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By Marc Peyser
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For Iris Kenna, Cuyamaca Rancho State Park near San Diego was like a second home. By day, she strolled its fields in search of exotic birds. At night, the 56-year-old high-school counselor sometimes slept under the stars. But one morning almost exactly a year ago, Kenna encountered something unfamiliar, and it saw her first. Without warning, a 140-pound male mountain lion pounced on her from behind. The struggle was brief. The animal dragged the dying, 5-foot-4 Kenna into dense brush to hide her from competing predators. Rangers found her only after two hikers spotted a pair of glasses, a backpack and a human tooth by the path she had been on. The rangers followed a trail of her clothes for 30 yards until they came to Ken-na's body. The back of her scalp was ripped off; the rest of her was fiddled with bites. No one had heard a scream, or even a roar.
Kenna is the most vivid symbol of an angry, shifting debate over how people and predators can coexist. In the high-growth Western states, many residents love living near the wild, and they are inclined to preserve it no matter what the risks. But violent deaths like Kenna's -- and a string of other mountain-lion attacks-are making a powerful case for fighting back. Californians will vote in March on opening the way to mountain-lion hunting, which has been prohibited there for more than 20 years. But Oregon, Arizona and Colorado recently changed their hunting laws to ensure that predatory animals-including bears, wolves and coyotes-would be protected. "It's overwhelmingly popular to have these animals in our ecosystems," says Tom Dougherty of the National Wildlife Federation. "But if they're in your backyard, some people aren't loving it."
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The most acute mountain-lion problem is in California. That's partly because the state's human population has doubled every 25 years this century. As more people built more houses, they usurped territory once largely inhabited by wild animals. But the mountain lion (alternately called cougar, puma and panther) has also been questionably served by environmentalists. In 1972, preservation-minded Californians banned hunting the majestic animals (except when they pose an imminent danger to people or livestock). The cougar population ballooned, from an estimated 2,400 lions to 6,000 today. Without hunters to thin the ranks, increased competition for food has sent hungry mountain lions to suburban backyards, shopping centers and elementary schools in search of nourishment -- a deer or, lacking that, a collie. Even children have been mauled. "People are afraid to go on a picnic without taking a firearm," says state Sen. Tim Leslie, a prominent anti-cougar advocate. In the wake of Kenna's death, Gov. Pete Wilson authorized the March ballot initiative-- one that could lead to controlling the cougar population.
But in other places, sentiment favors animals at least as much as people. A survey of Coloradans living near the Rockies found that 80 percent believe that development in mountain-lion territory should be restricted. What's more, when wildlife authorities killed the cougar that killed a woman named Barbara Schoener in California in 1994, donors raised $21,000 to care for the cougar's cub--but only $9,000 for Schoener's two children. Arizona recently outlawed trapping cougars (though hunting is legal), while Colorado and Oregon don't allow mountain-lion hunters to use bait or dogs. "There's a value shift about how people view wildlife, a high willingness to accept mountain lions on the urban fringe--even if they kill people," says Michael Manfredo, who conducted the survey at Colorado State University. That open-mindedness will certainly be tested as Westerners reintroduce predators-grizzly bears in Idaho, wolves in New Mexico and in Yellowstone National Park. It's a jungle out there--and it's getting more junglelike every day.
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