cat in the back of the trackers truck and I hope to get copies of them in the next few days. We are rural, but not so rural that we would expect to see a mountain lion in our midst.
Years ago I was practicing calling coyotes right after work. I was in a wildlife refuge near work, but it was across the stateline, so I had no firearm. I got a couple of coyotes to come in, but I could not get them any closer in than about 75 yards or so. It was getting about dark, so I stood up to hike back to the truck, turned around and about 25-30 yards away from me was a cougar. I'd called him in and didn't even know it....
Three of my neighbors took pictures of the cat in the back of the trackers truck and I hope to get copies of them in the next few days. We are rural, but not so rural that we would expect to see a mountain lion in our midst.
Wonder if the mt. lion thought he was so rual that he shouldnt expect to see humans in his midst?
I checked online for the local papers and local TV stations about yesterdays mountain lion. No one had been informed about the situation, so I informed them and directed the local news channel 3 TV reporter to the location and introduced her to the neighbor who's goat had been killed. The reporter interviewed both my neighbor, Toy and a Department of Fish and Game warden. Tracey, the reporter, wanted first hand shots of the goat and wanted to have video of her with the goat. I was to press the record button for her and stand by, but the goat took a liking to me and would not leave my side, so I may be on the news tonight with the reporter and I am petting the goat as it is sort of being interviewed by the reporter. It is interesting that the goat liked me because my sign is capricorn. Here are some pictures of the dead mountain lion. It was a she and about 14 months old, but unusually large from what the DFG has said. My neighbors took these pictures with their cell phones.
Why wasn't it sedated and relocated? Drive her up to Yosemite and she'd likely never bother anyone again. Such a waste...
Because they're simply getting overpopulated out there (and are also losing their fear of humans) ever since they outlawed hunting them (wildlife management should never be done at the ballot box).
Hope Fish & Game is able to determine if she left any hungry young ones behind so that they do not needlessly suffer.
Cougars that lose their fear of humans and hunt in yards will just as easily hunt a small child as a goat. In such cases "catch & release" is not an option. They carefully stalk their prey, they don't just "happen" upon an area.
She certainly is/was beautiful and it's a shame that she and humans had to collide. I hate killing wild animals when often we're the ones invading their territory, but any wild animal that has learned that humans mean easy food aren't usually good candidates for relocation. We don't have mountain lions, but we do have this problem with bears around the dump and people's houses who aren't vigilant with their trash, food storage and game processing. A hungry wild animal that isn't afraid of humans anymore isn't going to stop and think "oh, hey, that's a human so I shouldn't eat it" all it cares about is whether it's the right size and vulnerable enough to successfully attack.
So many of the problems today in quite a few areas aren't so much that "we're the ones invading their territory", but that cougars in many places (Oregon, Washington) have experienced a population explosion since the mid-'90s due to changes in laws regulating how cougars are hunted. Since then, cougars are reappearing in populated areas in which they were gone for decades and decades, and in some cases a hundred years.
Sometime in the '90s Oregon outlawed the use of dogs in hunting cougars. That was the most effective way of hunting them. Within a couple of years, cougars started appearing in towns with increasing frequency. I didn't live any where near a town, but for one summer, there was one drinking out of my pool most mornings. One of my neighbors had over 20 sheep killed in a corral in one evening. One shadowed a local lady out jogging along an irrigation canal. I started seeing tracks with increasing frequency around our place for years until we moved. My kids' housecat started refusing at times to go outside. They became a nuisance in the area.
As with the cougar in the OP's story, once they find an easy available food source that's what they'll look for and unfortunately, relocation isn't an option.
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