Interesting idea, and I love David Brin’s novels. But I’m ambivalent about the idea of messing with other species to that extent. We humans don’t have a great track record when it comes to avoiding unintended consequences when we meddle with the forces of nature.
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So they couldn’t at least tranq it and take it to a big cat rescue or zoo? The hell?
A cougar killed a deer on our street.The deer come into town to get away from the hunters.
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I was veering a tad into sentimentality. (Although I fully confess I was in fact imagining precisely such a world in during my commute yesterday.)
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I remember going to a monkey park in Japan. It was uphill from a small town, but completely unfenced. There was nothing to keep the monkeys from strolling down the steps into town for a bite of sushi, but they fed them up at the top of the hill, so I guess they weren’t motivated to do that.
I’d be terrified if they were capable of even thinking like that.
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It is cool to pump your own gas in some parts of Oregon now.If that was a snarky way of saying Oregon is somewhat backwards, consider that on the other side of the Columbia river, right across the state line from Portland, there's a town named Vancouver, Washington (which really is a suburb of Portland, no matter how upset Vancouver residents get when they hear that). You get the pleasure of pumping your own gas in Washington State. But gas prices in Vancouver aren't any lower than they are in Portland, where you can't pump your own gas. Plus there are lots of jobs created by having to hire service station attendants. Low paying, but jobs nonetheless.
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I don’t think anything between the two is a suburb of Portland, but the Dalles has become one, mostly by being an urb of any sort. Portlandia Creep.
There is a big cat rescue about 100 miles from The Dalles, but it’s full up (seriously). Maybe that’s why it was going to the hotel?
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Unfortunately, I’ve only seen people deliberately pour fuel onto the ground in two places—Oregon and New Jersey, both places where the general population isn’t permitted to pump their gas.
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Sure there is, but that seems mighty cruel
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Not really. I’ve worked with Ca Dept. of Wildlife and Fisheries doing mtn. lion depredation kill necropsies (it was our job to examine condition of dead mtn. lion, and to examine stomach contents etc… to determine if the “right” animal had been shot etc…)[can’t remember how many goat bits I’ve pulled out of lion guts… but it’s a lot]
These big cats can range really far, and often the ones choosing to have closer contact with man, or predate on livestock or pets are usually the outcasts who are starving/diseased etc… I guess you could tranquilize it, ship it hundreds of miles into the wilderness, and then hope it didn’t make its way back (but in all reality, if it didn’t, it would be more likely that it just died as it worked its way through the gamut of other - better in shape- cougar territories).
Its sad, but the lions that don’t avoid people are usually doing it out of desperation, and do pose a threat to people (particularly kids/smaller people), pets and livestock, and simply moving them doesn’t accomplish much.
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If you figure out how to uplift, I’d suggest that you start with some of our own species first.
I’m thinking of a particularly obnoxious orange orangutan that could clearly use some sort of cognitive enhancement device…
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That seems like one of the more dangerous things we could do. Turning an evil moron into an evil smartypants. I don’t really see the advantage.
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True. I hadn’t considered the evil aspect. Clearly I had been mistaking malevolence for incompetence…
[whynotboth.gif]
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I would also like to see this, and to make sure there are still macrofauna around when we’re ready to do so.
But I do have to second the “let’s enhance ourselves first” comments, despite the danger. We humans have no idea how to build stable, functioning minds. It’ll be hard enough to build friendly AI that doesn’t destroy us using programming languages/methods/hardware we design, let alone doing it directly in the mess of spaghetti code that is genetics. It might not be quite as bad as trying to build a sentient being in something like Malbolge, but still, predicting the effects of changes in genes is really hard, and if you only mostly succeed, the broken thing you end up creating has rights and you can’t just shut it off.
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[OhItsDefinitelyBoth.gif]
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Short end of the story, the more cougar ODFW states there are, the more funding they get to “manage” them sounds more like racketeering than a sound ecological plan…
It takes over $800,000 of Federal or State taxpayer dollars (our taxes pay for the grants, etc.) to protect almost 2 million privately owned cattle from 112 wolves. How much more are Oregonians spending to manage 6000 cougars, the population of which are missing the hallmarks of science? ODFW was only concerned about “public safety” killing of cougar after M18 banning the use of hound dogs, not before. Not using hound dogs would have created a financial loss for ODFW and their vested partners, so they had to create more reasons to kill cougar and gain financial support to do so - which included politically padded population numbers of them. Oregon does not have 6000 cougar, and may never have had that many even before Euro-Americans arrived here. Since the beginning of Oregon’s government, we (early livestock farm owners, and later ODFW) have been managing our cougar from the perspective of financial gain, and that caused the extinction of wolf and near extinction of cougar. We are using the same tools, same perspectives, and same applications to “manage” them today. It did not work then, it will not work now.
Page 19 of a capstone paper I wrote: “ODFW’s cougar harvest targets have never been met, suggesting a scarcity rent from yearly accumulative increased hunting, inaccurate political population model counts, and inconsistent hallmarks of science research. On a total benefits cost curve, the harvest effort has been increased from 777 to over 900, which simultaneously increases the total cost of management minus the total benefits of cougar harvest targets, which have never been met. ODFW has only managed to increase the cost of managing cougar, rather than hitting computer generated harvest targets (Tietenberg 2016).” Hitting these target zones would be very detrimental to Oregon’s ecosystems and carry a heavy financial burden for taxpayers. We have never managed the cougar for the benefits of the ecosystems; it has always been for financial gain. Managing cougar for the benefits of anthropocentric demands has been a tremendous ecological cost and public economic expense: Oregonians health (Lyme disease/deer auto collisions), ecosystem services (including climate change), and taxpayer expense.
Cougar are also some of the most vulnerable for the black market. Kittens are sold as pets, adult body organs sold as medicinal. Poaching is out of control. Cougar kittens can be immediately domesticated if taken young enough from the wild. This cougar most likely was not raised in the wild, but was raised around humans and may have even been released in or near the building. Even ODFW knows that cougars orphaned will have more conflict issues than cougar raised by their mother in the wild.
There are no good ethics in the management plan of our cougars or in the history of our killing them. Cougar have always been exploited for money, now in a whole new way. Any cougar conflict issue is a human made issue.
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The Dalles is about 90 miles up the Columbia Gorge from Portland; hardly what I’d call a “suburb”. Troutdale at maybe 10 miles might qualify. Jason needs to start using maps when he references supposedly adjacent locations.
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Yeah. It’s full of twee artisanal brewpubs now. Nothing like the accursed, tweaker-ridden shithole it was 20 years ago. I know a guy who grew up there and is convinced it’s been under a curse ever since they build the dam and flooded Celilo falls, and I could totally see that then, but last time I stopped there, I was shocked by the change.
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