You may have noticed over the last year or
so, that I take exception to a rather large number of the resident population
of animals in the area where I live. I’ve touched upon my disdain for the local
road lemmings (deer), the mice, the spiders, and the bear (although I can’t
really hold it responsible for wanting my delicious food waste), and I just
want to put it out there that I don’t hate animals.
If I lived by the ocean, nothing would give
me more joy than to watch whales and dolphins jump in the waves. I could watch
river otters play for hours. They make me think of little cats…..except they
like the water, aren’t nearly as pretentious, and are generally bigger than
cats, ….but that time my cat fell in the bathtub, he did roll around a lot,
which was kind of otter-like.
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| Not cougars, but they still have sharp bits |
I like house cats. I have two, and despite
waking me up at all hours to receive love, walking over my pillow with their
cat litter paws, and meowing in front of my kids doors in the morning because
they’ve figured out that I will leap out of bed to feed them so the kids don’t
wake up, they’re lovely. I even like the resident marmots, and their less
portly relatives the ground squirrels, despite the ankle-breaking holes they
dig all over the yard. Being a ground squirrel is what I imagine being on
amphetamines must be like…hyper alert, running everywhere, and yelling
(chirping, but I envision it as yelling) at anything that comes near you.
But, and I’m sure many will agree with me
here, I don’t like cougars. It’s not even actual cougars that I dislike, but
more their desire to eat people (read: me) that they every so often display. I
realize that this isn’t terribly common, and there are a lot of other nasty
things out there that can end me, but I’ve had cats that bite me a lot and it
hurts like fucking hell, so I don’t think getting eaten by a much larger cat
would be any improvement.
Cougars eat meat, and I’m meat. This is
pretty straightforward.
Bears, being the other large animal of
concern out here, will eat meat as well, but I picture them as more open to
food that doesn’t fight or run much, like berry bushes and logs filled with
bugs. This being said, don’t go out of your way to piss them off by giving them
a hug (it’s a bear-hug in name only),
or try for a selfie with a grizzly (It happens. Morons.), but in general, I’m
just not as worried about them. This is probably due to the fact that bears
don’t really try to hide. They bumble along making an ungodly amount of noise
and eat whatever is easiest to get. Mostly my garbage. Cougars, however, stalk
you, because they are motherfucking lions.
Basically it’s like we’re in Africa being
stalked by regular lions, but these ones have an extra vector: they can hide in
trees and jump down on your unsuspecting head. That’s freaky shit when you’re
out in the woods trying to enjoy nature.
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| Not a guard dog, but at least he's pretty |
In response to this threat (real or
imagined) I got a dog. I thought that he would offer some protection, or at
least warning when it comes to these apex predators in the area, however I am
not convinced he actually does. While he sticks to me like glue inside the house, the jackass takes off the moment the door is opened and returns hours later with a deer bone from a stash he found months ago. And the last time he encountered a bear on a walk, he completely failed to notice it, and he generally won’t go outside right now because it’s cold. Not a
terribly useful protector.
This brings me to a hiking trip I was a
part of on Vancouver Island a few years ago. A couple of hours into the hike
our group came across a sign that warned hikers to stay in groups of 3 or more,
as cougars were in the area and would stalk you if you were alone. Our group
was had about 10 hikers, no problem. Unfortunately the 10 of us were split into
three separate groups: The fast people, the slow people, and the middle person:
me. I was my own group. Of one. Which, for those keeping score, is less than 3.
This immediately made the cougar warning the scariest sign I’ve ever seen.
Happily I didn’t die, though I don’t know
if it’s because there were no cougars around that day, or because I was talking
in three different voices so any cougar in the area would think “Hey, there’s a
group of 3 happening down there. Maybe next time”. Yeah, that’s right, I’m that
awesome.
The strangest part of this paranoia I have
about cougars is that unlike the deer whom I would happily see eradicated from
the town limits (they can go live in the forest, not in the DQ parking lot), I
don’t actually want cougars to be killed; I just don’t want them near me or my
family. The sad part, and back to the idiotic deer again, is that the cougars
come into the town because of the deer, and then have to be put down because
they pose a threat. I really wish this didn’t happen, because despite the
Jamie-eating capabilities of these animals, they are beautiful. In pictures.
That were not taken by me.
So to summarize, deer suck, cougars are
pretty, and I would like to avoid being eaten.
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