The latest cougar killed in the valley; it had killed three Great Pyreenees dogs before the CO finally caught it.
Because of animals like the above cougar–which are becoming frighteningly more and more common in our valley–we are now clearing some more land in the front of our place in the hopes of discouraging them from entering our property. ‘Discouraging them’ is the best we can do. Unfortunately, there is no way of keeping these critters out of somewhere they want to be. Well, not any economically viable way. Even our local dump who recently built an electrified, chain-link fence around the dump has not been able to stop the bears. They’ve had to shoot about 18 grizzly bears and the blacks are presently digging under the fence and still entering!
We’ve hired our friend David to do the clearing for us. He’s a jack-of-all-trades kind of guy. He’s also a cougar hunter and one of the two men who tracked the cougar in January when it was marauding the neighbourhood. That cougar was ‘only’ 128 lbs, the above cougar is 146 lbs. He harvested the meat off both cougars. He made roasts and some sausages and shared it with us. Surprisingly, cougar roast tastes a lot like pork roast–the best part of the pork roast. He tells me it is the 50th cougar that’s been killed here in less than 10 years, “And we still have plenty of them!” Like many of us, he thinks the hunting season on cougars should be open year round again. There used to be a bounty on them and people regularly hunted them. Consequently, twenty years ago I would sleep outside with my neighbour and not worry about them. No one used to talk about cougars back then. Now we are regularly seeing them and losing our cats, dogs, and livestock to them.
After consulting with Dave, we’ve opted to go with his suggestion of using 7 foot, 6 x 6 concrete wire for fending. “It’s what we put down at dad’s place for the hounds.” ‘Dad’ is our friend Clarence; David is Clarence’s son and helped build that fence. When I ask if it will be the solution to our wildlife problems he laughed, “No, it won’t stop a grizzly bear or be tall enough to stop a cougar,” reminding me of the night the grizzly bear broke into Clarence’s dog pen, “There was fur and dogs flying everywhere. The dogs weren’t backing down and the bear was killing them.” Clarence managed to shoot the bear, but not before they lost one of the dogs.”But it will stop a truck in case of a crash!” What a relief.
You can’t keep a cougar out without about 12 feet of chain-link fence with another couple of feet of slanted barbed wire on top (which of course we’d need about $100,000 to fence the property), and it is virtually impossible to keep bears out of anything. It would need to be electrified, buried, reinforced with concrete and have armed guards standing at the ready with bazookas 24/7. Even then, the guards should be nervous!
Here is how the bush looked before we started clearing.
After some preliminary clearing of undergrowth and brush by hand and machine, Dave falls the first big alder. The birch at the centre of the photo was one of my best producers for syrup in February–it’s a keeper! At present, we are only taking out the dangerous snags or leaning trees along with the larger alders that are along the fence-line. It was logged many years ago now and they left a huge mess behind. Instead of felling a tree and cleaning it up, it is obvious they felled a bunch of trees and only took the best wood leaving behind all the limbs and stumps and mess. It is difficult to even walk through.
I don’t want a clear-cut when we are done, but I do want to shed some light on the subject. Already, it is a lot sunnier on that ground that it has been since Jesus walked on the earth.
Dave falls the first big alder.
My role is firewood hefter and hauler.
Even though we don’t yet own a wood stove, we are now sitting pretty with several cords of firewood from the trees we have felled. Dave cuts and his wife and I clean up after him and we all move on. It is a great system and we are making good progress; certainly much moreso than when I’m out there with hand tools!
The new view from the front clearing!
There is still a lot of work to be done and the fence to be erected, but it’s a start! On that note, I’ve got to go and join the work crew this morning.
Not Dabbling In Normal 
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Really could have done without this post. I understand that sometimes these things have to happen and I’m glad the meat didn’t go to waste. But it’s still a sad thing when the wild animals have to pay because we’re infringing on their territory.
Well, these are the realities of raising food and we are all implicated! Out of sight/out of mind is a blissfully unaware (and therefore irresponsible) state of being. It is wrong to think that if you live in a city or shop in a grocery store for your food (even if you are vegetarian/vegan) that it means that you are not implicated in the killing of these beautiful animals like cougars, bears, wolves, and deer. Or that the agricultural production and distribution system is not responsible for completely decimating vast areas of wilderness (and destroying watersheds, animals, and forest ecology) in order that the food get to the grocery store.
The ‘their territory/our territory’ is a false belief system of contemporary society. What you are saying that that my home is not ‘my territory’ but that it ‘belongs’ to the cougars. Although this preservationist philosophy is the contemporary thinking, it is built on erroneous arguments. For one thing, humans have been on this earth just as long as the cougars, (or bears, wolves, or chickens and goats). And, if you are going to argue that line, then you will have to accept that all of North America’s great cities were also the ‘cougars” territory before ‘we’ got here (same for Europe, India, China and so on). So, do we all give up our cities, our homes, if so, where then do humans ‘belong’?
Why is it a sad thing when a cougar ‘has to pay’ but not a chicken, pig, turkey, or cow because we want to eat? And what about the three loved dogs that were killed by the cougar–do they not ‘count’? How have you have decided that the domesticated animal has less ‘value’ than the cougar (who incidentally became a food animal just like a chicken).
Developing this homestead and taking responsibility for my own food has been a life changing learning curve and I have had to radically alter many of my previously (and naive) held views about the human/wildlife relationship and, more importantly, our relationship with the earth and our food animals. I have learned that if you truly care about animals then you should be more concerned about the lives of the industrial agricultural critters and work to improve their lives rather than hold sentimentalized ideas about wild animals who live free until they die.
Excellent comment!
Sounds like life with the local wildlife can be really challenging at times! The most we have to contend with around here is a very occassional coyote, and they usually stay away from the house and the dogs. Hope everything works out the way you hope!
It sure can! Not only that, it costs us a vast amount of money not only in livestock losses and direct loss of our food, but also in the extra building materials (you cannot simply throw together any old shack to house animals here as you can in many other areas) and sturdier/higher fencing materials! Not that the fence is any guarantee actually, but we can hope it will at least deter them into going through the neighbour’s place.
Great post!! You were very eloquent in your reply. Good job.
I ment to comment when you first posted this. You seem to have covered most of what I intended to say in your comment. I like this post because it is from the fuzzy edge where ideology and reality meet. We are starting to see more preditors moving back into our part of Ohio. Black Bear have been seen just north and just south of us. Bobcats, coyote, and foxes are abundant. Mountian Lions are slowly extending their range down from the north. Maybe they will reduce the deer poplulation. Thanks for posting this and letting people look at the grayness of the real world.
You are welcome! Yes, the cougars will reduce the deer population; they are likely the reason the cougars are extending south. Once they decimate the deer, they will then go after livestock, cats and dogs. Other reasons they are moving is the open terrain that we have created for them through the development of things like logging roads, cleared highway borders, and the vast electricity corridors bring. Cougars are using those open places to move into new territory. We have this problem now in BC. They are moving north into areas where traditionally were cougar free. Thus, they are starting to decimate our wild goat and sheep populations in the North of BC and the Yukon as these animals are not equipped to deal with this kind of predator, and can’t adapt fast enough. Those animals climb to get away from wolves and thus their natural predator is kept in check. Cougars don’t know any barriers and the ruminants have no where safe to get away from them. Consequently, they are being wiped out easily.
I’m not sure if you are aware of the problems they are having in New Jersey with black bear, but they are in a major struggle with them. NJ is way ahead of the rest of us in their attempts to deal with marauding bears and have realized that the ‘attractants’ theory doesn’t work. Once you have habituated animals, you cannot get rid of them by peaceful means. In NJ, assuming that the humans were ‘responsible’ for attracting the bears, the took an approach to garbage collection that removed it from the street curb. They presumed that once they removed the garbage from the community, the bears would disappear. However, the bears, having gotten accustomed to finding food around people, defied ‘human logic’ and began entering houses instead. They now have a huge problem. We have this problem in some areas too where people are simply refusing to see the animals logic. They now know that humans = food, either indirectly or directly (predation on humans by black bears is becoming frighteningly more and more common).
If we want to live with these creatures then we have to prevent their getting acquainted with our settlements. In other words, we have to defend our territory and keep them out, period. Humans have–until recently–always known this and thus we have historically killed anything that came around and those animals taught their young that humans were to be feared. Sadly, with the sentimentalized view of nature that is the flavour of our time, we are losing our perspective completely about what our relationship should be.
We are animals ourselves and depend on forests (including its flora and fauna) to survive. The cougars and wolves eat the deer and moose and humans seem to have no trouble seeing (and accepting) this as part of the cycle of nature. However, we have removed ourselves from the picture and this is the problem. Until recently, we have been in direct competition with cougars, wolves and bears for our survival and understood that we are an integral part of the sacred balance of nature. We used to shoot wolves and cougars in order to protect our common food source (the moose and deer).
Now that we mostly eat cows, we think that nature ‘out there’ will take care of itself. This contemporary ‘hands off’ conservation approach to wildlife (especially large predator) management is based on a misguided, so called ‘civilized’ way of dealing with the animals. It will (and is) biting us in the butt already. We have lost sight of our role ‘in nature’ by presuming we have ‘dominion over’ it instead of accepting that we are a direct part of the equation. If we don’t lower the wolf and cougar population through hunting, the deer and moose (and other ungulates) will suffer, and perhaps one of these days, never recover.
We have pushed them to the brink already with our logging and settlement expansion; they need our help with keeping the large predator population to a dull roar. We used to help them out in this way by killing large predators who lived around us. Just one cougar needs to kill one deer a week to survive. That cougar in the photo killed and ate three huge Great Pyreense dogs in 12 days. That’s a lot of meat. Imagine how healthy the deer population needs to be to feed a healthy cougar and wolf population each week!
I don’t know much about the wolves that were introduced into Yellowstone, but I hear they are flourishing. If this is true, it won’t be long until the ungulates are stressed and then they will turn to livestock predation unless we keep them in check. We have to get over the sentimentalized view of wildlife if we are to coexist.
Wolves in Yellowstone and everywhere are flourishing, the Idaho wolves have now moved into Oregon and are taking livestock. The populace on the western side of Oregon think that is OK, who cares about a 25 lambs or 19 calves here and there. But, as soon as someones dog got killed by a coyote last week near Portland, the news media was on that like stink on #@it! Rural people are supposed to live in harmony with wildlife and city people want the wildlife they do have eradicated. When I saw the news story about the dog being killed by the coyote, I doubted the story. I think the man’s dogs were out and came back home injured. He wanted folks to believe that a coyote jumped his 4′ field fencing and killed his dog and then left. More likely the coyote was cornered in that pen because a gate had been left open and the coyote was there to get food that it was already habituated to, and the dogs came back from their daily jaunt. These dogs were Labs, easily much larger than the coyote, I have yet to see a coyote attack like that unless it is defending it’s den, or is cornered. I wonder what people like this will do when the government subsidized wolves show up?
I was ranching in Wyoming when the wolves were being reintroduced to Yellowstone. Wow what a bunch of yammering that caused. We lived on the other side of the state from Yellowstone and didn’t see any wolves. They may be there now. However, we had bear, coyotes, and mountian lions. Everyone complained and wanted them eleminated. The owners of the ranch I managed did not. So, on our 80,000 acres they had free range. None were shot unless they took up residence near people. (Allowing them to become habituated to people is very dangerous!) We were told our herd would be wiped out. We changed our calving season to late May and early June and didn’t have any problem. By the time our cows were up in the mountian having their calves there was plenty of other easier food for the mountian lions and coyotes. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it worked for us. It is possible to live as part of the natural system, but you have to work very hard to understand it and where you and your actions fit.
This post has me tripping over my soapbox. I’ll dust it off and post some more thoughts on my own blog soon. That’s a better place for me to explore our role in nature, the link between food and population growth, and the concequences of playing god. Again, thanks for the thought provoking post.
hey are you like stupid or something. Why do you think it is ok to kill cougars. What right do you have in illing these animals ? fair enough they may decrease the populaton of livestock but you cant go killing them
I CANT BELIEVE HOW UN-CIVILLISED YOU PEOPLE ARE!
KILLING ANIMALS – WE CANT DO THAT , WE CAN’T JUST GO AROUND KILLING COUGARS. YOU NEED A REALITY CHECK AND MAYBE IF THAT BRAIN OF YOUS CAN HANDLE IT THEN YOU MIGHT SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY.
First of all, I suspect it is you who needs the reality check. Humans cannot live in harmony with large predators, period. Do you really think you would welcome a cougar living in your yard, and killing your dogs and threatening your children? If so, next time there is a marauding cougar perhaps we could try a relocation experiment.
Secondly, I didn’t kill the cougar, the Conservation Officer Service did because it was deemed a danger to our community.
Thirdly, what did you eat for dinner last night? I would like to know what the difference between killing a cow, chicken, turkey, pig, monkey, horse, snake, emu, kangaroo, salmon, fish, iguana, turtle, goat, sheep, shark, buffalo, elk, deer, caribou, whale, (as all of the above animals are traditional foods somewhere in the world) etc, for dinner than it is to kill a cougar and eat it?
Fourth, if you are a vegan, do you really think that the field of soybeans didn’t displace any animals or the huge combines that harvest the beans haven’t killed thousands of mice, birds, ground hogs, prairie dogs, badgers, moles, and young deer (to name just some of the regular casualties of such harvesters) in the process?
Let there be light.