Just To Keep The Lion Discussion On The Real Side...

[FishinCricket]

http://images.icanhascheezburger.com/completestore/2008/10/30/128698609841887731.jpg

[Tim Smith]

The less one actually knows about the wilderness and its creatures the more they tend to fear it.

That's a pretty good bottom line.

[Tim Smith]

That's why I make sure my 6 and 8 year olds are heavily armed when walking up and down our driveway!

Forget the mountain lions. Now I'm scared of 6 and 8 year olds.

[Kicknbass]

How to survive a Couger attack.

[Feathers and Fins]

Al, Ive been able to work with Wolves and Mountain Lion. To add to what you were saying. NO THEY DO NOT. In fact I have actually seen them fear people more in captivity then in the wild. My wolves were very much timid creatures when strangers came around as long as myself or my wife were home they would watch from a distance and not get to close. Now if the kids were outside playing and someone strange came walking down the road it was a diffrent story. Both my male and female would get between the kids and the person and there could be no mistake to waht their intention was if the person came to close to the kids.

That was the exception when they were protecting the cubs so to speak. It is the pack mentality. This also was the case when my wife or i were home. we were the Alphas so you could see the true timid yet watchfull nature. Wolves ive worked with in the wild and observed for hours show a very timid tendancy to them and watch more than be seen and if approached will normally retreat back with the acceptions being if the pack is hunting.

The cats are in my experiance timid in captivity but still very curious " nature of a cat" I have senn a 500 pound tiger play as gentle as a kitten and loved it but at feeding time he was deadly as they come in defence of food. The cougars seemed in captivity to again relate to pride behavior. The ones in the wild were more solitary but still timid. As I said before I have been stalked but once they know i know they were there it became a diffrent game.

I dont think they have lost their fear of humans, I beleive they have become more acustom to humans and as such do not show the fear of us they had at one time. I would love to see the ture stories behind the attacks. Were they female cats with cubs around? were they protecting food? There are more questions then answers in the attacks I use to follow.

Im not cat expert, venomous reptiles are my expertise but one thing i learned about wild animals in good health is they dont Kill for no reason and they normally dont attack without provication or cause.

[Fishslayer88]

I am by far not a cat expert but i figure they are like any other animal the more human presence the more they become accustom to humans and less cautious, once they see humans as non threatening we could be viewed as a possible food source.

[ness]

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[ColdWaterFshr]

Good ole Michael Scott. He cracks me up everytime.

Getting ready to start reading "The Man Eaters of Tsavo" - a true story that was recently adapted for a movie which I haven't seen yet. Its from the early 1900's and is about a pair of lions that got a taste for human blood and these british chaps were trying to build a railroad bridge in Africa, and these lions were apparently not having any of it, so they kept dragging off the workers (about 100 or so) and eating them one by one.

[Trout Commander]

Trout Commander.....knew there would be a "keyboard jockey" out there...I was right.

So you come in here with your bullspit biology and I don't buy it so that makes me a keyboard jockey? Mkay.

Since they are no longer regularly hunted

Also, please enlighten us as to what states have recently canceled their mtn. lion season.

[Tim Smith]

Interesting point about rabies. There's quite a bit of that out there...especially among smaller mammals like raccoons, skunks and coyotes which exist in the millions all around us (and you can add things like round worm and distemper to that disease mix as well).

If the defining argument here was that we should reduce exposure to rabies and diseases, we'd work hard to have more top predators because they have historically keep these mesopredator numbers low and they reduce overall exposure to rabies.

http://northernwoodl...-mesopredators/

"In northern New England, mesopredators are not generally viewed as a threat to livestock or crops. Their biggest threat to human health occurs during cyclical rabies outbreaks. From an ecosystem perspective, the biggest impact these animals have is on their prey species. By eliminating the top dog and top cat, and thereby releasing the mesopredators, we’ve ended up putting pressure on the animals farther down the food chain. Restoring the wolf and cougar would relieve this pressure, but only by redirecting some of it back towards us."

http://www.cof.orst....sopredators.pdf

http://www.ebd.csic....s_Am_Nat_99.pdf

In the case of the boy who was attacked here, it's probably not rabies. Texas had their worst drought ever this year and nothing was able to reproduce. There's no game out there. The experts dealing with this felt the lion who attacked this boy was young and injured and probably starving.

Also an interesting story at Tsavo. There was a movie made about that a few years back. It should have focused more on how incompetent and greedy a company was to expose their workers to that much risk...much easier to pretend the lions were supernatural beasts. Their skins are on display in the Chicago Museum of Natural History. I saw them about 15 years ago there. African lions are more similar to grizzly, polar and coastal brown bears. They're big and inexorable. Mountain lions are a fraction of the size and risk.