Over the last two-odd months I have, as I’m sure many of you have as well, been paying close attention to the growing fear and discussion around the recent mountain lion presence and potential danger they may present for us and our beloved pets.
I personally feel the intensity of this exacerbated threat because I often walk in the woods alone at night and I walk my family’s dog, along with my mother, around her neighborhood and I don’t wish for any animals to be harmed unnecessarily. My family’s dog, Charlie, is one of the things I love most in this world and if he were to be hurt I would be crushed.
Alongside my understanding of the mountain lion threat, I have another perspective I would like to share as well: I hunt deer and elk in this area and I have come to understand our woods as not just a place for us humans to bulldoze and walk in and shape into whatever we want, but as a place where there is so much life and history and interspecies relationship.
I think a lot of us moved up here in the first place because we wanted to be closer to something wild and natural, beyond the concrete and the office buildings. Living up in the high alpine woods means we live in nature, and nature contains things like moose and lions and wind. By living up here we are choosing more than those who live in cities or suburbs, to engage and live alongside nature, and that is part of what I love about living here – the ability to remember the time in the world when, for most of history we humans were part of nature and not separate from it.
But I fear that the focus on the mountain lions as a pure threat is counterproductive and will lead to unnecessary deaths of these lions, who have as much a right to live as we do. Now they do not have a right to kill our dogs or attack us. But a question should be posed that I have not yet read, and that is: why has this problem of more rampant mountain lion activity started this year?
My answer is us.
I hunt by Gross Dam, and this year they were many fewer animals than there have ever been, and many more animal attacks west of the Gross Dam area than ever before. Moose in the summer were being aggressive, and now there is this ongoing issue with mountain lions. These animals have been pushed from their habitat by the noise and the destruction that the dam expansion is causing.
I suppose my point here is that these are not isolated incidents, and the mountain lions haven’t chosen to attack us because they are evil or bad intentioned, but because they are starving and displaced from where they once lived as a result of something that we are doing. That doesn’t mean that we are evil either, necessarily, but that we are part of this problem. The answer to this cannot be just to kill the mountain lions and kill the moose and kill all the animals that react to the destruction of and encroachment into their habitats.
Now I will continue to walk in the woods and I will bring protection with me. I encourage you to do the same, but as I walk through these woods, which we have the privilege to live within, I will also try to remember that these animals have a right to be here as well, and that I will do my utmost not to have to harm another living thing, something that shares this beautiful place with us and makes it what it is.
