Hunting Dog Training Books Article

Discussed in this essay:

Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind, by David Quammen. W. W. Norton, 2004 (paper). 528 pages. $.

The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature, by David Baron. W. W. Norton, 2005 (paper). 277 pages. $.

The Tribe of Tiger: Cats and Their Culture, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. Pocket Books, 2001 (paper). 288 pages. $.

If you live anywhere in the vast asphalt-laced sprawl that stretches from Boston to Washington and beyond, you can probably look out your window and see a deer--or herd of deer--munching on your lawn, eating your tulips, or chewing your shrubbery. Wildlife biologists estimate that at the turn of the century there were fewer than 500,000 white-tailed deer in the United States. Today there are 25 million. The density of the deer population, moreover, has reached a critical point at which it has begun wreaking ecological havoc on the eastern forests. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Peter Pinchot, a Pennsylvania forest manager (and a grandson of Gifford Pinchot, first director of the . Forest Service), noted that deer have actually "stopped the regeneration of our forests in many areas." The deer eat so many of the seedlings of certain species, including oak and white ash, that mature trees are simply not being replaced.

The deer explosion is attributable to many things--to the introduction of succulent garden plants, to a ban on hunting in the suburbs, but most significantly to the absence of predators. Ecologists have only recently come to understand how vital large predators are to the health and complexity of ecosystems. In his recent book, Monster understand how vital large predators are to the health and complexity of ecosystems. In his recent book, Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind, David Quammen discusses what he calls "alpha predators," predators large enough to exercise a top-down role in regulating prey populations but who also, from time to time, emerge "like doom from a forest or a river" to kill a human being. Because Quammen's alpha predators prey largely on herbivores such as white-tailed deer, it is perhaps not surprising that in certain areas of the country the deer problem is giving way to a predator problem.

Scott Lancaster was the first adult killed and eaten by a mountain lion in the United States in more than a century. But, as David Baron explains in his book The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature, Lancaster's death was merely the unfortunate culmination of a surprising resurgence of cougars in the Boulder area and the mountain West more generally. Cougars were ubiquitous in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans, ranging from the Canadian taiga to Tierra del Fuego. But, along with other North American predators, cougars soon found themselves demonized by the colonists, who trapped, shot, and poisoned them almost to extinction. By the end of the nineteenth century, cougars had been largely eradicated in the East; by the early 1960s, there may have been as few as 4,000 in the entire United States. One estimate had the surviving population in Colorado at only 124.

The decline of cougars in North America is consistent with a decline of alpha predators worldwide, and in search of those few populations that remain, David Quammen has traveled far, examining the complex relationships that alpha predators have with nearby human populations. His Monster of God posits that lions, tigers, leopards, Nile and saltwater crocodiles, polar and brown bears, Ganges and great white sharks, and a handful of other such creatures have long served as a reminder of our place in nature--that at various times in the history of the human species we have acted as no more than an intermediate link in the food chain. If this is the case, however, such reminders are rapidly disappearing. The world's population, presently 6 billion, is expected to reach 11 billion by the year 2150. By 2150, Quammen observes, alpha predators will have ceased to exist except behind "chain-link fencing, high-strength glass, and steel bars." His logic seems unimpeachable. He anticipates a future dominated by "weedy tenacious creatures such as the house sparrow, the gray squirrel, the Virginia opossum, and the Norway rat."

The resurgence of mountain lions around Boulder, however, is strikingly at odds with Quammen's thesis and, as such, begs our attention. Mountain lions in the American West began their comeback in the 1960s and '70s, when most Western states removed bounties on mountain lions and declared them game animals. This might seem a strange way to address the survival of an endangered animal, but it gave cougars certain game-law protections they had not previously enjoyed and strictly regulated how many of them could be killed. Soon an even more significant change took place. Colorado had traditionally been inhabited by ranchers and miners--populations that tended to see themselves in a struggle against untamed nature and to feel more or less the same antipathy toward wild beasts that their pioneer ancestors had. But by the late 1980s a new kind of inhabitant had begun to replace the ranchers and the miners. These new immigrants were professionals fleeing urban areas, looking for open space and imbued with an altogether different outlook--a reverence toward nature in all its manifestations, in their search to get back to a simpler life, many of these immigrants, whom David Baron dubs "New West" types, built houses in what had been wild areas--in the mountains, at the end of dirt roads, in remote canyons--thereby creating a distinctive band of semi-wild suburb around many Western cities.

As a university town tucked under the beautiful Front Range of the Rockies, Boulder was a magnet for "New West" immigrants. Thanks to the foresight of its founders, Boulder already had an extensive greenbelt and park system, maintained by a system of artificial irrigation. The new immigrants elaborated this park system with their own lawns and their own gardens, and spread themselves out along the gravel roads and the canyons outside town. In so doing, they created a rich browsing area that local herbivores found more appetizing than the relatively impoverished surrounding mountains. These herbivores were primarily mule deer--close cousins to the white-tailed deer of the Eastern suburbs--and Boulder soon attracted a large resident population. "By the early 1980s," as Baron puts it, "Boulder was home to a large, urban deer herd that feasted on tulips and apples and sod, climbed onto back decks to gobble potted plants, copulated and gave birth in front yards, and died on city streets."

It so happens that deer are the principal prey of the cougar. One Utah study found traces of mule deer in 80 percent of cougar scat. Some biologists even argue that cougar predation has been such a force in the survival of deer that it has driven their evolution, turning deer into the fleet, wary creatures they are. In any case, Boulder's deer population also soon began to attract cougars. This was not much of a problem at first. Rare encounters with cougars afforded the viewer a thrill and occasionally warranted a note in a local paper. But gradually Boulder's new arrivals became more intrusive. People began looking out their windows to see these big cats in their yards, sunning on picnic tables. A homeowner heard a strange sound on his roof one night, looked up, and saw a cougar cub gnawing on a plastic great horned owl mounted there. Pets began to disappear. A woman heard the frantic barking of her cockapoo one morning and looked out onto her deck only to see a cougar grab the little pup by the neck and disappear with it over a fence. Soon the cougars began to go after bigger pets: a German shepherd was stalked and then killed in its cage. An eighty-five-pound Doberman guard dog named Lance escaped its cougar attacker but was left "paranoid, neurotic, and timid."

In response to citizen concern, the Colorado Division of Wildlife insisted that people were overreacting. Cougars were shy creatures with no history of attacking humans. As for the dog attacks, surely these were exceptions to the rule: cougars, the wildlife biologists argued, had a historic fear of dogs, which dated back to the time when wolf packs were virtually their only predators. Unfortunately, the last wolves disappeared from Colorado in the 1940s; no Boulder-area cougar was likely to have met one. A pair of Boulder-area naturalists--who provide the narrative focus of Baron's book--feared that the cougars were "habituating": essentially thinking, learning, and changing their habits to adjust to local possibilities. They noted that many of the attacks showed evidence that the cougars had studied their prey's habits, assessing its strengths and weaknesses, watching its comings and goings, before moving in for the kill. Ultimately, the naturalists feared that the pets the cougars were attacking might be a "gateway drug" on the way to humans.

These fears were borne out in June of 1990 when, half a year before Scott Lancaster's death, a woman named Lynda Waters, a third-year medical student and former all-American cross-country skier, went out for a run through the hills outside Boulder. Descending into a creek bed, she came upon a cougar a few yards ahead of her. Instead of fleeing, the cougar locked its eyes on her, tensed, and crouched. Waters picked up a rock and threw, but the lion only hissed and crept closer. It was then that she saw another lion on a rock ledge, circling around behind her. Waters scrambled up the creek bank and swung herself into a Ponderosa pine. One of the cats climbed after her, clawing at her legs, trying to drag her out of the tree. Waters, who had just taken a "Model Mugging" self-defense course, broke off a branch and desperately fended off the hungry cat. All the while she could hear cars passing on a nearby road and kids playing in the valley below. She finally escaped when the cougars spotted a nearby deer and left her for easier prey.

Nor did the death of Scott Lancaster end Boulder-area attacks on humans. In April of 1998, a twenty-four-year-old park ranger named Andy Peterson was hiking just outside Boulder when he stumbled on a cougar just off the trail. Once again, instead of running, the cougar advanced on Peterson. Peterson tried to look menacing, as he knew he was supposed to, and soon found himself in a standoff that lasted seven excruciating minutes. Eventually the cougar leapt, knocked Peterson--a former high-school wrestler--to his knees, and took Peterson's head into its mouth. Amidst the sounds of ripping flesh and chafing bone, Peterson reached up, plunged his thumb into the cat's right eye socket, and popped out its eye. The cat let go. Peterson fled, streaming with blood. When he turned around to see if the cougar was following, he saw what he took to be a lion's head staring at him from the trees. But then the vision morphed into something else: the bloody face of Jesus Christ. A few months after his escape, Peterson became a born-again Christian.

Reading Baron's and Quammen s books, one is tempted to conclude that the two authors are describing alternate universes. In Quammen's book predators are everywhere besieged. In Baron's they are everywhere resurgent. The two worlds, however, may not be as different as they at first seem. Quammen's book is concerned almost entirely with the Third World, or with marginal areas of developed countries; Baron's, with the First World and its Boulder, Colorados. In Quammen's world, wilderness is everywhere in retreat; in Baron's, farming, ranching, mining, and logging are all in decline, and a new suburbanized wilderness is being created. The two meet most usefully on the level of ecological principles. Quammen is particularly strong on the unexpected and only partly understood consequences of removing predators from the tops of food chains, one of those consequences being what ecologists refer to as "trophic cascade."

Ecological systems derive their energy from the sun, and ecologists understand ecosystems as being arranged in trophic levels, "trophic" referring in this case to the nutritional levels of a food chain. The original solar energy of an ecological system is transformed through plant photosynthesis and passed up the food chain through herbivores and several levels of carnivores until, finally, it reaches the alpha predators at the top. Alpha predators, Quammen argues, are what ecologists call "keystone species." If you remove a keystone species from the ecosystem, the food-chain levels get out of balance, and disruptions cascade downward throughout the system: hence "trophic cascade." The reasons for this--well demonstrated around Boulder--are simple. As Quammen points out, populations of herbivores are typically kept in check by the top-down influence of predators. If you remove the predators, the herbivores proliferate until they begin to destroy the very system that supports them. Boulder, with its rich and exotic browse base, and its historic lack of alpha predators, inadvertently created just this sort of trophic cascade, with unchecked herds of mule deer overbrowsing and destroying the very vegetation that attracted them.

Another ecological principle discussed by Quammen, to which he applies the improbable term "muskrat conundrum," helps explain the movement of cougars into the Boulder area. Quammen's "muskrat conundrum" arises from a study of the Iowa wetlands done by an ecologist named Paul Errington. Muskrats, like cougars, are territorial, and, according to Errington's principle, once a desirable muskrat pond is fully occupied, any additional muskrats are forced out to more marginal habitats. There, due to inferior food and shelter, and more frequent encounters with predators, these muskrats are much more likely to be killed. They become what Errington refers to as the "wastage parts" of the population. This may be why so many of the Boulder cougar attacks are initiated by young males. These cougars are "wastage population" cougars--out on the fringes, trying to establish themselves in new, often marginal territory.

But despite the ecological principles governing predators and prey, there are significant differences between the wilderness that shelters alpha predators in the Third World and the wilderness of our own world. One of Baron's central arguments is that the suburbanization of wilderness is, in fact, creating a new kind of nature. "As wildlife invades suburbs," he observes, "and as suburbs invade wildlife habitat, we are changing animal behavior in unexpected and sometimes troubling ways." The automobile has a great deal to do with this, and as "wilderness" gets more automobile friendly, and creatures like cougars fill up the spaces between our interstates, there are indications that the problem may soon be bigger than just Boulder.

Baron's book, which is written in the relentlessly melodramatic style of Jaws, describes cougars spreading inexorably eastward. By contrast, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, in The Tribe of Tiger: Cats and Their Culture, argues that cougars were never fully exterminated in the East and instead survived in remote areas by being especially stealthy around humans. The difference is significant. If you accept Marshall Thomas's argument, then the eastern seaboard sounds a great deal like pre-cougar-resurgence Colorado. Indeed, the herds of deer plaguing the unbroken strip of Eastern suburbs makes a replay of the Boulder situation likely--but on a far larger scale. Already, bears and coyotes are invading the Eastern suburbs. Can cougars and wolves be far behind?

Scott Lancaster s death is at the emotional center of David Baron's book, and he reacts to it with great indignation, declaring that Lancaster "was, in effect, a sacrifice, killed by a community embracing a myth: the idea that wilderness, true wilderness, could exist in modern America." Never mind that Lancaster's high-school classmates reconciled themselves to the young man's death, arguing that it was "kind of pure," that it "felt natural," that Lancaster, as his English teacher put it, "would have been angry that the lion was shot." To Baron's mind, Lancaster's death was "not supposed to happen"; he attributes it to a town that "loved its own version of nature with such passion that its embrace ultimately altered the natural world." He points out that at the time of its founding, Boulder sat on a treeless plain, that 300,000 trees had been planted in Boulder to make its urban forest, that most of those trees were not even native to the region. In other words, Boulder's landscape was "not as natural as most residents imagined"; it was "less a wilderness than a garden."

The theme of the artificiality of the wilderness around Boulder runs throughout The Beast in the Garden, as does the idea that by romanticizing this artificial wilderness and its supposed "naturalness," Boulder's citizens were shirking their responsibility to manage it properly and were refusing to understand their role in creating the conditions that had led to the return of cougars. But Baron seems so intent on maintaining his contrarian tone, so intent on gaining points at the expense of Boulder's "stuck in the sixties" lifestyle, that the reader is advised to turn to William Cronon, one of Baron's sources, where these ideas are better developed.

In Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (1995), Cronon, distinguished professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin, argues that modern-day environmentalism, the uncritical and undifferentiating worship of nature that so annoys Baron, is the grandchild of the Romantic movement. As late as the eighteenth century, wilderness was seen as a barren, deserted wasteland. But during the nineteenth century, with its response to industrialization, wilderness came to be viewed as a refuge and an escape--a place imbued with superior moral values and a transcendent higher truth. In the United States this idea took on political value in the ideas of Frederick Jackson Turner, for whom wilderness (and frontier) were crucial in forming the American character. For Turner, wilderness acted as an escape to those weary of urban life, a salubrious, reinvigorating moral bath meant to wash away the corruptions of the Old World. Wilderness democratized and individualized Americans and American society.

Cronon points out, of course, that the idea of American wilderness as a benign and restorative place could exist only after the Indian population had been eliminated. The same could be said for large predators. Only then did it become possible to conceive of the romantic ideal of "virgin nature." Like Baron, Cronon sees this ideal as a dangerous distraction insofar as it obscures the degree to which humans have always played a role in determining nature. Other ecologists have argued, for example, that American Indians effectively acted as a "keystone species," managing nature to maintain the populations of herbivores on which they were dependent. They did this through the selective use of fire, which kept down forest undergrowth and encouraged the growth of the succulent plants preferred by herbivores. Baron alludes to the unthinned, logged-over forests around Boulder as constituting a kind of ecological wasteland no longer capable of supporting significant populations of herbivores and therefore guaranteeing that the "wastage population" of Colorado cougars would naturally gravitate to areas like Boulder and its herds of deer. Both Baron and Cronon worry that if we don't appreciate our role in creating these conditions, if we take an excessively romantic view of nature, if what is "natural" is seen as superior to what is human, then we will never take our civic selves seriously and never understand our responsibilities either to ourselves or to the natural world.

For Baron, the question seems to be: How can the city of Boulder (and by extension the rest of us) make intelligent choices about its cougar problem? How can we, in the modern world, rediscover our place in nature and even reconstitute our role, as earlier populations of humans apparently did, as a keystone species? Baron mentions that after Scott Lancaster's death, Boulder undertook an adverse-conditioning program to "counteract the lions' habituation to humans." This involved throwing M-80's at stray cougars, shooting them with beanbags and rubber bullets, and capturing and transporting problem animals. According to Baron, none of this has acted as more than a bandage placed over an ecological wound. Ultimately, the key to rediscovering our place in nature will need to involve the exercise of some intelligence about the world around us, which may mean that we will have to become more aware, and more appreciative, of the nature of animal intelligence.

In The Tribe of Tiger, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas disputes Konrad Lorenz's argument that "animals have no culture," at least in the sense of what she refers to as "a web of socially transmitted behaviors." Marshall Thomas describes areas of the West in which cougars have learned to avoid cattle--which they associate with trouble in the form of retaliatory raids from ranchers--and at least one place other than Boulder (Vancouver Island, Canada) where cougars have it in their "culture" to attack humans.

Cougars, like cats generally, are observant creatures and, if you believe these books, are capable of changing their behavior according to what they observe. It's hard not to think that Baron's Colorado State Division of Wildlife agents had their noses stuck in their textbooks when they insisted that cougars didn't attack humans and were congenitally afraid of all dogs. The textbooks are no doubt correct about big-cat behavior over the previous hundred years or so, during which cougars, already leery of wolves, had been relentlessly pursued by the hounds of ranchers and bounty hunters. But things had changed, particularly around Boulder. The wolves, the bounty hunters, and many of the ranchers had disappeared. The cougars had adapted. The Division of Wildlife had not.

This kind of cat adaptation isn't unique to Boulder, of course. It seems to take place wherever ecological systems are severely disrupted. A most intriguing glimpse both of what precedes such a disruption and of what follows appears in The Tribe of Tiger. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas grew up, with her anthropologist parents, among the Ju/wa Bushmen in Africa's Kalahari Desert. The Ju/wasi were hunter-gatherers who lived according to the same natural dictates by which all the Kalahari's other creatures lived--including its prides of lions. The lions and the Ju/wasi had ecologically parallel roles, hunting the same animals in entirely analogous ways. Each controlled territories in the Kalahari, which territories, according to Marshall Thomas, they effectively ranched, culling out weakened prey animals, keeping populations in balance. That is, each applied in the Kalahari the top-down ecological pressure that Quammen attributes to alpha predators. And yet the two groups--the Ju/wasi and the lions-were accustomed to each other's habits and never interfered with each other, except occasionally to poach on kills. Even then, a nervous truce prevailed.

Marshall Thomas describes an incident in which her brother, John, was with a group of four Ju/wasi, following a wildebeest they'd shot with a poison arrow. They caught up to the wounded wildebeest to discover it surrounded by an unusually large pride of thirty or so lions and lionesses. As was their habit, the Ju/wasi spoke "firmly but respectfully" to the lions, entered the lions' circle, killed and butchered their prey, and made off with it. All the time the lions thrashed and growled in the surrounding underbrush but didn't interfere. Thirty years later, Marshall Thomas went back to the Kalahari. By this time, white ranchers had driven off the Ju/wasi, and the intimate familiarity between humans and lions had entirely disappeared. One night, she and a friend, the elephant biologist Katy Payne, were driving a van back to their camp from an elephant-observation tower. Waiting for them at a sandy spot in the road were two young male lions. Marshall Thomas tried to drive around the two lions, but, to her astonishment, the lions attacked the van, trying to bite and flatten its tires. Marshall Thomas floored the van. The lions chased--one on each side--until Marshall Thomas and Payne were able to pull away.

Marshall Thomas was left shaken by the experience. Her first reaction was to think that the Ju/wasi would never have tolerated such behavior. Then she realized that these lions, and in fact this entire generation of lions, had probably never met a Ju/wasi.

Peter Canby's last article for Harper's Magazine, "The Forest Primeval," appeared in the July 2002 issue.