Predators

"My husband was installing blinds on the house at about midnight on Friday," a friend reported. "When he was finished in here, he walked outside to see if you could see through them. As he reached the back of the house and turned around, he saw a dark shape with glinting eyes... and when it moved he could see it silhouetted. It had a short tail and moved like a cat, but it was twice as large as the neighborhood domestic cat, Mollie!"

This large midnight visitor turned out to be a fairly rare native bobcat, hunting along the edge of the pond that borders their house, who paused to watch them for a moment and then vanished. Like the cougars in the canyons of Colorado and the coyotes in the west, these predators are learning to deal with human-inhabited areas, putting us in the position of trying to deal with some very uneasy choices.

What do we do with the medium-to-large sized carnivores around us?

In spite of our sympathies for their situation, this is a type of wildlife that most homeowners can't really wildscape for -- there's no bobcat houses on the market and it's not a terribly good idea to set out bear chow to attract bears. Most predators are territorial and don't like to have other predators around. Predators need a lot of land to survive. But most of all, predators in human-space can cause lots of problems, since a meal is just a meal to them and it really doesn't matter to the predator if the meal was swiped from a dog's food bowl -- or if the meal was the dog itself. Occasionally and tragically, sometimes they decide to dine on human beings.

Since most large predators are protected species, the usual way of dealing with them is to capture them (if possible) and take them to another area. Occasionally they're put in zoos or adopted by organizations that specialize in predator care.

Unless you own a lot of land, the best option for dealing with predators is to push your local government into providing wild areas for habitat (check with your local Parks department to see what programs you can get involved with). And support your local herbivores -- for they're what the predators dine on.

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