Fearing Mountain Lion Attacks

Posted by Sheri Amsel Nov 29, 2006

In college I spent a semester filing grizzly mauling reports for Dr. Jonkel at University of Montana. This started my mild obsession with wild animal attacks. When wild animals attack humans, it is almost always a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The circumstances are different for each attack but with each species of wild mammal you can see a pattern of how they occur. This is rather important if you’d rather not be involved in one. So it’s worth talking about them by species. Today I am going to talk about mountain lions. mammals.suite101.com/article.cfm/mountain_lion_attacks_on_humans

Colorado has experienced a series of mountain lion attacks on people in the last few years. I didn’t know this when I went to visit my sister in Boulder, Colorado a couple of years ago. So I got up every morning at 5am — I was on New York time — and walked from her house up to the east side of the front range along the running path. I watched the sunrise, as the prairie dogs popped in and out of their holes and a bighorn sheep grazed on the tall, dry grass.

It wasn’t until afterward that my sister told me about the jogger who’d been attacked at that very spot a few months before. She’d been running along the path when two, young, male lions attacked her. Luckily, she was able to scramble up a rare tree. Even so they mauled her legs and would have done worse had a small herd of mule deer not distracted the lions, who ran in pursuit.

Mountain lions are really perfectly adapted for their hunting lifestyle. They can weigh over 200 pounds, though most are smaller and they are immensely powerful. Imagine the strength it would take to grab a mule deer and kill it with your… um... bare hands. They have strong hunting instincts so the worst thing to do if you come face to face with a mountain lion is to run. You know how your cat chases the rubber mouse on the string? Running makes you the rubber mouse.

The next time I visited my sister she was living up in Nederland, Colorado. Knowing I would be up at 5 again, I asked about mountain lions. She didn’t thing there was anything to worry about. A local man did wake up one morning to find a lion feeding on a deer on his front lawn, but it was a deer after all. Then there was the local elementary school, which had to close for a day because a female lion had killed a deer in the playground and was feeding on it under the swing set. Nothing to worry about — really.

Later we debated the true statistical danger of being attacked by a mountain lion. Someone came up with the fact that it was more likely to be attacked and killed by a domestic dog than a mountain lion. Apparently more than 300 people have been killed by domestic dogs in the last 25 years. We all glanced warily at her fat, yellow lab, who was curled up in the corner with a stuffed duck. Statistics I’ll still be paying a lot more attention in mountain lion country myself.