Originally published at: Mountain lion crashes through window of SF Bay Area house after seeing taxidermy inside | Boing Boing
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I swear to god, I am 90% sure I saw a dead Mountain Lion on the side of the highway the other day. It was on a section branching off for an exit or I would have stopped and got to go look for sure. In Kansas City.
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Always a fan of unexpected catamounts.
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F trophy hunting. F it. Killing for fun, and then displaying the dead bodies in one’s home is messed up.
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I was in NC visiting luxury homes my company worked on. I went into the office of one place and was greeted to the heads of big game animals all over. The home owner came in beaming and pointed out his latest kill. I don’t remember what, but he said he paid $50,000 to hunt it. I have never felt such an intense, instant revulsion for someone ever before.
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The homeowner scared the animal out of the house.
Darn, I wish it had been the other way 'round.
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I’m not a hunter but it’s my understanding that you can still harvest most of the meat off the animal and still mount the head on the wall. If you’re of the “meat is murder” persuasion then it’s still a barbaric practice, but it’s not like venison or elk in a person’s freezer got a worse deal than the pork or the beef.
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You are assuming that the the trophies were all animals that hunters eat, but there is no reason to assume that. Many trophy hunters kill bears, wolves, coyotes, big cats and other animals they kill just for the fun of murdering the animal with ranged weapons. Cross reference: asshole Trump sons.
The article didn’t say one way or another what the trophy animals were. For animals that are consumed for food, I think people can make a plausible case that subsistence hunting can be more ethical than the treatment animals get in our factory farms, but such hunting doesn’t scale. I would say, though, that even for people who eat their kills, if they are trophy hunters they will choose their prey based on it’s looks and want the biggest, most impressive looking animal, the very antithesis of wolves culling a herd.
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Fair enough, since a mountain lion would be unlikely to attempt to take down an elk. Hopefully if it was a smaller critter that means the hunter ate a gopher or whatever.
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That is true, but in California “Big Game” usually refers to deer, bear, wild pig, elk, pronghorn, and bighorn sheep—all of which can be eaten. If a mountain lion saw something it thought looked like a meal then it was probably one of the smaller species on that list rather than an elk or a bear. So it doesn’t necessarily follow that a hunter who has trophy heads mounted to the wall is responsible for more animal death and suffering than a person who eats bacon and wears leather shoes.
If the guy has gorilla heads or whatever mounted to his wall then that’s a whole different situation.
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One good point to consider is that the lions that show these weird/desperate behaviors are usually younger males that have been driven out of a territory. They’re often starving and desperate (see also lions that attack people etc…). This is not normal behavior, and is likely at least indirectly related to loss of habitat pressures on the lion population.
(point of qualification: I worked with CA fish and game doing pathology/necropsies on “depredation kill” lions. Once a year a load of frozen lions shows up at the CA state lab, and everybody pitches in. These are lions that got shot, trapped, poisoned for being “nuisance” animals. Pulled a lot of interesting things out of lion GI tracts… But to a “T” they were generally poor body condition young male lions.)
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I hunt deer & turkey about 90 miles SE of KC, near Clinton on a friend’s farm. I park my truck in his open pole barn, and use my cozy cot & sleeping bag to sleep out under the stars if the weather’s nice. Thieves & methheads are thick there, so he has a game cam set up to see who goes in the barn, which has a tractor, Bobcat, other valuables inside. November 2018, he captured a pic of a big male cougar who’s body length excluding tail spanned the front of my Ranger PU. I know about forced perspective, but game cams are not good at that, especially in the 3am dark when that bad boy walked peaceably past my snoozing self, within 15-20 feet at most. I didn’t know about it right away, but how cool is that!? May they live long and prosper.
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I just saw an article of a door bell cam capturing one in Andover, KS, which is near where my parents live.
So yeah, they are around here, but still really rare.
Speaking of rare, I saw an otter last year for the first time in the wild at Minor Park in KC, MO. Maybe they aren’t that rare elsewhere, but didn’t expect to see one basically in the city.
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The mountaon lion should have collected the head of the home owner as a trophy.
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Great story. Just curious, do you still sleep in the pole barn?
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On my wall:
Around here we only get deer invading businesses. One of those has a big sign saying “The Buck Stopped Here”.
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On the other side of the continent, but:
IIRC, this is why black bears keep turning up along Interstate 70 not far from Baltimore.
We get river otters* in the small, artificial lake in a nearby park – an Anacostia tributary flows thru there. (We’re a few miles NE of DC)
*Pretty sure they were otters – doing the backstroke, at that – and not beavers**. Turns out the otters are a good sign for the Anacostia watershed. There are beavers upstream, though, and some years back they dammed up the creek and flooded the Greenbelt Metro station.
To be this close to the city, we sure do get a lot of critters…
**And yes I know that one is a carnivore and the other’s a rodent, but when they’re semi-submerged it’s hard for the layperson to tell
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