Posted on 07/05/2009 12:02:47 PM PDT by jazusamo
At first Stewart Loew was excited by the sight: a mountain lion on the family's farm near Amado.
In 40 years on the Agua Linda Farm, Loew said this was first large cat he had seen when it appeared in the donkey pen about a month ago.
But soon, his animals started to turn up mauled or dead. First there were four sheep. Then, on June 15, an awful sight: 16 pygmy and nubian goats — all the mammals in the farm's petting zoo — were killed. Only the geese were spared.
Loew and his wife, Laurel, who run the all-natural, community-supported farm, faced a tough choice: Try to kill the wild cat or put their animals and possibly their farm's visitors — including many children — at some risk.
"We were really conflicted," Stewart Loew said.
But when they thought about it, there was no choice. They had a garlic and onion festival coming up the next weekend at the farm, and people would be walking in the dark through areas where the mountain lion was making regular kills.
They called a family acquaintance who is a mountain lion hunter and got a "depredation permit" from Arizona Game and Fish — a permit to kill an animal that has been eating people's livestock.
When the hunter went out with his dogs, they didn't see it, but then Loew spotted the lion out of the corner of his eye. It was lounging in the farm's yard.
"We disturbed him and he slowly walked away from us," Stewart Loew said.
That's when the hunter friend took advantage of the opportunity to tree and kill the lion, an older male.
It's not so uncommon a phenomenon in Arizona. In 2008, 42 mountain lions were killed as a result of their eating — or "depredating" — livestock. That's in addition to 264 that were legally killed by hunters.
Since 1972, an average of 31 mountain lions per year have been killed as a result of depredation, according to Game and Fish statistics. The peak year was 2003, when 66 were killed.
A mountain lion expert who for years tracked the animals in Southern Arizona said it sounds like the mountain lion at Agua Linda Farm, about 30 miles south of Tucson, had grown used to humans — "habituated" is the term experts use.
"What we found from monitoring mountain lions is they pretty much stay away from people," said Paul Krausman, who left the University of Arizona in 2007 for a position at the University of Montana.
It's even relatively unusual for a mountain lion to come into a farm, despite the fact that they're in rural areas, Krausman said.
"This lion obviously went in there and had lunch, but that's not the norm. From a management standpoint, that lion should be dealt with," he said.
For mountain lions, growing habituated to people generally means death. That's because they can't easily be relocated. Males placed in another male's territory will come into violent conflict, Krausman said. And pretty much all of Arizona is mountain lion territory.
"I wish that he was just moving through, but he had just settled in here," Stewart Loew said.
Also, an animal that grows used to people will likely return to where people live, Krausman said. He cautioned that mountain lions occasionally kill people, especially children.
Krausman and a local mountain lion expert, Sergio Avila of the environmental advocacy group Sky Island Alliance, said several factors can cause mountain lions to start encroaching on human lands.
Among them: A younger mountain lion could have chased the older cat out of its home territory. That's the theory an Arizona Game and Fish warden endorsed when looking into the case, Loew said.
Or the mountain lion could have been injured and found easy access to food and water at the farm, which is near the Santa Cruz River. Or long-term drought may have slowly made the cat's territory unhabitable.
Many human factors could have contributed to the lion's settling in at the farm, too. Urbanization, even in semi-rural areas like the river valley of Santa Cruz County, drives some animals out of their habitat. It may also lead to the animals more easily growing used to humans.
People may also be affecting the mountain lions' prey by over-hunting deer in a given area, or by draining water sources.
The slaughter at the petting zoo was unusual behavior, but it does occasionally happen, Krausman and Avila said. It's called "surplus kill," and there are a variety of explanations for it, though it's unclear which one fits this situation.
Sometimes a mother will teach her young how to kill this way, said Avila, who wrote a master's thesis on mountain lion depredation of livestock in Baja California. Or juvenile mountain lions will kill for sport, he said.
There's also a theory, Krausman said, that a mountain lion will go into a kill with abundant energy, and if the kill is too easy, it will keep killing until its energy is used up.
Whatever the cause, the petting-zoo slaughter shook up the Loews, who have a 12-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl.
"My poor kids. These are their pets that they've raised, and they had to help bury them," Laurel Loew said.
They didn't want to kill the mountain lion, and now they're worried about restocking the little petting zoo before October, when kids arrive for pumpkin picking. They're also worried about a backlash from their environmentally conscious customers.
"For us, this story has no winners," Stewart Loew said.
Bobcats wouldn't be very much of a threat to adult alpaca. They are just too far over their weight class. A bob' might take a young alpaca, but only if no adults were nearby. An alpaca stomped bobcat wouldn't be a threat to a newborn mouse.
Bears aren't really that efficient as predators. Chasing down and killing large animals isn't their thing. If I saw a bear feeding on an alpaca, my first thought is that it was injured or killed by misadventure or another predator rather than taken by the bear.
I'd be more inclined to worry about coyotes, if I were that alpaca herder. I don't know if there are coyotes in that area, but that is the way to bet. Coyotes are amazingly comfortable around humans. They have been seen in some very urban settings.
That .44 is downright beautiful.
If you carry revolvers that use cartridges, the following are nice and well made.
http://www.triplek.com/Products/id/38/grp/10/sg/1/
Go to the holster page, and you’ll see that some of the holsters are made to fit particular revolvers like the more contemporary duty holsters. ...maybe a little safer and more practical while retaining historical appearances.
Some women here like the drop holsters, because they ride more accessibly. Straight holsters ride way high on them. Those rigs kinda grew on me, too (slim here, for an older fellow, so the belt doesn’t get pushed down).
One of those “Circle of Life” kind of things.
Is your shepherd a redhead, BTW? All of mine are. ;-)
I’m an animal lover, and yes, this is awful but the headline had me laughing my ass off! Predators are meat eaters and they hunt...a petting zoo is a just a buffet to a big cat...Welcome to the food chain, folks!
This genius is too dumb to run anything more complicated than a petting zoo.
What is is about the concept of predator and prey that is beyond the comprehension of a second-grader?
Stewart thought maybe the mountain lion was using food stamps? Hydrogen and stupidity; the most abundant things in the universe.
Yeah, we have one the same age. It seems that they become daddies’ girls even more at that age. The first time she fired a shotgun, she giggled and fired another load. I’m the only one of us four who’s not a redhead.
I’ve had neighbors who had sheep and learned a few things from them. ...fascinating animals. It seems that they require much more work than most other livestock. With calves, you give them shots, get them weaned, and they’re pretty much on their way to the sale in a year. Sheep require a whole lot of watching. Raise dogs or llamas with them, though, and that really helps.
The soil here hasn’t been taken care of for so long, that it needs to be replenished and held together with better roots. So we’re building goat fence around a quarter-mile section and will use a herd of goats to get rid of the weeds and help with fertilization. ...probably take until next summer to build the fence, with all of the other stuff that has to be done. Hopefully, they’ll like sage. We’ll put the kids in pens and on something sweeter to eat a month or two before barbeques. ;-)
We’ll fertilize extra and test some hays along the way. ...looks like candidates for hay here are various rough, tough, dry land wheat hays and winter grass roughages.
My wild guess is that we’ll see wetter weather for about the next six years, if the coming solar max is lower than the last as predicted by the NASA folks. Some areas 100 miles or so to the south and in lower elevations will probably stay dry. We’ll plant hays in patches in low spots around the first of next May, start measuring growth rates, and so on.
I’m looking forward to seeing them. Thanks! :-)
You have the right idea flycatcher.
How are you? And how did the new jobs go?
I have been busy with Mom sick, but have been scanning FR. I was glad to find this ping. Been wondering how your work is going. Keep me up on all the adventures you’ve encountered, as I love to hear them. I may not answer quickly (been running Mom to radiation and chemo treatments) but I will read and enjoy.
No! Bad kitty!
Wasn’t a rant - it was pretty well said!
Continued prayers for your Mom’s full recovery and you, Girl. I think of y’all often. :-)
Bad kitty is right, his eyes were bigger than his stomach. :)
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