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TODAY Friday 5 September 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Man Bites Cougar

As a species, humans have a deep love/hate thing with cats. Big cats are the most common symbol on the official coats of arms of the nation states of the world (raptor birds come in second). The most popular moniker for high school sports teams in this country is Wildcats; close behind are Cougars, Panthers, Tigers, Lions, Jaguars, Bengals, and Catamounts. Almost all toddlers show a ready interest in mimicking the growl and scratching of a big cat.

The late Bruce Chatwin thought the obsession was bred into us during prehistory. In "Songlines" he noted that Australian aborigines, like people everywhere, were in the custom of telling scary stories to their children about ferocious animal monsters that would furtively come in the night and eat them up. Yet there are no really ferocious animals in contemporary Australia, and none indicated in the fossil record either. Chatwin hypothesized that long before the settlement of most of the world humans had evolved as language-speakers and tool-users who faced -- and overcame -- the desperate peril of a carnivore with a taste for the flesh of primates. He reviews the candidates, and nominates a now-extinct relative of the tiger. Are we all bound together with a tenacious memory that shudders at our victimization and exults in our triumph? And are we thus bound to big cats?

You might think so if you've been watching television or reading the paper over the last couuple of days. Last night's NBC News brought us a "balanced" (i.e., near-hysterical) report on recent attacks on Americans by alligators, bears, and, of course, mountain lions. And Wednesday's New York Times featured a long article by James Brooke entitled "Too Often, Cougars and People Clash." The sub-head read: "Is animal conservation becoming a victim of its own success?" In the last six years, two humans in California and two humans in Colorado have been killed by mountain lions (aka cougars). As Brooke notes, the fatality rate is way this side of rattlesnakes and lightning bolts. But there's no question that there is population explosion of deer and elk in the outer suburbs of this country, no question that predators are following them, and no question that our contemporaries are less inclined to blast away with a firearm than were their predecessors of the 19th Century. The upshot is more coyotes, mostly, but also more wolves and big cats. Humans are living densely in places where they didn't use to. So are the lions.

I wouldn't advise anybody to go to a public hearing and tell concerned parents that their child's death by mauling is the least of their worries. But even the most crude form of risk analysis says that there's a certain disparity between the dangers of lion attack (one death per year) and automobile travel (46,000 deaths per year). Bruce Chatwin may have been on to something; cats reach us beyond reason. Perhaps the rare human victim can be regarded as a tragic but useful reminder of our connection to the wild. And the manner of death, if terrible, at least resonates with the memories of ancestors, a quality not easily evoked by the shattered Mercedes of the poor Princess of Wales.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE:

For leads on World Wide Web info on wilderness and wilderness policy, your best bet is our Susan Alexander in the High Fives section.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

9/04: Logging
9/03: Fishing
9/02: Our Biodiversity Problems
8/29: Babies
8/28: MegaSheep and SuperCow
8/27: East Asia / Southeast Asia
8/26: No Drama on the Rhine
8/25: The End of Nature Again
8/22: Our Friend Escerichia 0157:H7
8/21: Free the Greenpeace One Million!

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