5 ms·

Big cats in urban jungle: LA mountain lions, Mumbai leopards

44 points by samizdis 4y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
> Avoidance is the safest strategy, she said. "These big cats are shy—they tend to avoid human contact as much as they can. They're really extreme introverts of the animal kingdom." There are lots of large predators that "avoid human contact". I think the reason for that is not some intrinsic physical thing, but because humans have historically hunted and killed these large predators. However, as humans stop killing these predators, how long until they lose their fear of humans and see us as prey?
- bombcar 4y ago
  Small children can be seen as prey; adult humans are actually quite large as animals go, and standing upright makes them appear even larger [67] - groups make it even more so. However, encouraging animals to be "scared" of humans is good, because large predators that get used to humans often have to be put down. [67] https://www.reddit.com/r/me_irl/comments/op4u1q/me_irl/ https://www.reddit.com/r/me_irl/comments/op4u1q/me_irl/
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
    But leopards can hunt far larger prey than humans. From Wikipedia: > The largest prey killed by a leopard was reportedly a male eland weighing 900 kg (2,000 lb).[92] > It is able to take large prey due to its powerful jaw muscles, and is therefore strong enough to drag carcasses heavier than itself up into trees; an individual was seen to haul a young giraffe weighing nearly 125 kg (276 lb) up 5.7 m (18 ft 8 in) into a tree
    - bombcar 4y ago
      They can but it's relatively abnormal; just like I'm sure someone somewhere has been mauled to death by a housecat.
  - nescioquid 4y ago
    Learning to coexist with the animals, as the article mentioned, is probably the best approach. I once read an article about tiger attacks in India and a brilliant tactic people developed: wearing a mask on the back of the head. Cats are ambush predators and will attack from behind. Apparently having a "face" on the back of your head is a good deterrent against cat attacks. Growing up near Glacier Park, we were given a great deal of wilderness survival instruction starting in elementary school (this was back in the '70s and '80s). I spent a fair bit of time tramping through the woods alone as a child, making noise so as not to startle the bears as taught. When I did occasionally come upon a bear, it wasn't fussed and continued on doing what it was doing. The odd report of a mauling elicited sympathy but there seemed to be a tacit assumption that the poor fellow screwed up somehow. In all that time, I never so much as caught a glimpse of a cat, though they were surely around. Predators getting used to humans happens when they come to depend on humans. Glacier Park learned from the "Night of the Grizzly" episode by keeping the bears out of food waste and considering feeding the bears a serious no-no. Animals that were unable or unwilling to return to their normal survival strategies were relocated or put down, though the major change was educating people and changing their behaviors. However, if you've got big cats in your backyard, I imagine that population is already stressed.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- bergenty 4y ago
  I think the reason is adult humans are too large to be easy prey. Yes, they do go after prey that size sometimes but not normally because the cost benefit probably doesn’t work out.
- dkarl 4y ago
  > how long until they lose their fear of humans and see us as prey? If you're asking about individuals, it already happens that individual animals target humans for predation. If you're asking about genetic change in populations, it probably won't happen, because we identify and kill the rare individuals that attack humans.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  > because humans have historically hunted and killed these large predators I don't recall any cats in my history classes. Maybe they got their education some other way.
- jamal-kumar 4y ago
  Once in a while it happens and people sometimes even have the fortitude to kill the puma with their bare hands. Here's a recent account [1] I've always lived in areas with big cats that end up wandering into the city or town once in a while. Usually it just ends in a ketamine dart and a bunch of videos on social media. I think I actually hear about a lot more attacks in North America than in Central America for whatever reason. I get the sense that they're actually more of a risk to small children, pets, and livestock. If you're out hiking what I've heard a few times is that if you smell something that's a lot like a "wet dog" smell in the middle of nowhere then you better get the bear spray in your hand in case you end up on some cat's menu choices. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umBbQvnShaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umBbQvnShaA
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Many humans could fight a mountain lion and win. There are circumstances when they will attack but in general we’re too big to be prey.
  - johndhi 4y ago
    ... what? I don't think so
whartung 4y ago
I live in an urban area in So Cal near the foothills. Mind, this is not the San Gabriels, which is more chaparral, this is more high desert. We have some open fields nearby, but we're less than 5 miles from the actual hills themselves. Less than a month ago we had a bobcat "in" our backyard. By that, I mean we had her running along the top of our cinder block wall. What we actually saw was her litter of kittens. We just saw them running back and forth on the top, we did not see the mother. We saw her later in the afternoon as she came back to round them up. It was a tense few minutes as the mother waited on the ground for her kittens who were hesitant to drop down from the wall (it's a 6 foot wall). They were clinging to the neighbors gate. We were more worried they'd fall on the inside of the gate into their backyard. They're not home, and the gates are locked. It would have been interesting to see how she would have got them out of there. But all was well, they dropped on the outside of the gate, and they scurried off. A teachable moment for the children, no doubt. We've also had coyote's on this wall. There's something inherently creepy about being stared at by a wild animal. We have to assume that they live in one of the nearby fields. There's a nice 10 acre field that's overgrown with deep grass. Most of the fields have much less cover. But still curious what brought her and her kittens to our house.
- com2kid 4y ago
  In the pacific northwest you can find bear families walking around cities and taking a swim in backyard pools. There is a local mountain called cougar mountain, during the mid 00s housing boom it underwent a lot of development and some of the new locals started complaining to their local government that there were, gasp cougars living at cougar mountain and some residents even requested that the cougars be removed. From what I understand, such requests were promptly ignored.
- stevenwoo 4y ago
  I used to bicycle a lot before/during dawn hours to get in a workout before work and have seen mountain lions inside the city limits of Cupertino and Palo Alto. Both these cities have significant overlap with or contain nature preserves.
wcarron 4y ago
Wow. I'm surprised to learn that over 100 cats were collared around LA. As far as I was aware, there were/are only like 7 or 8 lions in the Angeles National Forest. Great to hear that they're significantly more numerous than I'd known. I spent a lot of time in the ANF while I lived there and never saw one or found a kill and only once found tracks. Anecdata but I feel it supports the assertion that they just plain don't like to be around humans or spend too much time in the 'frontcountry'. Here in AZ, I find tracks regularly.
- tessierashpool 4y ago
  there are exceptions, but typically, if you see a mountain lion, the mountain lion decided to let you see it.
fourstar 4y ago
It'd be great if they'd stop putting those huge tracking devices around these mountain lions' necks down in SoCal (and elsewhere). Also, not a fan of banding (UC Berkeley Falcons for example). Extremely traumatizing for the animal.
- LeoPanthera 4y ago
  > Extremely traumatizing for the animal. Do you have a citation for this?
  - fourstar 4y ago
    Lol. Knock yourself out: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=banding+day https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=banding+day I believe they also stopped doing it at the Big Bear eagle nest. And for mountain lions: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/13/los-angeles-mountain-lion-griffith-park https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/13/los-angeles-... no mate yet? Hmm wonder if it could be the huge and unnecessary device strapped around its neck.
    - googlryas 4y ago
      So what you're saying is you don't have a source for this?
    - LeoPanthera 4y ago
      No offence but you're not going to convince anyone by linking to a YouTube search, of all things. The Guardian link says absolutely nothing about the collar being traumatizing.
    - tomjakubowski 4y ago
      Plenty of GPS-collared pumas have found mates. P22 in particular is isolated from potential mates by the freeways surrounding Griffith Park. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0139087 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
danans 4y ago
> A Waghoba temple is seen at Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai, India, Wednesday, April 6, 2022. Tribals worship Waghoba, a deity in the form of leopards and tigers, in the belief that they protect them and their livestock from evil. It's always interesting to see concrete religious symbols developing as a result of human beings interactions with nature in this way. In many ways this doesn't seem so different from the ancient lions of Sumerian reliefs or the various creatures depicted at Gobleki Tepe (the oldest known religious structures). The sheer honesty of that concrete depiction of human survival plight in a natural environment gets reduced to a shadow of itself in most mainstream religion, whether now or in antiquity. Tangentially, this particular example of a deity fashioned after a dangerous wildcat is one reason why Hinduism is sometimes described as having thousands of gods. Many of them are just "functional", representing protection against or assistance of specific natural phenomenon, and have little to do with political identity or salvation. The Hindi inscription above the idol in the photo is even more interesting, translating as: "King of the Jungle, Waghobadev". "Waghobadev" itself translates to something like "tiger/leapord god".
jeffrallen 4y ago
The mountain lion warning signs around Silicon Valley are really terrifying. I was always secretly rooting for them, seems useful to occasionally remind chewy humans they are not top of the food chain.
zem 4y ago
when I was in college in Mumbai (~1995) we had a leopard on campus. was a fairly disconcerting few days before they caught it. (the campus had a lot of wilderness areas so it was easy for it to hide)
- ggm 4y ago
  Was there any serious consideration of tag and release? or when you say "capture" do you mean catch, tag and release? Ecologically speaking, it might be better to leave a viable cat in place than remove it and make a territory to fight over. This is why feral cats in some cities are chipped, speyed and released (they cut an ear to mark it sterile)
  - zem 4y ago
    no idea what they did, they just issued an all-clear. i'm guessing they tried to relocate it to some more remote area.

44 points by samizdis 4y ago

> Avoidance is the safest strategy, she said. "These big cats are shy—they tend to avoid human contact as much as they can. They're really extreme introverts of the animal kingdom." There are lots of large predators that "avoid human contact". I think the reason for that is not some intrinsic physical thing, but because humans have historically hunted and killed these large predators. However, as humans stop killing these predators, how long until they lose their fear of humans and see us as prey?

bombcar 4y ago
Small children can be seen as prey; adult humans are actually quite large as animals go, and standing upright makes them appear even larger [67] - groups make it even more so. However, encouraging animals to be "scared" of humans is good, because large predators that get used to humans often have to be put down. [67] https://www.reddit.com/r/me_irl/comments/op4u1q/me_irl/ https://www.reddit.com/r/me_irl/comments/op4u1q/me_irl/
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
  But leopards can hunt far larger prey than humans. From Wikipedia: > The largest prey killed by a leopard was reportedly a male eland weighing 900 kg (2,000 lb).[92] > It is able to take large prey due to its powerful jaw muscles, and is therefore strong enough to drag carcasses heavier than itself up into trees; an individual was seen to haul a young giraffe weighing nearly 125 kg (276 lb) up 5.7 m (18 ft 8 in) into a tree
  - bombcar 4y ago
    They can but it's relatively abnormal; just like I'm sure someone somewhere has been mauled to death by a housecat.
- nescioquid 4y ago
  Learning to coexist with the animals, as the article mentioned, is probably the best approach. I once read an article about tiger attacks in India and a brilliant tactic people developed: wearing a mask on the back of the head. Cats are ambush predators and will attack from behind. Apparently having a "face" on the back of your head is a good deterrent against cat attacks. Growing up near Glacier Park, we were given a great deal of wilderness survival instruction starting in elementary school (this was back in the '70s and '80s). I spent a fair bit of time tramping through the woods alone as a child, making noise so as not to startle the bears as taught. When I did occasionally come upon a bear, it wasn't fussed and continued on doing what it was doing. The odd report of a mauling elicited sympathy but there seemed to be a tacit assumption that the poor fellow screwed up somehow. In all that time, I never so much as caught a glimpse of a cat, though they were surely around. Predators getting used to humans happens when they come to depend on humans. Glacier Park learned from the "Night of the Grizzly" episode by keeping the bears out of food waste and considering feeding the bears a serious no-no. Animals that were unable or unwilling to return to their normal survival strategies were relocated or put down, though the major change was educating people and changing their behaviors. However, if you've got big cats in your backyard, I imagine that population is already stressed.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
bergenty 4y ago
I think the reason is adult humans are too large to be easy prey. Yes, they do go after prey that size sometimes but not normally because the cost benefit probably doesn’t work out.
dkarl 4y ago
> how long until they lose their fear of humans and see us as prey? If you're asking about individuals, it already happens that individual animals target humans for predation. If you're asking about genetic change in populations, it probably won't happen, because we identify and kill the rare individuals that attack humans.
drewcoo 4y ago
> because humans have historically hunted and killed these large predators I don't recall any cats in my history classes. Maybe they got their education some other way.
jamal-kumar 4y ago
Once in a while it happens and people sometimes even have the fortitude to kill the puma with their bare hands. Here's a recent account [1] I've always lived in areas with big cats that end up wandering into the city or town once in a while. Usually it just ends in a ketamine dart and a bunch of videos on social media. I think I actually hear about a lot more attacks in North America than in Central America for whatever reason. I get the sense that they're actually more of a risk to small children, pets, and livestock. If you're out hiking what I've heard a few times is that if you smell something that's a lot like a "wet dog" smell in the middle of nowhere then you better get the bear spray in your hand in case you end up on some cat's menu choices. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umBbQvnShaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umBbQvnShaA
colechristensen 4y ago
Many humans could fight a mountain lion and win. There are circumstances when they will attack but in general we’re too big to be prey.
- johndhi 4y ago
  ... what? I don't think so

whartung 4y ago

I live in an urban area in So Cal near the foothills. Mind, this is not the San Gabriels, which is more chaparral, this is more high desert. We have some open fields nearby, but we're less than 5 miles from the actual hills themselves. Less than a month ago we had a bobcat "in" our backyard. By that, I mean we had her running along the top of our cinder block wall. What we actually saw was her litter of kittens. We just saw them running back and forth on the top, we did not see the mother. We saw her later in the afternoon as she came back to round them up. It was a tense few minutes as the mother waited on the ground for her kittens who were hesitant to drop down from the wall (it's a 6 foot wall). They were clinging to the neighbors gate. We were more worried they'd fall on the inside of the gate into their backyard. They're not home, and the gates are locked. It would have been interesting to see how she would have got them out of there. But all was well, they dropped on the outside of the gate, and they scurried off. A teachable moment for the children, no doubt. We've also had coyote's on this wall. There's something inherently creepy about being stared at by a wild animal. We have to assume that they live in one of the nearby fields. There's a nice 10 acre field that's overgrown with deep grass. Most of the fields have much less cover. But still curious what brought her and her kittens to our house.

com2kid 4y ago
In the pacific northwest you can find bear families walking around cities and taking a swim in backyard pools. There is a local mountain called cougar mountain, during the mid 00s housing boom it underwent a lot of development and some of the new locals started complaining to their local government that there were, gasp cougars living at cougar mountain and some residents even requested that the cougars be removed. From what I understand, such requests were promptly ignored.
stevenwoo 4y ago
I used to bicycle a lot before/during dawn hours to get in a workout before work and have seen mountain lions inside the city limits of Cupertino and Palo Alto. Both these cities have significant overlap with or contain nature preserves.

wcarron 4y ago

Wow. I'm surprised to learn that over 100 cats were collared around LA. As far as I was aware, there were/are only like 7 or 8 lions in the Angeles National Forest. Great to hear that they're significantly more numerous than I'd known. I spent a lot of time in the ANF while I lived there and never saw one or found a kill and only once found tracks. Anecdata but I feel it supports the assertion that they just plain don't like to be around humans or spend too much time in the 'frontcountry'. Here in AZ, I find tracks regularly.

tessierashpool 4y ago
there are exceptions, but typically, if you see a mountain lion, the mountain lion decided to let you see it.

fourstar 4y ago

It'd be great if they'd stop putting those huge tracking devices around these mountain lions' necks down in SoCal (and elsewhere). Also, not a fan of banding (UC Berkeley Falcons for example). Extremely traumatizing for the animal.

LeoPanthera 4y ago
> Extremely traumatizing for the animal. Do you have a citation for this?
- fourstar 4y ago
  Lol. Knock yourself out: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=banding+day https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=banding+day I believe they also stopped doing it at the Big Bear eagle nest. And for mountain lions: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/13/los-angeles-mountain-lion-griffith-park https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/13/los-angeles-... no mate yet? Hmm wonder if it could be the huge and unnecessary device strapped around its neck.
  - googlryas 4y ago
    So what you're saying is you don't have a source for this?
  - LeoPanthera 4y ago
    No offence but you're not going to convince anyone by linking to a YouTube search, of all things. The Guardian link says absolutely nothing about the collar being traumatizing.
  - tomjakubowski 4y ago
    Plenty of GPS-collared pumas have found mates. P22 in particular is isolated from potential mates by the freeways surrounding Griffith Park. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0139087 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

danans 4y ago

> A Waghoba temple is seen at Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai, India, Wednesday, April 6, 2022. Tribals worship Waghoba, a deity in the form of leopards and tigers, in the belief that they protect them and their livestock from evil. It's always interesting to see concrete religious symbols developing as a result of human beings interactions with nature in this way. In many ways this doesn't seem so different from the ancient lions of Sumerian reliefs or the various creatures depicted at Gobleki Tepe (the oldest known religious structures). The sheer honesty of that concrete depiction of human survival plight in a natural environment gets reduced to a shadow of itself in most mainstream religion, whether now or in antiquity. Tangentially, this particular example of a deity fashioned after a dangerous wildcat is one reason why Hinduism is sometimes described as having thousands of gods. Many of them are just "functional", representing protection against or assistance of specific natural phenomenon, and have little to do with political identity or salvation. The Hindi inscription above the idol in the photo is even more interesting, translating as: "King of the Jungle, Waghobadev". "Waghobadev" itself translates to something like "tiger/leapord god".

jeffrallen 4y ago

The mountain lion warning signs around Silicon Valley are really terrifying. I was always secretly rooting for them, seems useful to occasionally remind chewy humans they are not top of the food chain.

zem 4y ago

when I was in college in Mumbai (~1995) we had a leopard on campus. was a fairly disconcerting few days before they caught it. (the campus had a lot of wilderness areas so it was easy for it to hide)

ggm 4y ago
Was there any serious consideration of tag and release? or when you say "capture" do you mean catch, tag and release? Ecologically speaking, it might be better to leave a viable cat in place than remove it and make a territory to fight over. This is why feral cats in some cities are chipped, speyed and released (they cut an ear to mark it sterile)
- zem 4y ago
  no idea what they did, they just issued an all-clear. i'm guessing they tried to relocate it to some more remote area.