Living with Lions
Predators are Essential for Ecosystems in Balance
by Gowan Batist
I was awake at 5am, feeding thin sticks into my newly kindled fire, when my phone pinged. My neighbor was asking for help. A mountain lion had attacked their goats, and they wanted to know if I could bring my medical bag. I headed out the door and walked through the blue predawn to their goat pen, a tidy low corral made of pallets lashed together. The lion had reached through the slats and injured two baby goats, both of which were bawling loudly into the otherwise still morning. They had seen the lion hurry away into the brush when they ran out to respond to the goat’s cries. What wasn’t immediately obvious was that the mountain lion hadn’t actually left the area. As my neighbor cradled the injured baby goat, a loud aggrieved feline complaint came from the direction of the nearby creek bed.
I swung my flashlight around and caught the reflective discs of the lion’s eyes, huge and staring directly at me, the source of the annoying light. I stepped in front of my friend, who smelled of blood and whose arms were emitting the sounds of a small injured animal. The lion was so close. Too close. A mountain lion who does not have the room to feel safe turning their back to run will often present a confrontational front, and this juvenile was no exception. They were making all the displays of an angry house cat, but on a large scale. What we should have done was slowly increase our distance while shouting and throwing things. However, with our backs against the corral, and the lion’s back against the bank of a creek bed, nobody had space to move for a long several moments in which I was bathed in the purest rush of adrenaline euphoria I have ever felt.
My neighbor’s partner had gone to the house for supplies and heard our calls, so brought a horn with them when they returned. As they approached the standoff, we decided to try to haze the lion off. My neighbor blew their horn abruptly, shockingly loud in the still morning, and I shrieked like the primate I am and stomp-clapped in the crouching lion’s direction. The cat evaporated, flashing up the bank so fast that I was left with a retinal after-image of a tail as long as me and a rack of ribs streaking into a tan blur. I’ve carried a small marine air horn ever since. It was $15 and fits in my pocket, and I suggest you get one too.
This could be a story about how a plucky neighborhood of farmers defended themselves from a marauding beast, except for one detail. That starving teenaged lion was likely taking a chance on a goat pen because their mother had been shot by someone further up the road a while back, which we had heard about through the grapevine. Lions stay with their families for up to two years and are not able to hunt successfully enough to survive for quite a while even after they attain their full size. This lion’s desperation was likely created by human actions.
When my grandfather was growing up in Mendocino County, times were so hard here that the entire landscape had been stripped by desperate people. The Great Depression, following a World War and the Spanish Flu pandemic, had collapsed the economy. There were few if any deer left to shoot, and the livestock they had were zealously guarded by a totally unregulated extermination war on all native carnivores, including mountain lions. My great-grandmother sent him out, as a young child, with a shotgun. He would shoot songbirds and blue jays, which his mother would boil for broth, straining out the tiny bones. When skunks got into their chicken coop, it was such a tragedy that they resorted to trapping the skunks themselves, keeping them in the now-vacant coop until their winter pelts grew in, when they were skinned and their pelts—white stripes disguised by black dye, as counterfeit mink—sent to San Francisco to be sold to the rich, on a small boat also carrying moonshine. This happened within living memory, and apex predators are slower to recover than smaller animals. It may feel like there are more sightings of lions now than we had growing up, but recovery is not the same as invasion.
I share this family and local history to give ecological context that’s specific to this county’s recent history, but mountain lions have lived alongside humans on this landscape for tens of thousands of years. Since colonization they have suffered greatly, but are still here. We must learn to live with them, because exterminating them has already been tried and has failed. In California, from 1907 to 1963, mountain lions were classified as a “bountied predator,” and a record of 12,462 lions were killed for bounty in that time, more than any other state. After the bounty system ended, hunting was allowed until a moratorium from 1972 to 1986, after which point Proposition 117, California Wildlife Protection Act, officially banned hunting of mountain lions in 1990. In 2013, Senate Bill 132 became law, which protects lions in populated areas and only allows lethal removal in the case that a lion is posing an imminent threat to human life—aggressive behavior that is not due to the presence of first responders.
In the years since then, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has added additional protections to endangered populations in Southern California and has implemented F&G Code 4801.5, which allows CDFW to partner with entities to implement non-lethal procedures on mountain lions, including rescue and rehabilitation. All of these policies may mean a recovery of mountain lion populations to closer to what they were before the wholesale extermination policies at the turn of the century, but even with new protections, there are many issues preventing a full recovery.
Panthera, a global big cat advocacy organization, estimates that the 2020 wildfire season alone negatively impacted at least 15% of California’s total lion population. Plowed fields, highways, and housing developments isolate populations from each other, causing genetic bottlenecks. Perhaps most insidiously, they are sickened by rodenticides and the mercury which drifts off the ocean in the fog from international oil and gas drilling. This mercury, according to researchers at U.C. Santa Cruz, hyper-accumulates in lichen favored by deer, and then further concentrates in the bodies of lions who primarily eat deer. All these factors mean that mountain lions in Mendocino County, while enjoying more legal protections than they ever have before, still face myriad challenges.
What does this mean for those of us who make a living farming and ranching? First of all, we need to know and follow the law. It is not legal to shoot a mountain lion on sight on your ranch, even if it is near your livestock, nor is it legal to shoot a lion on sight anywhere else. However, that does not mean you should allow a lion to pick off your chickens or goats! It’s unsafe for everyone involved, including the lions, to learn to predate livestock. Permits must be obtained to haze, shoot, or trap a lion, and if you use lethal force to defend yourself or your animals in the heat of an imminent threat, it must be immediately followed by a phone call to CDFW, which can grant a permit verbally and then follow up. There are potentially dire legal consequences for not following these laws, and social consequences to our neighbors and operations from the disturbance to the lion population as well.
Ecosystems are not arithmetic structures. If you have ten lions and shoot one, you do not necessarily end up with nine lions. What you have is a reeling social structure that may actually result in more lion conflicts than you had previously, as new migrating lions seek to fill the vacated space, and/or desperate orphans take the risk of coming close to humans and their pets and livestock. We are safest when our communities are all stable, human and wildlife. It is better to learn to live with the big cats we have than to keep their social network in a constant state of chaos by lethally removing lions.
I see living in a functioning ecosystem as a sign of success of my operation, and I hope other farmers can learn to see it that way too. A 2006 study by Ripple and Beschta shows that mountain lion presence increases diversity at every trophic level, from beetles to amphibians to streambed plant diversity, due to their impacts on ungulate populations. A 2016 study by lead author Sophie Gilbert estimates that the savings in dollars and human lives by returning mountain lions to the parts of the Eastern U.S. where they’ve been extirpated could be immense, preventing 21,400 human injuries, 155 fatalities, and $2.13 billion in avoided costs from deer vehicle strikes over a 30 year roll-out period. The study also points out that the return of mountain lions to South Dakota prevents collision costs with deer on such a large scale that they save the state $1.1 million annually. South Dakota has 886,667 people, while California has 39,185,605. Restoring the lion population in California would save money and lives at a scale proportional to our vastly larger population, every year. It seems appropriate that some of those savings could be applied to making coexistence work for everyone, but I’m just a farmer, I don’t make state budgets. These numbers illustrate that, while conflicts we have with mountain lions are serious and sometimes costly, we are still better off with them than without them.
Mountain lions are large and powerful animals who can be dangerous but most of the time avoid us at all costs. A Santa Cruz Puma Project study in 2017 showed that they will even leave their cached kill sites when recordings are played of human voices versus control sounds. Their avoidance of humans means that many of us have gotten away with leaving small ruminants unprotected for years before something happens. When a depredation does occur, it’s shocking, scary, and sad, and can feel violating. The fact that depredations are rare doesn’t mean that we should roll the dice with our animal’s lives, leave them unprotected, and then take lethal action when a native carnivore eventually takes advantage. No one wins in that scenario. Proactive tools are safer, less traumatic, and more effective than reactive ones.
A 2013 study from CDFW shows that only about 25% of autopsied mountain lions, killed with depredation permits, had stomach contents matching the animals they were accused of eating. This means that either the livestock was not killed by a cat at all, or that the wrong cat was trapped. Trapping as a tool is imprecise, can backfire due to the consequences of social chaos for the surviving local lions, and should be saved for the absolute worst case scenarios, not be a regular tool of agricultural businesses. Mendocino County no longer has a contract with USDA Wildlife Services for trapping.
Depredation permits can still be obtained via the appropriate channels in emergencies, but the paradigm is shifting, and as shepherds we have to shift too. A USDA-APHIS study done in CA in 2014 and 2015 shows that losses of cattle to any predator represent 1.1% of unintentional deaths for mature cattle and 5.8% of calves, with only 20% of beef ranchers using any form of non-lethal management tools. The same study reports that 19% of unintentional sheep deaths and 45.3% of lamb deaths were from predation in the same years, with only 58% of sheep ranchers using any form of non-lethal management tools. Adopting tools like livestock guardian dogs, whose efficacy ranges from 93% to 98% across several studies in different regions, seems like the obvious step. Since implementing tools including electric fence, guardian dogs, and flashing solar Foxlights, I haven’t had a depredation in several years.
Learning to live alongside wildlife is our only long-term solution, and given how large their ranges are, will always be a community project. The last time I wrote about coexistence for a local paper, I got hate mail and harassing phone calls. This is clearly a very emotional issue for many people. I understand how sad it is to lose animals, and I have been face to face with the consequences of a neighbor shooting a mother mountain lion—which was her starving cub hissing in my face. This has become such an important issue to me personally that I have recently begun to work with the Mountain Lion Foundation as their Coexistence Coordinator, where I gather and share research and tools for homesteaders and ranchers. Project Coyote has also offered to help support Mendocino folks who are struggling with conflicts. There will soon be a non-lethal exclusion service up and running in the county as well, and I’m excited to learn more about that project as it develops.
I strongly believe that there is a way forward that protects the safety and viability of our farms and ranches and families, as well as that of wildlife. We may never reach a goal of zero depredations, any more than we reach a goal of zero tractor accidents or zero wildfires. We live and work in a dangerous and complex world, which makes it all the more essential to approach our work with proactive, holistic safety in mind. We can do more than deter desperate native carnivores from causing trouble; we can foster ecological health that enables stable thriving populations to live without needing to scrounge from our tables. Any farm or ranch that strives for sustainability, regeneration, or to be climate beneficial must include the native ecosystem we live and work in. Practically and ethically, the only way forward is together.
Gowan Batist of Fortunate Farm is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist working towards regeneration on landscapes her ancestors devastated. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed out in the fog or the oak savanna propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or sprawling on the ground with dogs. Her writing can be found at https://www.patreon.com/GowanBatist.