June 11, 2004

Back to the table of Contents Page

Classifieds

Palo Alto Online

Living with lions

by Jay Thorwaldson

It's the next mountain lion that counts, Lynn Sadler of the Mountain Lion Foundation told a group of Palo Altans Thursday night.

Sadler, as executive director of the Sacramento-based, 17-year-old organization, declined to do a post-mortem on the shooting of a mountain lion that wandered around a Palo Alto residential neighborhood for more than seven hours May 17 until it was shot and killed by a Palo Alto police officer. The shooting evoked a storm of protest.

"We won't talk about what did happen because that's not going to do anything. We want to talk about what we can do from this point forward," Sadler said in an interview with the Weekly prior to the scheduled 6:30 p.m. talk at the Lucie Stern Center, a short distance west of the shooting incident at Walnut and Walter Hays drives. Acterra, the environmental group, helped arrange the talk.

Sadler said California has come far in the past 15 years in protecting the big cats. She headed the successful 1990 "Proposition 117" initiative campaign that banned trophy hunting of lions, and helped fight off the 1996 challenge to the initiative.

But protecting the lions doesn't lessen the need to be careful, she said.

"There are any number of things we can do to help the lions, from habitat protection and better corridor protection to better education of the public," she said. The latter can take many forms, from teaching people about actions they can take in their own backyards that "can have repercussions for miles around" to how to take precautions when hiking or bicycling in wild areas, where lions live.

She said leaving out pet food can attract animals that are lion prey, and feeding the beautiful deer in semi-rural areas can draw lions to homes.

"If you leave out a goat on a chain to eat the grass in your back yard, some people call that 'Happy Meals for mountain lions,'" she said.

Understanding the crucial role the lions play in the overall ecosystem is important, she said.

"The top predator in any ecosystem is holding together that delicate web of life that can unravel pretty quickly when you lose that top predator," she said. With the leading predator missing, "the landscape would look pretty different in 50 years, with different trees, different vegetation."

In urban settings, cornered lions can be dangerous, but a tranquilizer dart should act within five to 10 minutes unless it hits bone, she said -- contesting the earlier estimate of 20 to 30 minutes Palo Alto police were provided.

A cornered lion also is not likely to be thinking of food, even if it is hungry: "That lion is so freaked out he's concerned about getting out of Dodge, not about getting dinner," Sadler said. "But that doesn't mean there's no danger -- he might use you for traction in getting out of town," she said of onlookers and media people at the scene.

Especially in the wild, mountain lions are also "more likely to see you than for you to see them," she noted.

"I once was on a porch with other people, looking at some trees at eye level, and we took pictures of them. When we got the pictures back, there in a tree was a mountain lion. None of us had seen the lion, despite focusing and taking the pictures."

General warnings are that people should not run from a lion but stand tall, "look big," make noise, throw things -- and hike with a sturdy walking stick.

She said the "bible on mountain lions" is a book by Ken Logan and Linda Sweanor, a husband-wife scientist team, called "Desert Puma." The Mountain Lion Foundation published a book, "Cougar, the American Lion," in 1990 that went through six printings. It now is out of print but available at libraries, some park stores and used-book outlets, Sadler said.

Weekly Editor Jay Thorwaldson can be e-mailed at jthorwaldson@paweekly.com.

E-mail a friend a link to this story.