Cougar Country No,Really

DAYTON - In the predawn hours on a Thursday morning two weeks ago, Derek Katsel woke to the sound of his dog barking.

"I got up and went outside to see what was going on," he said. "When I came around the corner, there was a cougar five feet from my porch, looking at my Jack Russell at the door."

Katsel went back into the house to dress and get his pistol. When he came back out, the puma took off running toward his shop with three of his dogs in hot pursuit.

They quickly had the lion treed a stone's throw from his house on Magill Lane off the South Touchet Road.

Katsel used his cell phone to wake up his girlfriend, Tammy Magill, and told her to open the kennels holding his Blue Tick hounds on the 143-acre family farm at the confluence of the South and North Touchet rivers.

She complied, and soon she, her dad, Dan, the three hounds and four house dogs were at the base of a cottonwood with the large mountain lion staring down at them. Trapped and threatened, the animal lashed out at one of the excited hounds, biting its hip so badly it needed drains put in later, Katsel said.

"The cat ran up creek (South Touchet River) about 100 yards and treed again," he went on.

By this time Ryan John, the Dayton-based enforcement officer with the state's Department of Fish & Wildlife, arrived at the scene. Katsel had called him right after he called his girlfriend to open the kennels.

Déjà vu

To John, seeing the mountain lion was a déjà vu. Just three weeks earlier, he had been called to the bus barn at Dayton High School about a mi le t o the north early one morning to respond to the sighting of a cougar, now presumed to be the same one.

At first, the officer wasn't inclined to shoot it, but after weighing Katsel's concerns for his kids, livestock and dogs, and considering the earlier sighting so close to a school yard within city limits, John decided it was best to put the animal down.

"It's always tough because we're charged with watching over them," he said. "But we have to be careful when they behave abnormally. This one was way too comfor t abl e around the back porch. I needed to r emo v e the cougar in the interest of public safety.

Thus ended several tense weeks for the Dayton neighborhood, which had been on alert since the first cougar sighting in January.

"We feel a lot safer knowing that cougar is not in our yard," Katsel said.

Not quite as worried about the presence of mountain lions in the city, neighbor Kelly Steinhoff said she's nonetheless relieved the cat is no longer around.

"Pretty much all of us around here have livestock, and a few of us have small children," she said. "But it's part of living in the country. You just have to be smart of where you go and what you do."

Still Rare

Cougar attacks on humans are extremely rare.

In North America, only 25 fatalities and 95 nonfatal accidents with mountain lions have occurred in the past century. However, more cougar attacks have been reported in the western United States and Canada in the past two decades than in the previous eight.

In Washington state, of the one fatal (1927) and 15 nonfatal attacks reported in the past 100 years, seven attacks occurred during the 1990s.

Wildlife biologists point to increasing human encroachment on traditional cougar habitat as one of the main reasons for the growing number of encounters.

But that doesn't explain why cougar sightings have gone up in Columbia County, which has a relatively stable human population, John said.

Last year alone, John himself saw cougars on five separate occasions. That may not sound like a lot until you consider how elusive the animals normally are and how rare it is for anyone to even see one once in a lifetime. The entire state has a cougar population estimated at no more than 4,000.

"It's certainly a healthy population," he said about the number of mountain lions in Columbia County. "Nobody knows exactly why the number of sightings is going up. There is a lot of speculation."

To find out what's behind the growth of sightings, the state launched a three-year trap-and-collar study in the Tucannon Valley.

Yellowstone Effect

The pumas like to roam the foothills of the Blue Mountains and, by extension, the South Touchet corridor. The wild fires that swept through the area half a decade ago created a kind of "Yellowstone effect," said John, referring to the fires that raged in the national park in 1988 and gave rise to a regeneration of the natural ecosystem, including one of the food sources for the big cats: white-tailed deer.

In their stealthy travels up and down the South Touchet corridor, the cougars rarely get in trouble, John said. Once a year, he responds to a call of a livestock attack. Last year, he put down the only other mountain lion in his five years as an enforcement officer in the county. It was a young cougar that returned several times to feast on a local farmer's pigmy goats.

"He got a taste for an easy meal," John said about the defenseless goats that were disappearing weekly from the farm five miles south of town.

A high percentage of cougars attacking domestic animals, and the rare human being, are 1 or 2-year-old males in search of their own territory after having been driven from others by older lions.

That was the case with the goat thief, an 80-pound lion no more than 3 years old. The lion Katsel encountered was older, possibly hungry or diseased. For his age, the male should have weighed 150 pounds, but on the biologist's scale he only reached 130.

Cougars are not listed as an endangered species. During certain months of the year, September through March, they may be hunted under a general tag or special permits. But the only effective way to track and trap mountain lions is by using hounds, a practice Washington state voters outlawed in the 1990s.

Katsel, who happens to have the kind of hounds to hunt cougars and is occasionally called in by John to do so for game management purposes, feels it's time to bring the hunting method back.

Who Let The Dogs Out?

A pilot program allowing the use of hounds in five northeastern Washington counties (Stevens, Okanogan, Ferry, Pend Oreille and Chelan) and more recently Klickitat, where complaints about cougar encounters and attacks have been the greatest, has already proven successful in bringing the number of those complaints down, he said.

A state study show that since 2004, when the program was introduced, confirmed complaints in the counties allowing hound hunting has been cut in half, from about 115 that year to fewer than 60 in 2009.

Currently, there are bills in the legislature that would make hunting cougars with hounds permanent throughout the state.

But some experts who study large predator behavior patterns argue that this traditional hunting method just makes things worse.

According to Robert Wielgus, director of Washington State University's Large Carnivore Conservation Laboratory, allowing hound hunting will reduce the number of mature males because those are the animals big-game hunters favor.

That in turn takes away the stabilizing force in cougar territories, leaving younger males more numerous and more prone to wander into urban areas and to run wild, he is quoted as saying in the Seattle Times.

Wielgus and a number of his graduate students studied patterns in cougar encounters in counties where hound hunting was reintroduced and in areas where it is still banned, finding that complaints in the hound-hunting counties likely came from younger males who had moved in from hundreds of miles away after the older males had been killed by trophy hunters.

Katsel believes not all hounds men are after the bigger cats. The same study by the state's Department of Fish & Wildlife that found reduced complaints in the pilot counties, also confirms that all hunters using dogs take the largest males.

Only 42 cougars are "harvested" by hunters in the state each year, according to the study.

Management Tools

Some conservationists do agree that hound hunting is a good and already-available management tool for wildlife officials such as John to target troublesome animals, as he did last year with the young male that devoured the goats.

"Biologists have shown that the best way to deal with problem animals is to target the animal, not the entire cougar population, with hounds," Joe Scott of Conservation Northwest wrote in a recent blog on the Sports Yakima website.

"The Department of Fish and Wildlife has already been granted that power," he wrote.

One of the best tools for individuals concerned about attacks in cougar country is pepper spray, John said. Perhaps even better than a fire arm, which is hard to aim under stress of attack and may only aggravate a predator if it misses its target, the spray will immediately dull a cougars' senses and inflict temporary pain that will prompt it to flee.

Plus the spray may come in handy in case of a much more likely kind of attack for most people who live in or near town, John said.

"It works for dogs too," he said.

Dos & Don'ts In Cougar Country

Don't leave small children unattended.

Modify the habitat around your home. Light all walkways after dark and avoid landscaping with plants that deer prefer to eat.

Don't feed wildlife and feral cats (domestic cats gone wild). This includes deer, raccoons, and other small mammals. Remember predators follow prey.

Close off open spaces under structures. Areas beneath porches and decks can provide shelter for prey animals. Feed dogs and cats indoors when possible.

Keep dogs and cats indoors, especially from dusk to dawn.

Use garbage cans with tight-fitting lids. Garbage attracts small mammals that, in turn, attract cougars.

Keep outdoor livestock and small animals confined in secure pens. For a large property with livestock, consider using a guard animal.

Encountering A Cougar

Stop, pick up small children immediately, and don't run. Running and rapid movements may trigger an attack. Remember, at close range, a cougar's instinct is to chase.

Face the cougar. Talk to it firmly while slowly backing away. Always leave the animal an escape route.

Try to appear larger than the cougar. Get above it (e.g., step up onto a rock or stump). If wearing a jacket, hold it open to further increase your apparent size.

Do not take your eyes off the cougar or turn your back. Do not crouch down or try to hide.

Never approach the cougar, especially if it is near a kill or with kittens, and never offer it food.

If the cougar does not flee, be more assertive.

If the cougar attacks, fight back. Be aggressive and try to stay on your feet.

Pepper spray in the cougar's face is also effective in the extreme unlikelihood of a close encounter.