The Curious Rise (and Fall) in Cougar Attacks

Peter Frick-Wright: From Outside Magazine, this is the Outside Podcast. 

David Stoner: Hello?

Peter: Hi, uh, this is David?

David: Yes, it sure is. 

Peter: Hi, this is Peter Frick-Wright from Outside. 

David: You got my message, huh?

Peter: Yeah, it was pretty clear.

David: Well, I, I get a lot of, uh. I hear a lot of interesting tales told once you get, you know, away from the biology, and that's a new one to me.

Peter: A few years ago, in 2017, I broke my leg in a very preventable canyoneering accident. So preventable, you could also describe it as a cliff jumping accident.

David: You were jumping off a cliff and the water was too shallow and you broke your leg? 

Peter: Uh, basically, yeah. It turned out that there was just one rock…

I was the host of this podcast at the time, and what I've come to learn in the years since, is that if you remember me at all, it's probably that story that you remember. 

Peter (field): Oh! Ohhhh. 

And if you don't remember me. That's totally fine. My name is Peter Frick-Wright, I launched this show in 2016 and hosted it until early 2020. I left to travel and decompress, but that was right when the world went into lockdown. So instead I went back into the basement cave I make podcasts in, and I’ve been there ever since. 

Anyway, it's nice to meet you. It's good to be back.

We called the episode "The Time Our Host Shattered His Leg in a Canyon." And I spent most of it stuck just above a 40-foot waterfall, just below a 60-foot waterfall, with  700 foot cliff walls on either side of me—pretty much the most difficult place you could design for a rescue. It took 21 hours to get out, eventually by helicopter.

But we've already told that story. 

Today, I want to bring your attention to a little detail from that day that we just sort of joked about at the time. 

There was a point I was just like, “If I can’t make it out of this canyon, I wonder if I can just live here?” You know, apparently there’s a cougar, I’d make it my friend.

Robbie: It would bring you food?

Peter: It would bring me food. I’ve got water to drink.

After my leg went kablooey, I had crawled out of the river, and up onto a shelf of rock that happened to contain the bleached white bones of a deer carcass almost certainly brought to this extremely unreachable location by a cougar, who wanted to eat in peace. And now here I was a wounded, literally bleeding animal, who had just crawled onto its favorite snacking spot.

I've been thinking about that a lot over the past few years. Because about 6 months later, in the same area where I'd gotten hurt, a woman was killed by a cougar: Diana Bober.

Newscast: Bober’s car was found over the weekend. Search and rescue teams fanned out from there and found her body Monday afternoon. 

Peter: In fact, it was the first time in modern history that a human had been killed by a mountain lion in Oregon, but the third attack in a few months in the Pacific Northwest. 

Newscast 2: A weekend bike ride turned deadly when a cougar suddenly attacked. It happened in North Bend, Washington in the foothills, about 30 miles east of Seattle. 

Peter: Cougars were having a moment. And at least among the runners, hikers, and hunters that I hang out with, that moment changed the way people talk about cougars. It went from “you’re lucky if you ever get to see one,” to “they’re everywhere. Watch out.” 

Inside Edition: Two hikers are about to have a shocking encounter as they come around a bend.

Hiker: Oh [bleep].

Inside Edition: It’s a mountain lion. Still as a statue, glaring down at them. He blends right in with the background. 

Peter: The new narrative basically went like this: because humans had systematically eliminated most of their competition on the landscape—like wolves and bears—cougars were having a population explosion. There were more of them than ever before, even before European colonization, and they had filled in pretty much every greenspace we've allowed to remain. So they're living in our parks, on our trails, and in our backyards. If you’ve ever had the sense out in the woods that something’s watching you, that was a cougar.

And, at least for me, there’s been plenty of anecdotal evidence to back this up. My wife, Ellie, once worked on a trail crew in Arizona that did ten-day stints in the backcountry. At one point, their Forest Service contact told them that a radio-collared cougar had been following them for months. Some members of the crew started going to the bathroom in groups.

My friend Steve, probably the most accomplished trail runner I know, has seen six cougars on trail runs over the years. That’s an insane number. It’s like, they really are everywhere.

Then, about six months ago, I heard a rumor, from a credible source, that made the idea of an increasing cougar population seem like a very serious problem. The story was that because of this newfound cougar density and overlapping territory, cougars had started hunting in packs.

Like a pride of lions. Or velociraptors.

Now, I told this story for a long time, and people found it so insanely scary, I eventually decided to write something about it. Which meant emailing a cougar biologist for more information.

So I reached out to professor David Stoner, at Utah State University, and his response was immediate, and pretty direct. 

“Peter, that is complete nonsense. If you want a more nuanced quote, I am here until 5:00.”

David: I don't know where these rumors start, but it's just not true. Hunting in packs is just nonsense. It has nothing to their natural history. There's no tendency like that.

These are not, these animals don't behave like African lions. They don't work cooperatively.

Peter: Stoner was pretty unequivocal about this whole new narrative. They're not hunting in packs. Two deaths in a few months? That was an anomaly. 

David: Human being attacked by a mountain lion is extremely rare. I think. I think it comes out to about 1 attack per year in the U.S. and Canada.

Peter: It’s actually even less than that, if you count all the historical data. From 1890 to 1990, there were 53 cougar attacks in the US and Canada. About 1 every 2 years. Just 9 of those attacks were fatal, although in 1 of them a cougar killed 2 people so, weirdly, there are actually 10 fatalities from those nine attacks. 

David: And if you look at the spatial distribution of those incidents, they're clustered. They're not randomly distributed throughout the range.

The other weird thing is that twenty of those 53 attacks—38% of them—were on Vancouver Island, in Canada. And no one knows why.

David: Maybe there's something in the water up there. I, I don't know.

Peter: Look at more recent data, and the numbers do go up, but so does the overall population. Of both people and cougars. If you look at just the U.S. and not Canada, from 1990 to 2018 there were more cougar deaths than the previous hundred years combined, but the total number is still just 11.

Stoner says cougar attacks are so rare, even disappearances that look like cougar kills, probably aren't cougar kills. Unless you’re on Vancouver Island.

David: Um, we had an incident here in Utah, oh, 3 or 4 years ago. A young woman went jogging. It was late winter, dry year. She went up the canyon, was never heard from again. Search and rescue came out to try and find her to no avail. 

Peter: When someone disappears in the backcountry, without a trace, often people start to think mountain lion, which sometimes make a kill and then hide it so they can come back to it later. And so a reporter asked Stoner to comment. How likely was it that a cougar had killed this trail runner?

David: We had this interview the next day her body was found by a hiker, and you know what happened? 

Peter: What? 

David: She, it looked like she had, um, broken her ankle.

Peter: Oh, wow. 

David: And couldn't walk. And that evening, a snowstorm came in.

Peter: Oh, jeez. 

David: So she had taken advantage of this lull in the... Again, it had been a really mild winter. She was able to get pretty far up this canyon. She was injured and then died of exposure.

Peter: Stoner says cougars get blamed for more backcountry deaths than they actually cause. The numbers are pretty conclusive.

David: It just doesn't happen that often. 

Peter: Yeah.

David: It's extremely rare. I mean, that's, that's what, um, I have a hard time conveying to people is that your chances are far better of going to Vegas and coming out ahead.

Peter: So rumor quashed. So quashed, I don’t even feel comfortable using the idea that cougars are hunting in packs as a source of narrative tension that we play around with through the whole episode.

Instead, I started to wonder: what is going on? 

Newscast 3: Tonight a man is recovering after being clawed in the head by a mountain lion while sitting in an in-ground hot tub. 

Peter: If all the data is so conclusive, and experts are saying not to worry about cougars, why is everyone else pretty worried about cougars?

Cougar encounter: No! Get the [bleep] away! Get the [bleep] away! Holy [bleep]. Holy [bleep]. Go away! Go away! I’m big and scary. Oh [bleep]. Oh [bleep]. [Bleep]. [Bleep].

Peter: Why are we all getting it so [bleep]ing wrong?

Cougar encounter tape: Go away! Go away! I’m big and scary. Holy [bleep]. Oh [bleep]. Oh [bleep]. [Bleep]. [Bleep].

Peter: More after this.

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Peter: Okay. Okay. Well, let's talk a little bit, uh, just bigger picture. Um, because like, you know, after, after I kind of got interested in this rumor, I started looking around. And, you know, even just like a Google search that I did this morning, like in the same search, it'll be like, You know, the suggested results are like, why are, why is the cougar population increasing in the West?

And then it's like, why is cougar, cougar population decreasing? 

Um, and it's just, it just feels like there's. Every kind of fact that you grab onto about cougars, there's sort of like evidence that the opposite is also true.

Derek Broman: Yeah, I mean, a hundred years of, um, wildlife management has generated a lot of change. 

Peter: This is Derek Broman, the Game Program Manager for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. And he also says that no, cougars are not hunting in packs, but what has happened is that the landscape has basically been filled with as many cougars as will fit.

Derek: We have been seeing an increase in the cougar population statewide, uh, for many, many, many decades. Um, now in certain parts of the state, it appears that we are likely at or reaching, carrying capacity or essentially the number of animals that the landscape and the food supports.

Peter: Okay, so here we have what seems like one foundational pillar of that original rumor. Cougar populations have been increasing, overall. But that's because, well, we killed ‘em all about a hundred years ago. They're still coming back from the massive hunting and poisoning campaign that Europeans went on as they were setting up their farms and homesteads out west.

So you're saying that there was a focused effort to reduce the number of cougars in the area, like a generation ago or two generations ago, and that this growth that we're seeing over multiple decades is a kind of like a bounce back from that?

Derek: Yeah, correct. And you know, we're not at, we'll never be at, you know, pre-European settlement populations and um, other factors, because just so many things have changed. Sometimes there's fewer prey, sometimes there's more prey. Um, habitat has changed.

The areas where cougars are “new” and I'm doing air quotes, which is probably bad to do on a call like this, but, um, we're having cougars show up into places where one, they haven't been for many decades, and two, it's where the majority of the Oregon population resides.

Cougars are more plentiful, but their numbers have been growing for a long time. They’re so solitary and reclusive that most of us didn’t notice. 

The reason it now feels like there are more cougars around, is that we’re also running into them more. They're filling in territory that has people in it, and these days people have a lot more awareness of what's wandering through their backyard each night.

Derek: Everybody's got a Ring doorbell or some sort of video device now at their home. And you know, they'll get now a photo of a raccoon or coyote or whatever that before they had no idea was there. But it might have been coming by their home, like, every night for years.

Peter: Which brings us to the second reason people might have thought cougars were all the sudden hunting in packs. People started seeing packs of cougars on camera.

Derek: I, too can like, my mind's eye says, man, if you saw a trail camera photo of two or three adult females that are all related and all of their kittens. Yeah. That would look like your mind would just go to, wait, I just saw like 10 cougars all eating on the same prey. Like you just assume they all participated in the killing of it. Um, so that's, that's totally plausible.

Peter: Mothers do share kills with their kittens, and juvenile cats look almost exactly like adult cougars. But it isn’t just mothers sharing with their offspring. 

In a study published in 2017, biologists shared footage from camera traps in Yellowstone National Park that documented unrelated cougars sharing a kill, and then hanging out together. That happened 118 times during the 3-year study. It was our first glimpse into cougar socialization.

So it turns out cougars share meals with each other, like a family. But only one of them does the hunting.

Having told this story to friends and family the last couple of months, I know there are a certain percentage of you, no matter how hard I stress this, that are still going to come away thinking maybe, just maybe, those scientists got it wrong, and cougars are now hunting cooperatively. And they are killing people all over North America. Because that's how the human brain works. 

Cougars are scary. And also, it turns out that studying cougars, and knowing something about them for certain, that’s really hard.

Over the last couple of decades, the science on cougars has been rewritten over and over again. As we figure out new ways to study these animals, we’re filling in a lot of blank spots about their lives.

Derek: And when it comes to like cougars and other solitary animals that are really difficult to find and monitor, um, we are making a lot of new discoveries and constantly kind of, you know, breaking the records. Partially  it's just because our ability to sample and monitor these animals is improving so much.

Peter: Scientists have come to a more granular understanding of cougars diet, their behavior, and their relationships to predators. 

Earlier this year, in Washington State researchers noticed that cougars were killing wolves at unprecedented rates. Since 2013, 30% of natural mortalities—meaning wolves that were not killed by humans—they’d been killed by mountain lions.

But the weird thing is, this only seems to be happening in Washington. They think the steep terrain gives cougars an advantage in encounters with wolves.

But the biggest improvement in the science, the biggest blind spot we've basically filled in, has been in figuring out how many cougars are out there.

Population estimates used to be based on mathematical models in which a lot of the factors were approximate. Now, scientists use biodarts to take DNA samples. They can map a whole feline family tree. 

Derek: We've also done scat dog work where we send out dogs trained to look for cougar poop, cougar droppings, in the same way we can do genetic analysis and get at density. And those are things that are very new. Before we just had to like extrapolate or use some other tools that really like might have been designed for other species and we try to apply them to cougars. And we're finding out those really didn't work. So now as the science is advancing, our abilities to monitor animals at a much finer resolution, um, we're starting to discover some of these things.

So who knows if we talk another 5 to 10 years, I'm going to have to correct myself on everything we've learned about cougars.

Peter: But no matter how good the data gets, no matter what kind of new information we start gathering, we're not going to suddenly find out that cougars are hunting together. Everyone is pretty certain about that.

Derek: Like they're all really, really good at obtaining prey, um, by themselves. So traveling as a larger group, it'd be like sending six people to go get a cheeseburger. Like why? That's just a one person job. That's a one person meal.

Peter: The reason they don't, and pretty much never will work cooperatively, is because of the way they hunt. 

Cougars are ambush predators. Masters of stealth and surprise. Their teeth are designed to grab you by the back of the neck and sever your spinal cord. Or puncture your brain. You're dead before you have a chance to fight back. 

There's really no advantage in having multiple animals working together in that situation. If anything, more cougars are a liability because it's harder to sneak up on something.

African lions, and velociraptors, for that matter, go after bigger animals, so they do need more of them to make the kill.

Derek: Proportionally, um, the size of the prey, the susceptibility of the prey. That changes enormously. Um, you know, just thinking in my mind of like running through the prey of like an African lion, like you don't have a lot of deer elk size.

They're, they're, they're having a, when they're pride are taking down, um, their prey, they’re large animals that requires an all hands on deck. Um, you could have 150-pound cougar taking a hundred pound deer. That's easy. That happens all the time. It'd be different if it was a cougar trying to take down like a bison or something like that. Maybe that's the equivalent. Um, but even elk, like cougars, are very good at taking elk. They take typically more deer, but, um, they just don't need it. They've, they've evolved to find just the right body size and set of skills and teeth and claws to work with the local food.

Peter: The interesting thing about all this, is that this horror story of a rumor is actually a symptom of the success story cougars are living.

Cougars were hunted and poisoned to the brink of extinction, but we adjusted, we changed some policies, changed how we thought about their presence, stopped killing them indiscriminately. It turned them into the hero of a comeback story, instead of the villain.

The fact that people are scared of cougars again, so scared they’re telling each other that cougars are hunting in packs when they’re not, that means cougars are once again plentiful enough to actually be a little bit scary.

Even if the numbers on cougar attacks don't justify hardly any fear, this rumor is a testament to their success as a species. Every day that they're out there living and killing, every time a new cat finds a little corner of the woods or the desert that they can tuck themselves into and wait for the right prey to wander by, they're making the wilderness a little more wild.

And that’s a cool story.

Derek: I mean, my responsibility first and foremost is. To serve the public, um, but to be a steward of, of our wildlife and to make sure that our wildlife populations are healthy and robust. And across the board, if you look at cougars, they're checking every single box. So, um, that's a good place to be in. 

Peter: Cougars are doing great.

Derek: Doing fine. Cougars are doing great 

Peter: This episode was written and produced by me, Peter Frick-Wright, with music by Robbie Carver.

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