Mtn Lions and Bikes

In article ,
says...
On Fri, 09 Jan 2004 20:56:56 GMT, "Matt O'Toole"
wrote:

I've had three mountain lion encounters, two within a mile or two of this
attack. In all three cases, the cats just walked away -- but with an air of
nonchalance. This is kind of scary -- they don't appear afraid, or they look
like they're trying not to.

Matt O.

Well I'd ask myself 'what are their natural enemies', IOW what causes
them to run in the wild. Probably nothing. I'd guess they're apex
predators.

They are, but they won't attack a much larger animal such as a healthy
adult buffalo, because they'll get gored and stomped. Young and sick
ones are common prey though (in areas where they both survive, which
aren't many).



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I didn't see anyone post the link or the story yet, so I figured I would.
It's from http://www.chainreaction.com/squirrels.htm, towards the bottom.

Park bicyclist conquers cat

by Mike Dawson
Peninsula Daily News
Sunday, May 26, 1996

PORT ANGELES -
Of all the humans the cougar could have attacked Friday, it had the rotten
luck to tangle with Phil Anderson, dog wrestler, jujitsu fan. "I went to my
back, wrapped my legs around him, rolled over and mounted him and started
choking him, choking him forever," Anderson said Saturday. "It was just
nuts."

Anderson, 28, a Port Angeles mountain bike enthusiast, spent Saturday on the
couch, healing from the cougar attack in Olympic National Park. He had been
riding his mountain bike on the Wolf Creek Trail Friday afternoon. The trail
is an old road that runs from Whiskey Bend on the Elwha River to Hurrican
Ridge. Whiskey Bend is about 20 miles west of Port Angeles. It is also the
head of the popular Hume's Ranch Trail.

Anderson had ridden his bike up Wolf Creek Trail for about two hours. On the
way down, he stopped 150 feet from the parking lot, dismounted the bike and
removed his helmet. He picked up a sweatshirt he had left trail-side on his
way up.

He had just pulled the heavy, black sweatshirt down over this head when he
spied his opponent. "He just moved out of the shadows, so smoothly and
quickly." When the cat came at him, he started running backwards, he said.
He figured the cougar weighed about 80 pounds. The cougar kept coming, then
leapt at Anderson's chest.

Anderson fell to his back, locked his legs around the cougar, flipped over
and buried his thumbs in the animal's throat. He kept the front paws pinned
back with his forearms, he said. He had the cat pretty much subdued, but it
wouldn't die.

"I was watching him go in and out," Anderson said. "We were at a stalemate."

To his surprise, the cat made no noise while it struggled, Anderson said.
He, however, was shouting for help. After about two and a half or three
minutes, the cat still wriggling, Anderson got his thumb in the cougar's
mouth. He just smashed it," Anderson said. That gave the cat the edge. As
Anderson lost his grip, that cat's claws went into a whirl, ripping at the
thick, baggy sweatshirt.

Some of the claws caught Anderson's chest. "He put a lot more holes in my
sweatshirt than he did in me," Anderson said. Not wanting any more, the
combatants exploded away from each other and ran.

Anderson ran down the trail, grabbed a baseball bat in his van and returned
for his bike.

The cat had stuck around, still looking for food. "He carried off my bag
with four peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in it," Anderson said.

It was the end of Anderson's first cougar sighting.

Anderson is a short, wiry, high-energy kind of guy with powerful arms and
legs, a flat stomach and short hair. He's an Olympic Peninsula version of a
surfer dude, with a passion for speed and gravity. He's also a mountain bike
guide and unemployed waiter. The cougar, rather than picking on a tasty
tourist, jumped a former college wrestler. And he has some other skills that
prepared him for cougar fighting, he said. "I've been doing this jujitsu dog
thing." While unemployed last winter, he spent a lot of time wrestling with
a 120-pound German Shepherd named Forest, who was named for the trees.

Forest, who loves to wrestle, has been getting a taste of jujitsu, too.
Anderson employs a move he picked up from "ultimate fighting," a new
anything-goes sport in which people fight without gloves. The move is a
defensive tactic, to help a little guy take down a big guy and choke him
out. Anderson had already mastered the move on Forest. So when the cougar
came along, Anderson was ready.

"It's something I think about all the time," he said.

He had good reason to imagine a cat fight. Cougar sightings have been
reported in the Hurricane Ridge and Elwha districts of the Park once a week
for the last month, ranger Gary Gissell said. At least two cougars,
including one with a limp, have been identified. There may be one or two
more, he said.

Rangers don't plan to hunt down Anderson's opponent, he said. With so many
in the area, there would be no way to tell which one to hunt. Besides, he
said, Anderson may have turned the cougar's attention to rabbits.
"Hopefully, he may have turned the cougar off from hunting humans," he said.

Gissell said he looked over the fight scene and found cougar tracks and
signs of a struggle. He also learned, through Anderson's admission, that
Anderson was riding on a trail where bikes are forbidden.

The fine is $50. However, Gissel let the injured wrestler off the hook.

"The cougar was his warning," he said.


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In article ,
Ken writes:


Regarding defending yourself with your bike, if the mountain lion is really
after you, they won't let you see it before they attack. They are very fast
and will attack from the rear or from cover.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

This is true. There are places on Vancouver Island and other BC
bucolic coastal communities where they have been known to follow
kids on their ways to school, lurking in the treetops, and
stealthily moving from tree to tree. Their favoured mode of
attack is from above and behind, and they'll target the back
of the neck for a quick kill. They don't like to have to work
very hard. So, the defensive tactic is to not make any noise,
and make them /work hard/ to get ya. Cats' own tactic is to
lie on their backs so their opponents can't reach their
indefensible parts, and frenetically use their hands/feet/teeth
offensively in front/on top. (Siamese/Burmese/Russian Blues love
this game, when ya go to tickle their tummies.) I think a lot of
cougar fatal victims went into the classic, passive, bear-attack
position of lying on their stomach and protecting their faces, and
hoping it'll go away. That just gives the cat carte blanche to
tear ya apart, or go for the neck.

No, I've never been attacked by a cougar, and if I were, I honestly
don't know how I'd immediately react. Possibly, I'd fold & crumble.
But if I get a chance to recover from the initial surprise, I'd at
least want the satisfaction of getting in some good throat punches
and kidney grinds.

Your best defense is to ride in
a group. Attacks on groups are much rarer than attacks on singles.

Shrill noises, like the sound of women/children screaming,
aggravate them and incite them to attack. All the cougar/human
attacks I've read about generally seem to be more about anger
than hunger. This is evidenced by the more confrontational
rather than stealthy nature of the attacks. I doubt they'd
really want to eat humans -- we probably smell bad to them.
Snowshoe hares smell more like dinner.

Interestingly, y'know how man-eater tigers in India are (were?)
generally identified as old-timers with bad teeth and arthritis,
and humans are the easiest obtainable item on the local
smorgasbord? Human-attacking cougars often seem to be just
transitioning from the human equivalent of 17/18 years old
to adulthood. So, maybe they're just feline punk kids.
Or schizophrenic & confused. Or they just have an angrifying
hair up their ass from a previous, negative experience with
humans. Maybe human-attacking cougars, along with other
irrational animal behaviours like self-beaching whales, is
indicative & symptomatic of the human technological impact
on the natural environment? I dunno, but it's something to
think about.

Also, as the old bear joke goes, ride with someone smaller and slower than
you.

The chinook phrase for cougar is "hyas puss-puss", or "great cat".
According to some Native lore, catamounts are the reincarnated
spirits of people who were total assholes in their human lifetimes.
Before I learned of this, I once asked a Native (Kwakiutl) guy why
cougars weren't included in the usual Totemic zodiac. His answer
was: "Because they aren't part of 'the thing'." IOW, they're
deprecated as having undesirable traits with which to associate
one's self, or one's clan.

I like cats. As my grandmother once said, "Some of the best people
I've met were cats." But some of the worst people can be cats, too.
They're just fellow beings, subject to the same buffeting and hard
knocks we all endure through life. But Walt Disney's tritely cute
"Lonesome Charlie" does cougars as great a disservice as
media-sensationalized accounts of cougar attacks. They are not
all anti-human, soulless killing machines. Mostly they just wanna
be left alone. Sometimes they go nutz, and being confronted by one
of those ones is akin to being swarmed by a bunch of punks lurking
in a 7-Eleven parking lot. What does one do then?


cheers, & meow,
Tom

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Trouble is, in my neck of the woods occasionally a mountain biker or two
had reported a pair of mountain lions stalking them. If I remember
correctly it was a mother and younger cat. I think rocks were thrown
followed by a quick down hill ride, but the report was that the cats
followed. No one was injured. N. California, Sierra Nevada Mts.

David Kerber wrote:

In article ,
says...

...



Depends on terrain, but do you think you could accelerate
up to 25 mph on a flat smooth trail pretty quick? I'll bet
I could! Do you even attempt to run/pedal away? Do you ward
off the beast somehow with the bike? Abandon the bike and
make a grab for a bike stick or stones? Stay perfectly still
and hope "Big Tabby" goes away?



Probably stop and try to keep the bike between him and me. I don't
think 25 mph would get you away from a Mt. Lion, and running tells him
you are prey.

....

In article ,
Bernie writes:

will go on a "wolf howl tour". Usually a busload of people who go up
north at night in the winter and howl with the wolves. Try it. You
will be moved, I promise.

I was most moved during my first visit to my brother's ranchette.
One of his cows had gotten his head & horns stuck between fence
rails. The poor guy just patiently stood there, stoically waiting
for someone to eventually extracate him from his dire predicament.

Cows' horns are kinda like MTB bar ends.

I guess you can discern my conflicted thoughts about carnivorism.
It's hard to eat some creature who lovingly licked the salt from
the sweat on your hand.

Wolves don't have such thoughts, 'cuz they usually don't intimate
with their victims. We ppl have to isolate ourselves from the
death/life cycle by way of supermarkets, and convenient,
shrink-wrap packaging.

Maybe wolves howl out of a bittersweet sadness/joy about their lot.


cheers,
Tom


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In article , David Reuteler
writes:


eh. personally i'm far more scared of squirrels. & they're too small and
fast to hit over the head with a frame pump before they jump through your
front wheel.

Yeah, they do seem to want to run between your wheels don't they. They feed on
the park grass on the SAR, Santa Ana River Trail. When you pass they always run
for the nest among the rocks along the river. And those pesky rabbits will run
along the path darting from one side of bikeway to the other.
Bill

In article , (Marlene
Blanshay) writes:



Apparently coyotes are (i've heard) rather afraid of people and non-
aggresive like bearts. However, they seem to go after people's pets. And I
imagine they sound eerie when howling.

Ive heard that too Marlene, but I think many coyotes here in OC have become
used to urban living. I ride/run a lot on the SAR, Santa Ana River, trail and
have heard coyotes howling and see them often near dusk and they never run from
humans unless the people have a large dog with them. Once I mistook a coyote
for a dog keeping pace with a jogger. Until I took a closer look. The runner
said the animal had been within 20 feet of him for about 50 yards or so. I
think mostly they ignore us unless they percieve us as a threat. I've also
heard a pack at Craig park in La Habra, North Orange County, in broad daylight.
This park is in a highly developed area with many weekend visitors. The ranger
said the howlers were probably welcoming some members back. The habitat is
dense brush quite high and about 3 acres in area.
Most parks in OC have a lot of ground squirrels, rabbits, and full, open
garbage cans.

Bill

In article , Ken
writes:


There's a report he
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/West/01/0...ion/index.html

The first thing to realize is that your risk is very low. Maybe 10 humans
have been killed by mountain lions in California over the past 100 years.
The last person killed was almost 20 years ago. Compare that to the number
of humans killed by Ford Explorers.


There may have only been 10 killed in the last 100 years but this cat was on
his second human in a matter of hours. The cat was shot when it returned to his
first kill, the first biker.

Since all the fires here in Southern CA, the cats have been displaced, moving
in search for food. They will be nervous going through strange territory maybe
even coming across other cat's scat. This one was big enough(approx 110 lbs)
that he picked a grown woman off of her bike and was carrying her by her face
(avoiding the helmet?) The only thing that save her was her riding partner
hanging onto her leg screaming and kicking at the lions flank. Two other riders
came to their aid throwing rocks at the cats head driving him off into the
bush. This was about 4:30 P.M. so visibility was bad and doubt if either rider
saw the cat before he hit them.

This is a single track trail and no danger from SUVs to man or beast. What I
find odd is that the cat already had one down, why did he attack another so
soon after? Doesn't sound like a normal cat hunting for food to me.

Matt O'Toole wrote:

anything in play, just like your pet housecat will. I've seen bobcats stalking
deer, though to my knowledge they don't actually try to bring them down.

They do around here! Packs of coyotes will also take deer as well.

Both of these behaviors was surprising to wildlife biologists, who
thought deer too far out of the animal's prey size range.


SMH


Bobcats generally don't get bigger than about 30LB. They could maul you
seriously if they attacked you, but they're no mountain lion, and they generally
leave people alone. They deserve respect -- don't mess with them -- but they're
not something to worry about. One bobcat used to sit in the middle of a big
climb in Laguna Beach, and watch riders go by, one by one.

They are not all anti-human, soulless killing machines. Mostly they
just wanna be left alone. Sometimes they go nutz, and being confronted
by one of those ones is akin to being swarmed by a bunch of punks
lurking in a 7-Eleven parking lot. What does one do then?

What got me was the dead guy lying out in the brush prior to the
attack in question. It was like "oh well, nobody really missed him
until recently, I guess he was killed by a cougar."

None of it surprises me. Except that they are also checking out
an animal that was killed by a car, presumably that one was going
after a roadie but was too slow.

It really makes me think.

Maybe there's a conspiracy among cougars to kill cyclists, or
something.


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