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.
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