A mountain lion broke through an electric fence in Lo Curro, Vitacura, Chile and frightened by the sound of an alarm proceeded to enter a house where the homeowner was eating breakfast. The humans managed to lock their unwelcome vistor in the kitchen, where he proceeded to demolish the place, while they took photographs through a window. Eventually, police and representatives of the Agricultural and Livestock Service (SAG) arrived to sedate and remove the animal.
The puma may have been being kept illegally by a resident of the nearby town of La Dehesa.
The dead mountain lion and bighorn sheep were found on a closed road in Glacier National Park. Both evidently fell from somewhere very high on the cliffs above and to the right during the struggle which took place when the lion attacked the ram. The dead lion’s mouth can be seen to contain a large clump of the ram’s hair.
Western Outdoor News: COMMISSION PRESIDENT CELEBRATES A SUCCESSFUL HUNT – California Fish and Game commissioner Dan W. Richards travelled deep into the wicked terrain of Idaho’s Flying B Ranch to fulfill a long-held goal. “It was the most physically exhausting hunt of my lifetime. Eight hours of cold weather hiking in very difficult terrain. I told the guides I appreciated the hard work. They were unbelievably professional, first class all the way,†he said. Richards said he took the big cat over iron sights using a Winchester Centennial lever action .45 carbine. Asked about California’s mountain lion moratorium, Richards didn’t hesitate. “I’m glad it’s legal in Idaho.â€
The LA Times reports that the president of the California Fish and Game Commission has been successfully hounded out of office by the usual West Coast crowd of left-wing extremists for the outrage of legally taking a trophy mountain lion on a hunt in Idaho. Residents of California have been regularly stalked, occasionally mauled, and even killed and eaten by mountain lions in unprecedented numbers of incidents since hunting lions in the Golden State was banned by whacko-supported initiative in 1990.
The California Fish and Game Commission was created a century ago (1909) by sportsmen to manage and regulate the state’s wildlife resources. Its operations and programs are funded by license fees and taxes on sporting goods paid exclusively by hunters and fishermen.
But, in California today, the tyranny of the fruits-and-nuts supporters of the democrat party is so far-reaching, their intolerance and bigotry concerning other people’s lifestyles and convictions so great, that the president of the state Fish and Game Commission has been hounded out office by a six-month-long campaign of vilification based on his being guilty of legally hunting!
Daniel W. Richards was replaced as president of the California Fish and Game Commission on Wednesday, seven months after he sparked a storm of controversy by killing a mountain lion during a hunt in Idaho.
Although the kill was legal in Idaho, California has outlawed the hunting of mountain lions for decades. More than 40 state legislators called for Richards to resign in March, saying he showed poor judgment in killing the cougar when the practice is opposed by most Californians.
At the time, Richards defiantly refused to resign from the commission, saying he had done nothing improper. Even though the commission voted to elect Commissioner Jim Kellogg as president Wednesday, Richards plans to remain on the commission until his term expires in January. …
[Michael] Sutton, an executive with the Audubon Society [who was at the same time elected Vice President of the Fish and Game Commission], said later that the killing of the lion and Richards’ comments defending it were factors in his decision to vote to replace Richards.
“It was pretty clear that Commissioner Richards had lost the confidence of the majority of the commission,” Sutton said. “Most of us feel it is inappropriate to use the presidency as a bully pulpit for your views.”
The president of the State Fish & Game Commission is supposed, in California, to be out of line when he uses his office to speak in favor of hunting.
The presidency and control of the commission will be passing out of the hands of the sportsmen who pay for it and into the hands of Environmentalist granola-crunching ideologues eager to implement new policies based on junk science, Animal Rights theories, and hostility to firearms and the field sports.
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The LA Weekly describes the politics of the situation:
[A]lthough Fish and Game commissioners haven’t explained specifically why they decided to vote Richards down from his throne today, it was clearly a symbolic move to kill the human who killed the beast.
“The president of the commission should be someone who has the confidence of a majority of his peers,” Mike Sutton, vice president, told the Mercury News leading up to the vote.
Richards was playing the feisty right-wing ideologue at the beginning of this battle, but he has since became strangely resigned to his ousting.
He looked on as the commission changed its own internal election policy in May so that they might replace Richards. And today, a Fish and Game Commission spokesman tells us that Richards himself took part in the unanimous vote to elect Commissioner Jim Kellogg as his replacement.
The ex-prez, appointed by Arnold Schwarzenegger (surprise, surprise) in 2008, will remain on the commission until his term ends in six months. But from there, he tells the Mercury News: “I think there is a zero chance that Jerry Brown will appoint me, so it doesn’t matter what I think. He has his hands full with shoplifters and other thugs in the Legislature.”
Pretty morbid, right? Let this be a lesson for all trigger-happy Republicans who dare to dream of swimming against California’s blue tide: We’ll eat your grin for dinner.
A 6-year-old boy was attacked by a mountain lion while walking near the lodge at Chisos Basin in Big Bend National Park with his family Sunday night.
The boy suffered non-life-threatening injuries — scrapes and puncture wounds to his face, according to park officials.
His father was able to fight off the cat by stabbing it with a pocket knife.
The attack occurred on February 5th. Mr. Hobbs stabbed the lion with a Spyderco Calypso pocketknife with a 3″ blade. Better to have any weapon on hand than no weapon.
A Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection staff member examining the dead mountain lion at the Sessions Woods Wildlife Center in Burlington, Connecticut
Science News came up with some more information on the mountain lion killed in Milford on Connecticut’s Wilbur Cross Parkway in June.
[H]air and fecal matter [from the exactly same cougar] had been collected more than a year earlier by biologists tracking the Connecticut-bound cougar across Wisconsin. First spotted in Champlin, Minn., in December 2009, biologists tracked him as he zig-zagged through Wisconsin, leaving behind a trail of paw prints, hair and poop.
Even in Wisconsin — with its bears and wolves — cougars are unexpected visitors, says mammalian ecologist Adrian Wydeven of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources in Park Falls.
There have been only four confirmed cougars in that state since 2008, so when the traveling cougar appeared, Wydeven and his team kept a watchful eye on his movements. From December 2009 through late spring 2010 they haunted the cat’s trail, collecting samples and sending them to the lab. In December, a trail camera captured a cougar prowling through the evening snow near an area where hair had been sampled earlier, providing scientists with a glimpse of the cat.
Then, after another trailside portrait in May 2010, the cat disappeared.
The next time he appeared was more than a year later and a half-continent away, just a few miles from the Connecticut shore. Scientists don’t know much about the cat’s journey between Wisconsin and Connecticut, but wildlife biologist Clayton Nielsen of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale speculates the cat probably crossed Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, then wound his way down through New York. “There’s no real way of knowing,†he says. “But going south through Illinois, Indiana, Ohio — that’s very poor habitat, with a high likelihood that people would see the animal.â€
Nielsen, who is studying cougars in the Midwest, says while roaming young males are increasing in the area, there are still no known breeding populations east of the Black Hills, except for an endangered group of less than 100 in and around the Florida Everglades. Scientists hypothesize that the Connecticut cat was wandering in search of food and a mate — but since he didn’t find a mate, he kept on moving. Female cougars don’t travel nearly as far as males, which limits the establishment of new breeding populations. But, Nielsen hypothesizes, if a few females made similar journeys, it’s plausible that a cougar population could re-establish itself farther east.
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David Baron wrote a kind of obituary for the Connecticut cougar in the form of a New York Times editorial, provocatively titled The Cougar Behind Your Trash Can:
Thanks to the South Dakota cat and its incredible journey, residents of the Eastern United States can now experience the fear and thrill that come with living below the top of the food chain. America has grown a bit less tame.
DNA tests demonstrate that a mountain lion which was struck and killed by a 2006 Hyundai Tucson SUV around 1:00 a.m. on June 11 on Wilbur Cross Parkway in the area of Exit 55 in Milford, Connecticut came from far away and seems to have set something of a record for mountain lion roaming.
The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection said today that results of genetic tests show that the mountain lion killed in Milford in June made its way to the state from the Black Hills region of South Dakota and is an animal whose movements were actually tracked and recorded as it made its way through Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Genetic tests also show that it is likely that the mountain lion killed when it was hit by a car June 11 on the Wilbur Cross Parkway in Milford was the same one that had been seen earlier that month in Greenwich.
Mountain lion seen and filmed in Greenwich circa June 5.
Jack Russell Terriers are small dogs who don’t know their own size, as this case from Eastern South Dakota demonstrates. The valor of this particular terrier attracted international attention, and one of the best accounts is the one from the British Daily Mail.
It was a David and Goliath style battle that few would have thought possible.
But with the odds stacked against him, Jack the plucky Jack Russel chased a deadly mountain lion high into a tree.
The cornered lion remained trapped above the ground before the Jack Russel was able to pounce a few minutes later.
Jack’s owner, Chad Strenge, witnessed the astonishing scenes while he was walking Jack on farmland in South Dakota.
The pair had been hunting when Mr Strenge heard Jack barking frantically several hundred yards away.
Thinking that his heel-biting Jack Russel – a breed known for their high energy levels- might have caught a squirrel, Mr Strenge raced to a patch of dense woodland.
Incredibly, the 150lb mountain lion was trapped high in the branches while 17lb Jack bayed for his blood below.
‘He trees cats all the time. I suppose he figured it was just a cat,’ said Mr Strenge. …
Mr Strenge shot at the lion which knocked it from the tree. Jack then chased the lion over a short distance before Mr Strenge killed it with his gun.
Professor Jonathan Jenks, an expert on cougar migration, said hunters usually needed two or three hounds to chase a lion up a tree.
He said: ‘The cougar was probably not hungry enough to attack Jack.
‘It very well could have lost a territory and decided to take off from the Black Hills and head this way.’
Arden Petersen, of the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks department, said that no charges would be filed for shooting the animal.
People in South Dakota have the right to kill mountain lions which they feel are a threat to themselves, their livestock or their pets.
The lion was taken to South Dakota State University, where it will be studied.
One of the participants on a bamboo fly rod list forwarded the link to this 2007 YouTube video of a mountain lion looking into the window of a Colorado home in very much the manner of a house cat sitting patiently outside a mouse hole.
The lady doing most of the filming seems a bit overconfident in the ability of window glass to serve as an impenetrable barrier to wildlife. One can see the lion giving some serious consideration to having a try. Fortunately he decides in favor of prudence, or I expect we’d have never seen this video.
Apparently, the lion had been seen hanging around the vicinity of these people’s house before the video was made. The sensible thing to do would have been to shoot this particular lion.
In November or December 2007, this animal was hit by a truck on Highway 64 in northern Arizona. the cat wasn’t weighed at the scene but it took three people to lift it and its mass was estimated at 200-220 lbs (90-100 kg). It was over 2.1 m (6′ 10.7″) long.
Darren Naish, at Tetrapod Zoology, admires big cougars.
The ones you read about being shot for killing California joggers are typically on the small end of the size range, too.
The Puma, Cougar or Mountain lion Puma concolor (other names include panther, painter, catamount, mountain devil, silver lion, brown tiger, red tiger, king cat, Indian devil, purple feather (wtf?), mountain demon, sneak cat, leao and onça vermilha) is a highly variable animal (its historic range extends across much of the length and breadth of the Americas), but an average example from an average population might be anywhere between 1.7-2.7 m (5′ 6.92″- 8′ 10.29″) in total length, and weigh between about 60 and 80 kg (132-176 lbs.) (though the range is from 25 to over 110 kg (55-242 lbs.); Currier (1983) gives the ‘average’ range as between 55 and 65 kg, 121-143 lbs.). Pumas seem to conform to Bergmann’s rule (Gay & Best 1996), though the presence of jaguars and the size of available prey also seem to have an influence on their body size. Animals at the upper end of this range must be impressive beasts: larger than even a very big leopard, and only 10 kg (22 lbs.) or so lighter than an average African lioness. Here are some pictures of big pumas: the specimens might not be record holders, but I find them interesting as they show pumas that are, to me, exceptionally big.
Killed in February 2007, this individual was reportedly 210 lbs (95 kg). It has variously been reported to have been shot in Oregon or Alberta: apparently, Oregon is out as it’s illegal to hunt pumas with dogs there.
A mountain lion attacked, killed and partially ate a New Mexico man, authorities said on Tuesday.
A search party found the body of Robert Nawojski, 55, in a wooded area near his mobile home in Pinos Altos, New Mexico, late last week, the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish said.
Investigators concluded that Nawojski had been attacked and killed by a mountain lion, or cougar, at a spot close to his home, where he lived alone and was known to bathe and shave outdoors.
Spokesman Dan Williams said the lion subsequently dragged the man’s body a short distance into nearby woodland and ate and buried parts of it.
Nawojski was reported missing by his brother last week. A search party found a mountain lion lurking near his home, and reported it to the Department of Game and Fish, who shot and wounded the animal.
