Pity the poor cougar

The recent attempt of a cougar to kill and eat the Antilla family's horses out at Crossroads is a powerful reminder of what YOU can do to help prevent a cougar attack.

Cougar eat deer. Get it? STOP FEEDING DEER NEAR YOUR HOME!

Do not put out salt and mineral blocks for those cute little Bambies. Do just the opposite, drive them away from your home. Your garden will be happier. Encourage the deer to leave Sisters and forage where their ancestors were doing long before you and I appeared in the picture.

People who love nature and want to enjoy deer close up are doing nothing but screwing up the works. They are in fact, "tempting nature," while at the same time putting the cougar on the chopping block.

The cougar that made an attempt on the Antilla's horses can only make a living by killing things; in the wild world of Nature those are the rules; there is no "Good," "Bad," "Right, or "Wrong." A hungry cougar is an opportunist, it will usually try to kill and eat whatever is the easiest.

It is fortunate that Tikki is a spirited horse and does not give up easily. My earnest hope is that Tikki kicked the daylights out of that cougar and gave it an education it will never forget. That way it will think twice when it smells horses, and decide that deer are safer prey.

Unfortunately, it could be all too easy to change the headline of last week's Nugget to, "Cougar attacks two children in Crossroads." I'm not blowing smoke, good people, and I'm not being an alarmist. I am stating a biological fact.

Those of you who insist on feeding deer in and around Sisters are contributing to the demise of the cougar in Oregon. Worse, you are tempting cougar to keep coming closer to town by attracting deer to your backyards.

A cougar is no dummy. They stay alive and make a living by being cautious and stealthy. By attracting deer to town cougar become bolder (as evidenced by the cougar that killed a deer in the Antilla's sideyard), then tragedy strikes and people overact. (If it were my horse, friend or child killed or mauled by a cougar, I might even "overreact.")

The cougar is already in big trouble in Oregon. ODFW has come up with a so-called "management plan" that only brings in more (much needed) revenue and gives hunters an excuse to run their hounds on cougars and kill them indiscriminately. Makes about as much sense as killing bears because they might eat your apples.

Showing how senseless the Oregon cougar plan is, an article on the American Association for the Advancement of Science Web site points out that killing cougars indiscriminately produces more potential human-cougar conflicts, not less.

Rob Wielgus, a wildlife biologist at Washington State University in Pullman says such efforts have the opposite of their intended effect. Hunting in that state actually led to more cougars and more complaints about problem animals.

The reason is that hunters were permitted to indiscriminately shoot cougars, and they often killed females and older males. When the old males died, young inexperienced ones arrived from neighboring territories, and it's these animals with which humans tend to collide. Bad news for cougar and man.

"This kind of heavy hunting merely exacerbates the problem," Wielgus says. "And apparently Oregon officials want to travel down this same old road."

Government trappers did the same with coyotes. Indiscriminate killing led to larger numbers of pups that explored new habitat. That's why coyotes can be found in Maine, Chicago, the Los Angeles suburbs and on the Oregon Coast.

Cougar need help to survive, not another excuse for people to kill them and put their (trophy) skins on a wall. In another 20 years or so, there will be thousands more people living on the edge of cougar habitat. The temptation for a cougar to kill and eat a human will become too much for them to turn down - unless we stop tempting them.