Captured Cougars Can’t Go Home Again

Nerve-stunning dart or fatal shotgun blast?

That question, faced last week by a state game warden when a mountain lion showed up on a Valencia patio, is one that brings deep values into conflict.

Shooting to kill is certain to horrify onlookers and arouse the wrath of animal rights activists who believe wild strays should be transported back to their habitat. Yet the humane solution--the much-touted tranquilizer darts designed to drug the animal into harmlessness--may risk injury or even death to humans. If the animal escapes, what happens to the next small child it encounters?

That was a chance the game warden in last week’s incident chose not to take, shooting the mountain lion to death.

But even choosing the “humane” solution, it turns out, is merely a stay of execution. Even darted lions are later killed, quietly and out of sight.

The question of whether to use a gun or a dart faces the state’s peace officers and game wardens with increasing frequency as an expanding population of mountain lions--and occasionally black bears--pushes from the state’s rugged open spaces into suburban neighborhoods, bringing pets and people face-to-face with deadly predators.

Following the 1994 death of a jogger near Sacramento--the state’s first fatal mountain lion attack in 80 years--a second woman was killed near San Diego just a few months later. Since then, dozens of mountain lions have been tracked and shot after threatening people. Sightings have proliferated in mountainside communities.

In response to the rising number of confrontations, state game officials are preparing a new policy that will define a progressive scale of threats to help wardens decide when to immobilize and when to kill.

Yet, behind the apparent dilemma lies a little-known but harsh reality: Even mountain lions hauled away alive after being felled by a syringe containing a nonlethal anesthetic are not on their way back to the forest.

“Generally, we don’t capture and release,” said Ken Zanzi, assistant chief of wildlife management in the state Department of Fish and Game.

Instead, the dart is used to remove the animal without traumatizing onlookers with a gruesome death or exposing anyone to an errant gunshot.

“Then it would be dispatched after that, humanely,” Zanzi said.

The drugged animals are given a lethal injection or, if the serum is not available, a bullet to the head, he said.

Rarely does one of these majestic predators--also known as cougars, pumas, painters and catamounts--live long after being caught in a populated area, and the few survivors spend the rest of their lives in cages, he said.

“Where there is an institution that would house that animal--and those places are getting very difficult to find anymore--we’ll try to make arrangements to have it placed, especially kittens from a mountain lion or cubs from a black bear,” Zanzi said.

The state’s wildlife managers feel they must kill rather than release the animals because they believe the state’s mountain lion habitat already has more denizens than it can support, a sad result of the rebound of the mountain lion population after hunting was outlawed in 1972.

They contend that summarily dropping a new cougar into another’s territory would have one of several unpleasant results. Because cougars are territorial and will fight for exclusive hunting rights in large territories, one could be killed in combat. The alternatives are that one of them would starve or be driven out of the wilderness into a populated area, which is how the problem likely started in the first place.

In all cases, a lion dies.

The reasoning is hard even for mountain lion lovers to refute.

“It’s true they don’t have a place to go,” said Lynn Sadler, executive director of the Mountain Lion Foundation. “There’s no wonderful solution.”

Bears are different. Because they probably just wandered into town scouting for food, as opposed to being driven out by other bears, those that are darted are usually trucked back to the woods, Zanzi said.

Animal advocates and the state’s wildlife officials don’t see eye-to-eye on what to do about the overcrowded cougar habitat. The Department of Fish and Game proposes “mountain lion management.”

Translated from the bureaucracy-speak, that means allowing hunters to reduce the population to what the environment can support, which would require the repeal of a proposition passed by voters in 1972.

To preserve hunting ranges for the lions, Sadler is focusing on saving wild land from further encroachment through public education.

“Our polling shows people care very deeply about wildlife, but they don’t necessarily think through the consequences of their decisions,” Sadler said. “People move out to the country to get away from it all, and they don’t even think about the fact that they are smack in the middle of an ecosystem and that animals are going to die.”

For now, though, all signs suggest that game wardens--as well as less highly trained police and animal-control officers--will increasingly find themselves under pressure to make quick decisions, even in areas that have been urbanized for decades.

The Fish and Game Department does not keep statistics on how many lions have been darted as opposed to shot. But during the two years prior to last week’s incident, mountain lions had been shot in Arcadia, Altadena, La Crescenta and Fillmore.

Attacks on people are also climbing. Of 11 this century, two were in 1909, two in 1986 and the remaining 7 have all occurred since 1992.

In those cases, the animal is always tracked and killed.

The situation gets tougher when lions show up in populated areas, endangering people, pets and livestock, but do not attack.

Although sightings remain fairly rare and not well documented, they too appear to be increasing. Since 1994, multiple sightings have been reported by The Times in Ventura, Conejo Valley, Tujunga, Arcadia, Porter Ranch, Granada Hills and Irvine.

When a threat to pets or livestock has been verified, the Fish and Game Department can issue a permit allowing a rancher or farmer to kill the animal.

The number of lions killed under these depredation permits grew steadily from 7 in 1972 to 73 in 1993, then lurched to 122 in 1994, the last year for which there are records.

But Fish and Game wardens or local officers can kill a mountain lion only when it is perceived to be an imminent threat to public health or safety.

In these cases, whether an animal is blasted to death in someone’s backyard or removed to a more clinical demise is left to the warden’s discretion within a general principle.

“Our No. 1 concern is public safety, then our concern would be toward that animal,” said Bob Teagle, capture specialist for the Fish and Game Department’s Wildlife Investigations Laboratory near Sacramento.

To ensure that animals are immobilized as often as possible rather than shot, Teagle trains wardens, veterinarians and biologists in the use of dart guns and other capturing equipment.

A cadre of darting experts equipped with special rifles and a nerve-blocking drug is ready throughout the state to respond to a threatening lion.

The game warden’s decision Tuesday to shoot the lion that showed up in Valencia drew stiff criticism from a Los Angeles Zoo veterinarian who was rushing to assist with a dart gun.

Calling the warden “trigger happy,” veterinarian Gary Kuehn said he could have saved the animal if his arrival, only a few minutes later, had been awaited. The killing prompted dozens of angry phone calls to the Department of Fish and Game’s regional office in Long Beach.

State game officials defended the decision, saying they acted only after failing to drive the animal into an open area where it would pose less of a hazard to people.

“We do have dart guns, but we didn’t want this cat running around through the neighborhood,” said Lt. Tony Warrington.

Despite the protests, leading mountain lion advocates, including Sadler of the Mountain Lion Foundation, declined to criticize.

“It’s a tough call,” said Paul Beier, a wildlife biologist at Northern Arizona University who has studied Southern California’s large cats.

“From a humane point of view, we would all like to see animals not killed,” Beier said. “Still, probably only once in a game warden’s career would he have to deal with a mountain lion in a suburban situation. I’m just loath to second-guess what he does.”

Even under good conditions, darting isn’t easy, said Teagle, who has confronted six cougars in his career and successfully knocked each one out with a syringe.

Not only does the marksman need to calculate the drug dose based on the size and apparent vigor of the animal, he must compensate for wind, range and the size of the dart, a medical syringe with a built-in charge that injects the drug.

Because conditions vary so widely, Teagle said, he always takes a practice shot before aiming for the real target.

Notwithstanding his own predilection for darting, Teagle doesn’t fault any officer who makes the other choice.

“Some situations, quite frankly, I probably should have shot the animal,” he said.

There have been occasions, he said, when he was casually talking to a property owner and “next thing you know, you have a mountain lion 10 feet away from you.”

At that point, the choices are few.

“Back up, try to chase it away or shoot it,” Teagle said.

“It’s no different from a police officer that has a felon cornered.”