Mountain Lion

Native Americans, carrying carved cat images as fetishes, revered the mountain lion as the greatest of all hunters. Native rituals used lion skins and paws to ensure hunting success. Europeans were less respectful, treating big cats as dangerous vermin to be destroyed. From the seventeenth century through much of the twentieth century, governments offered bounties for lion skins. Humans were the only species consistently preying upon adult mountain lions. Hunters set iron traps, dug pits, and used dogs to chase and tree the cats. As expanding human settlement made wild prey scarce, mountain lions found cattle, sheep, and horses irresistible. The cats tended to avoid humans, but rare attacks and killings frightened people and led to calls for the cats' extermination. John James Audubon noted that by the 1840's, man had nearly eliminated mountain lions east of the Mississippi. By 1900, few mountain lions existed in North America east of the Rocky Mountain states. Attitudes toward mountain lions began changing in the last decades of the twentieth century. Laws in western states banned or strictly limited hunting. However, as human intrusion into the mountain lion's habitat increased, cats occasionally attacked solitary hikers, joggers, and skiers, stimulating calls for removal of the predators.With great effort and expense, conservationists maintain a relict population of some seventy Florida panthers (Felis concolor coryi) in southwest Florida- a subspecies originally ranging from Louisiana to Florida. In Central and South America, where significant populations of mountain lions remain, destruction of habitat by expanding settlement has greatly reduced surviving numbers. Outside Florida, mountain lions are not technically an endangered species, but their long-term future remains precarious.