November 14, 2008 6:49 am
More On Mountain Lions
Posted by Will under animals, nature, neighborhood, news, outdoors, updated
[3] Comments
My friend and fellow-L.A. Metblogs contributer Frazgo posted up news yesterday about an animal attack in Monrovia in which a bicyclist was reportedly aggressively chased by a pair of coyotes near a city park and bitten.
Fraz included news of the mountain lion killing last week that triggered my first post on the subject and linked to a post about it on the Monrovia City Watch blog, as well as to another post in the aftermath of mountain lion killing in September that I did not know about. The post itself is pretty straight-forward, but a follow-up comment by the same writer — written in response to a commenter who wondered why the creature couldn’t have been tranquilzed and lamented human encroachment — really blew me away and not in a good way, Here’s what he had to say:
I’m tired of hearing that we moved into their land. This isn’t their land they were not alive when homes were built here, they were born much later. If you want to be dinner for wild animals than be my guest or if you want to feed your children or pets to them then do it but don’t tell me that this is their land.
If you subscribe to that theory then where do you start and finish. Man doesn’t have a place on the planet because others were here before him. Non Native Americans don’t belong in the United States, we need to leave. Mountain Lions shouldn’t kill deer because they have a right to be here this is their land also.
We have a duty to keep ourselves, our families and neighbors safe and sooner or later we are going to have to start killing the animals that would kill us. We are the reason that they are so prolific because we provide an easy living for them that allows them to thrive in numbers that were unheard of a few hundred years ago.
There is no place to relocate them that does not allow their quick return and that makes all in danger and they have become accustom to us and we and our pets have entered their food chain and we are quickly becoming the prime target because we are the weakest, slowest and easiest Kill.
Obviously I submitted a differing point of view — surprisingly diplomatic in tone — that attempted to counter this fellow’s misperceptions. Unfortunately they were sent via an email form that the blogger can then decide to post or not (I’m betting not) and I didn’t copy them to paste them up here.
So suffice it to say that such a myopic and misinformed point of view is pretty aggravating.
November 14th, 2008 at 8:24 am
Hey Will, I have to agree that it is sad either animal had to be shot. I believe I wrote you elsewhere, but the Monrovia shooting in particular was a situation that was unavoidable. The officer tried to do everything he could to shoo the animal away, when it charged he was left with few options. Ditto the Arcadia shooting.
We’ve both done a series of posts and commented back and forth about the tough times the drought has brought to the regions wildlife. Local police aren’t equipped to handle and Fish and Game doesn’t have the resources to react fast enough when they get calls. Sometimes they have good results other times its horrific it just depends on what resources are available at the moment.
November 14th, 2008 at 8:54 am
I have a friend at school who’s done a little bit of writing about ways in which we imagine Nature to exist or not exist in the city. I’d guess – not knowing much else – that your esteemed commenter subscribes to a kind of view in which Nature is always “out there”. People move in discrete spaces, and when new people move in, they push out the past completely.
The situation, as I think we both agree, isn’t nearly as discrete as that. Have you read Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: Architecture of the 4 Ecologies? He picks up on the metaphor of the palimpsest in an effort to point out how LA’s roads tend to follow the traces of past movements through the basin.
Thinking of this situation, it’s a reminder that Nature – the coyote, the mountain lion – is never wholly absent, never wholly gone. And even more importantly, animals don’t imagine the world as a series of discrete spaces – it’s just in their nature to do so. The problem is, that way of imagining nature – as something always among us – is kind of terrifying, especially for people who build up their world so that they might be in control of it.
November 14th, 2008 at 9:33 am
Wow. I’ve never heard of a case of coyotes attacking an adult, especially not one on a bike. I often encountered coyotes when I lived down in San Diego and would go hiking in the forests east of the city. In fact, I once shared a trail with a couple of coyotes who followed me for more than 12 miles, without ever coming closer than 20 feet — one of the high points of my California hiking career.
On the other hand, while I’m glad the hunting ban has allowed mountains to thrive once again, they seem to have lost their fear of man. I’ve often seen mountain lions over the years, but never saw them for long until recently. They’d usually slink off at the first sign of a human. But now they’re more likely to stand and watch as you pass by. I don’t know what the solution is; I don’t think resuming hunting is the answer, but for their good, as well as ours, we’ve got to find a way to restore their healthy fear of man.