Loving Monsters (Cougars are just big, lovable pussy cats, after all.)

Tech Central Station ^ | November 5, 2003 | Glenn Harlan Reynolds

[quidnunc]

NPR science reporter David Baron has a new book out, called "The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature." Baron's book is about the return of cougars to the Boulder, Colorado area after decades of hunting-induced absence, and their eventual taste for eating human beings — along with the various fantasy ideologies regarding wildlife and nature that this chain of events revealed.

But, in light of the book's subtitle, I don't think it will be terribly unfair if I use this story as a, er, parable. For the story it tells is, at core, an old one: Monsters are loose, and some people know it, while others pretend not to.

It's a standard theme, from old tales to modern stories like "Harry Potter" and "Buffy." The modern twist is that some people see it as moral to take the side of the people-eaters. One suspects that this isn't so much in spite of the people-eating, but because of it.

Cougars were once regarded as timid, fearful of humans, and far more likely to flee at the sight of people than to regard us as food. Of course, there was a reason for that: for millennia, humans had attacked Cougars whenever possible, regarding them as a menace to safety and as competitors for valuable game. Showing one's face around Indians produced arrows, spears, and torches; later on, appearing around European settlers produced a faceful of lead. Aggressive cougars tended to die young, or to receive sufficient aversive conditioning to learn to leave humans alone.

Later on, a generalized revulsion against predators set in. As Baron notes (it's the source of his title, in fact), meat-eating was supposed by some to have begun with Original Sin — "carnivores" in the Garden of Eden were said to have eaten fruits. In the post-lapsarian world, however, hunting was long seen as something manly, championed by those, like Teddy Roosevelt, who feared that excessive urbanization and industrialization would cause Americans to become too distanced from the reality of nature. But as that distancing took place in spite of Roosevelt's efforts, what is now called "fluffy bunny" syndrome appeared, and predators were regarded as inherently evil. Coupled with stockmen's continuing aversion to having their cattle and sheep eaten by predators, this produced programs of predator eradication that led to the near-extinction of cougars' only natural enemy, the gray wolf, and the removal of cougars from all but the most remote areas.

But then "fluffy bunny" syndrome extended itself to become "fluffy mountain lion syndrome." Government-sponsored cougar hunting ended, bounties were removed, and cougars started to make a comeback. Boulder's inhabitants disliked hunters, and liked the idea of living with wildlife, causing populations of deer in residential areas to explode. Meanwhile low-density housing meant that more and more people were living along the boundary between settled and unsettled areas. As cougars, their fear of humans having dissipated after years of not being hunted, moved into semiurban areas bursting with deer, they acclimated to human beings. People were no longer scary and, after a while, started to look like food.

-snip-

[SauronOfMordor]

He and his girlfriend were proven wrong in spectacular fashion, caught on videotape.

Is the tape on the net? I have a couple of bunny-huggers I'd like to send it to

[Gritty]

For those who feeeeel all animals are just fuzzy-wuzzy little critters who just want to be your friends...

Death In The Long Grass

... you'll be up all night reading this book!

[martin_fierro]

It may be a few months before that tape appears on the net, if at all.

Apparently it's pretty gruesome.

You may want to e-mail your tree-hugging friends the news articles on the mauling:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1000238/posts

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/997801/posts

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/997664/posts

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/997103/posts (he's called a "bear expert" in this one. HA!)

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/997031/posts

[FreedomPoster]

Here's our buddy Treadwell, from the bear posts a couple of weeks ago! See the replied-to post. This thread has a similar theme.