Mountain Lion near Santa Cruz

[reddesert]

60 lb is pretty small for a mountain lion, it could have been juvenile, sick, or a runt as Drew says. Typically a healthy adult will avoid people and not attack them. State wildlife departments justify euthanizing a mountain lion (or bear) that has attacked or eaten people because it has lost the fear of people and may do it again. Is this well-justified? I don't know. The mountain lion that the police shot out of a tree several years ago in the San Jose area was minding its own business and clearly should not have been shot, I think/hope they have changed their protocol after the public outrage.

In Tucson recently a mountain lion and two cubs fed on a human body that was dumped near a trailhead (presumably murdered elsewhere by a human), and the wildlife dept decided to kill the lions, which has caused some outcry - again the justification was that they didn't show fear. It is still very rare to actually see a lion in the mountains, bear sightings and scat are more common. Lions are certainly present, but I would guess that the animals on Jim Andrada's friend's roof are actually bobcats.

[Drew Wiley]

Mtn lions are extremely curious much like other cats, which means that they can deliberately stalk people for this benign reason alone. But then if something happens to trigger a different instinct, like wearing an antler hat and running away on all fours, the game can change. What we would do is put a bright red or yellow kerchief in a back pocket and slowly walk dirt roads where we knew they were common. Curious lions would follow at a distance, then we'd take turns hiding behind trailside trees to watch them walk by. One enormous tomcat placed his pawprints precisely inside our own bootprints in the mud to try to fool us if we backtracked. It's an amazing behavior I've heard of leopards doing too.

[Bob Salomon]

Mtn lions are extremely curious much like other cats, which means that they can deliberately stalk people for this benign reason alone. But then if something happens to trigger a different instinct, like wearing an antler hat and running away on all fours, the game can change. What we would do is put a bright red or yellow kerchief in a back pocket and slowly walk dirt roads where we knew they were common. Curious lions would follow at a distance, then we'd take turns hiding behind trailside trees to watch them walk by. One enormous tomcat placed his pawprints precisely inside our own bootprints in the mud to try to fool us if we backtracked. It's an amazing behavior I've heard of leopards doing too.

In 1954 I was a junior curator at the Stamford Museum in CT. One of my jobs was to sweep out the mountain lion’s cage. He was an old, toothless lion, but very friendly. If you didn’t pen him up at the back of his cage he would just rub or lean against you. Apparently he had been hand raised since he was a cub.

[Drew Wiley]

What a wonderful experience, Bob! I once worked for a fellow who kept two fully toothed, fully-clawed mtn lions in his house, lounging on his sofa. He said he didn't like the way they looked at him, so eventually got rid of them. There was a beautiful gray tamed one near here at the Marine World theme park, which they walked around on a leash just like the cheetah. Lions and tigers, however, were only exercise either off-hours or within their penned areas. It was popular to watch a handler using a huge thick rope to play with tigers when they were swimming around in their enclosure pool. But one of the lions terribly mauled its handler one day; he barely survived, and called it a cat and mouse experience. The couger and cheetah were brought out into the open and had the same benign smile-like expression, and loved being scratched right in front of people, but only by their official handlers, of course. I'd be a lot more wary of a bobcat than a pet cougar, although my brother had a tame bobcat in his house in the Oregon desert - they seem to be a more mild-mannered subspecies there. I never had any luck trying to tame bobcat kittens.

[Bob Salomon]

What a wonderful experience, Bob! I once worked for a fellow who kept two fully toothed, fully-clawed mtn lions in his house, lounging on his sofa. He said he didn't like the way they looked at him, so eventually got rid of them. There was a beautiful gray tamed one near here at the Marine World theme park, which they walked around on a leash just like the cheetah. Lions and tigers, however, were only exercise either off-hours or within their penned areas. It was popular to watch a handler using a huge thick rope to play with tigers when they were swimming around in their enclosure pool. But one of the lions terribly mauled its handler one day; he barely survived, and called it a cat and mouse experience. The couger and cheetah were brought out into the open and had the same benign smile-like expression, and loved being scratched right in front of people, but only by their official handlers, of course. I'd be a lot more wary of a bobcat than a pet cougar, although my brother had a tame bobcat in his house in the Oregon desert - they seem to be a more mild-mannered subspecies there. I never had any luck trying to tame bobcat kittens.

When our monkey died my wife insisted that we replace him. So we drove from Niceville to a dealer in exotic pets in Panama City, FL. When we entered the shop he had 2 beautiful foxes, in cages, by the door. One was red and the other a beautiful grey. I was petting the grey fox, they were the same price as a squirrel monkey, as were descended skunks and rattlesnakes, $25.00 each. As I was petting the fox I asked him if they were tame? He said “one was”. As he said that the grey one hissed and I pulled my hand away just as his jaws snapped shut! If they didn’t have an odor I probably would have bought the red one. But we wet home without any animal. His monkeys were just not tame enough.

[Drew Wiley]

Oh my! I've never had a monkey. But when I was little, before our own house was built, we lived in a tiny house atop a hill in a very small town.There was no such thing as pre-school or kindergarten. Women didn't work except at home, so they'd come over for tea in their pillbox hats and sit cramped on the sofa. I was around 4 or so. The kitten would jump up on the sofa arm and one of the women would instinctively reach over and start petting it while still sipping tea and chatting. Then there would be sideways glance, a sudden shriek, and all those ladies would run out of the house. It was a pet skunk.

[Bob Salomon]

Oh my! I've never had a monkey. But when I was little, before our own house was built, we lived in a tiny house atop a hill in a very small town.There was no such thing as pre-school or kindergarten. Women didn't work except at home, so they'd come over for tea in their pillbox hats and sit cramped on the sofa. I was around 4 or so. The kitten would jump up on the sofa arm and one of the women would instinctively reach over and start petting it while still sipping tea and chatting. Then there would be sideways glance, a sudden shriek, and all those ladies would run out of the house. It was a pet skunk.

Had a similar experience. Have had 2 pet skunks, one an adult and the other a baby. One day we were walking the baby on a leash and one of our neighbors was mowing his lawn.
It was a very hot summer day and he was very large and overweight, as he made a pass in front of us I took the skunk off his leash and put him behind him. Then called him and pointed behind him. Thought he would have a heart attack. Never saw anyone that heavy jump that far!

[Jim Andrada]

Well, if she said mountain lion on the roof i think I'd believe her. She lives right up against the mountains and there are a lot of bobcats around - the way she described it, she was hearing something pretty heavy walking on the roof.

I was talking with my next door neighbor one day and he said his son had come home from somewhere and left the front door open while he picked something up and left. A couple of hours late they were all heading out to a restaurant and he went into the family room to turn on a light and noticed a bobcat sleeping under the piano - it must have followed his son into the house. Had a few anxious minutes trying the decide how to evict the cat when it just got up and walked out the door.

My wife and I were walking one day and saw something dog sized cross the road ahead of us - then we realized that it was a large bobcat. it walked along with us about 30 feet away for a few hundred yards, then plopped down under a tree for a nap.

Another time I was at the local IBM site (since largely turned into a U of A research park, although IBM still has 500 or so folks there) There are covered walkways between the buildings and as we came out a door we looked up into a tree next to the building and saw a bobcat snoozing contentedly on a branch.

One day my wife's piano tuner came by to work on the pianos (yeah - pianos plural - two full sized grands. She was a concert pianist for a lot of years until arthritis ruined her hands.) Anyway, the tuner lives pretty far out of town and he likes to work on cars. He said there are always bobcats around and there was one female in particular who lived in back of his house for a long time - he said that when she had a litter she brought the kittens to the door to "introduce" them. One day he was under a car fixing something when the kittens crawled under the car to see what he was doing. They followed him when he stood up and he said they looked so cute that he couldn't resist picking one of them up. Big mistake. I asked him if the mother had attacked him and he said Hell no - but the kitten really stank and it took forever to get the smell out of his shirt.

When we lived in Tokyo there was a guy a few blocks away who had a leopard and a wolf. Right in downtown Tokyo.

[ic-racer]

Not sure where Santa Cruz is, but our neighbor's tabby cat got out last week. This incident created quite a stir with the murine and ornithological wildlife in the microenvironmenet between the houses. In fact the creature murdered one or two Turdus migratorius species in the area before being captured and returned to captivity.
Sadly, no photographs exist of the incident.

[Drew Wiley]

Santa Cruz is a seaside resort town backed by hills of brush and redwood groves with an exceptionally dense mtn lion population. These cats frequently wander into residential areas and Stanford University on the opposite side of that ridge, basically Silicon Valley, where this latest incident occurred in one of their parks. So basically, you have many miles of ideal habitat being encroached on one side by Silicon Valley "residences" (unbelievably expensive real estate with lots of pretty trees and yards lions like to explore, lounge in, raise kittens, and find deer in).