Last March, two young California men were searching for shed deer antlers in the Sierra foothills east of Sacramento and were startled by a young mountain lion walking toward them, no more than 10 yards away. Experts say the best thing to do when a mountain lion approaches is to raise your arms to make yourself look larger, yell, and back away slowly. The young men, Taylen Brooks, 21, and Wyatt Brooks, 18, did just that, but the lion was not deterred.
Wyatt fell and the lion pounced on him sinking its fangs into his face. He pushed the cat away and it raked his face, and then the lion turned and attacked Taylen, fastening its jaws on his neck. Wyatt saw his brother’s arms go limp and the lion then dragged Taylen off the road and into the brush.
With difficulty Wyatt managed to dial 911. Fifteen minutes later, two deputy sheriffs drove up, followed by an ambulance. “The deputies spotted the drag trail through the brush and followed it to the cat, still crouched over Taylen’s body,” wrote Malcolm Brooks, the young men’s uncle. The cat vanished after deputies fired warning shots. It was later caught and killed by a county trapper.
Brooks’ story about the incident appeared in the New York Times Magazine in December, and it has rekindled a debate about mountain lions and how they should be managed.
Experts say there are simply too many lions in some places, many of which have lost their fear of humans.
To Brooks there is no doubt about what should be done in parts of California — something known as “tree-and-free.” That means, to reduce habituation and instill a fear of humans, hunters with hounds are allowed to chase lions until they climb a tree to escape. Lions in California are strictly protected, though, and there are many wildlife advocates who want to continue strict protections for the charismatic animal, including no “harassment” with dogs.
But some experts say there are simply too many lions in some places, many of which have lost their fear of humans, and treeing and freeing doesn’t go far enough. “They need hunting,” said John Chandler, the professional El Dorado County trapper who caught the lion that attacked Brooks’ nephews. “It solves everything.”
There are an estimated 30,000 mountain lions in the United States, the lion’s share of them in the West. Numbers are not well known because cougars are not federally protected and not well studied. But they are showing up in more places, from the Midwest to the East Coast, and are stoking controversy.
Mountain lions are also known as pumas, cougars, or panthers. They live solitary lives and feed primarily on deer. They are the second largest of North America’s wild cats (jaguars are the largest). In the U.S., male mountain lions averagemore than 135 pounds and females nearly 95 pounds. They are found from Canada to South America, the most widely distributed wild land mammal in the world.
Taylen Brooks, left, and his brother Wyatt.
El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office
Unlike wolves or grizzly bears, mountain lions across the country are managed by states, and so regulations are literally all over the map, varying greatly. In California, any hunting of lions is banned because of a 1990 voter initiative; in Texas, mountain lions are considered vermin and can be shot year round with a general hunting license and no special permit.
Florida is the only place where they are managed by the federal government, as an endangered species.
Attacks like the one on the Brooks brothers are driving a lot of the debate. Since 1890 there have been at least 32 fatal mountain lion attacks on humans, and more than 170 nonfatal attacks. As more people encroach on wild land — building homes and hobby farms, hiking and biking — the numbers of encounters are increasing and are being spread far and wide by social media and news outlets.
Washington state has been the sight of several attacks. A highly publicized incident happened last year near Snoqualmie when five women riding mountain bikes were attacked by a young 75-pound male. They successfully fought the animal off, and then pinned it to the ground under a bike until a state Department of Fish and Wildlife agent came and killed it. One biker suffered serious injuries. Two years ago a nine-year-old girl was attacked near Spokane and nearly died, though she has recovered. In 2018, a mountain biker was attacked by a lion and killed.
Lion management has been decided by voter initiatives in some states, with Washington and Oregon banning hunting with hounds.
California has seen the most attacks in the last 40 years with 22 people injured and four killed. While the numbers are relatively low, the shock of predator attacks always grabs headlines and leads to calls for changes in policy. At the same time, lions are charismatic and have a large amount of support.
Northern and Southern California of course are very different places. P-22, a lion that improbably lived near the Hollywood sign and in Griffith Park for years, was emblematic of the fragmentation of habitat and genetic isolation of mountain lions in the southern part of the state. The Center for Biological Diversity says that five populations of mountain lions in the central coast and south are at risk of extinction because of habitat decline.
Recently, after a comprehensive study, researchers revised the estimated number of lions in the state downward from around 6,000 to between 3,200 to 4,500.
One of the wild cards in the management of lions, and other wildlife, is “ballot biology.” Management of mountain lions in several states has been decided by voter initiative. Washington and Oregon both banned hunting with hounds in the 1990s. Colorado, which has roughly as many mountain lions as California, recently voted against an initiative that would have banned the hunting of mountain lions, lynx, and bobcats.
A mountain lion perched atop a tree.
Susann Parker / Alamy Stock Photo
Some experts and hunting advocates are critical of such “ballot biology,” saying that they are often based on emotions rather than science.
Others believe they are an important way to affect change and bypass special interests. Dan Ashe, former director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, believes that hunting mountain lions is unethical. “I’ve never been much for so-called ‘trophy hunting,’ especially when the animals are chased to exhaustion by commercial outfitters using dogs and GPS tracking,” he wrote in a Colorado newspaper, “and then shot by a ‘hunter’ while perched helplessly in a tree.”
California, where the attack on Malcolm Brooks’ nephews occurred, is governed by Proposition 117, passed in 1990, that gave the mountain lion strict “special protection.” It banned sport hunting. It did not specifically ban “tree-and-free,” but the state has interpreted the law to not allow that, unless lions pose a direct threat. But Brooks advocates a return to tree-and-free. That’s how lions are hunted across the country — the lion is shot after it’s treed. But Brooks said the chase doesn’t have to end with a killing.
“The linchpin is strictly the exercise of having them run with hounds and stressing them enough until they take refuge up a tree, a naturally evolving conditioned response they learned long before Anglo humans with purpose-bred hound dogs arrived in the new world,” he said. “Bears have been running lions into trees since time immemorial. It’s just what they do to escape.
“We don’t want mountain lions to live under the threat of needless or ruthless persecution,” a wildlife advocate says.
“For over 30 years [California has] not been able to approach management of that species the way every other state manages or the way they manage other species,” Brooks said. “Now it seems like the chickens are really coming home to roost, with overly habituated lions that have had almost no pressure put on them for decades.”
Bart George is a wildlife biologist with the Kalispel tribe in northeast Washington. He and colleagues just published results of a four-year study that found that using trained hounds is effective in restoring a fear of humans. “The questions was how close would they would let us get” before and after tree-and-free,” George said. “The distance doubled or tripled in a lot of cases. And they were fleeing sooner. They learned that the human voice means trouble.”
However, Brent Lyles, the executive director of the Mountain Lion Foundation, which works to protect mountain lions and advocates using scare tactics and improved livestock management practices, said more research is needed.
Existing studies on tree-and-free are “not conclusive but they are a start,” he said. “There’s not any data that says it works. We don’t want mountain lions to live under the threat of needless or ruthless persecution.” The state of California, in partnership with Utah State University and other agencies, has just began a study that compares chasing the animals with hounds; scare devices such as flashing lights and loud sounds set off by motion; and turbo fladry, which is electrified fencing with red flags that ward off predators.
A mountain lion captured on camera in the eastern end of the Santa Susana Mountains in Southern California.
National Park Service / Alamy Stock Photo
Lyles’ group often responds to homeowners and teaches them about effective deterrents. “There’s all kinds of blinking lights and noisemakers and motion-activated this-and-that that can be used to protect livestock, and use them in conjunction with husbandry practices,” such as penning livestock at night. “Coexistence is achievable. It’s not as expensive as people think, and it works. Livestock guardian dogs really work if it’s done right. Motion-activated noisemakers work really well if they are done right.”
John Chandler is a trapper for El Dorado County. For 25 years he has responded to people who have problems with mountain lions, and he is the trapper who responded to the attack on the two young men and captured and killed that lion.
Chandler believes that the mountain lion situation in parts of California, including El Dorado County, has gotten far more dangerous. “It’s gotten crazy, he said. “You don’t realize how many lions are walking through neighborhoods at night,” but the spread of security cameras has shown how many are out there.
“We have more mountain lions than we can deal with,” he said and “there are a lot more” lion encounters. “Way, way way more. And they [the lions] have changed a lot. They aren’t afraid of people anymore, they aren’t afraid of dogs.” Chandler is authorized to respond to lions that get close to people with a team of hounds to chase them off.
He believes lion behavior began to change when California banned the hunting of black bears with hounds in 2012, a practice that sometimes swept up lions that were spooked by the dogs. Treeing and freeing works, he says “but I’ve treed the same lion 10 times.”
Would hunting help? “Of course. In states where they can hunt them, they don’t have this problem,” he said. “But it’s never going to happen in California. I don’t see a situation where they bring back hunting unless more kids get killed.”
