it's not a happy reality, but we don't live in the kind of judeo-christian fantasy reality projected by the garden of eden or in disney cartoons. cougars are not our friends. they want to eat us. that puts us in a mortal struggle with them, one that must end with either their demise or ours.
with cougars - and lions and tigers and crocodiles - the only interaction that we can have with them is "kill or be killed". there is no possibility of peaceful co-existence. we will consequently drive them to extinction. this is natural and unavoidable.
Terri
I don't get this "pop culture" thing with the "mortal struggle"? What? Judeo-Christianity "fantasy"? From what I have gleaned: that puts us at the top of the food chain where we have "dominion" over everything, which seems to be what you are saying. Ends with our demise or theirs? What? No possibility of peaceful co-existence? Natural and unavoidable? Uuuuuh: No. Of course nature does right itself -- always -- and it seems to me there is in fact, a possibility: humans have a frontal lobe and should be using it to coexist with nature.
deathtokoalas
no. the struggle does not put as at the top of any chain, it puts us in competition with other creatures aspiring to be at the top of the food chain. systems have predators that compete with each other for dominance, and that competition ends when one creature drives the other to extinction. this is the history of evolution - dominant species eliminate less dominant species.
we can maintain this fantasy that we ought to be holding on to reserves to protect things that eat us for a small amount of time, but it's ultimately impossible to be anything more than an illusion. that's the dominion you think of - this idea that we are their protectors. but, we are not their protectors. we are their competitors.
eventually the reality asserts itself: humans and species that eat humans cannot co-exist. we must eliminate them, and we will.
there's no use in being slave to a system of morals about it. it's evolution.
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deathtokoalas
well, i stated that it's not a happy reality. i don't enjoy the idea of eliminating species. but large cats, specifically, interpret us as prey - forcing us to kill them or become their next meal. excluding the large cats, the only other species that treats us specifically as prey would be crocodiles.
cougars are shy animals, and are not as threatening to us as tigers or lions. but you have to get a grip on the amount of people that tigers and lions consume in an average year. there are large areas of india and bangladesh where humans are actually a primary prey source. it's not because we're invading their habitat, or because we're killing their natural prey - we are their natural prey, and they have evolved to eat us. it's common in some regions of africa for lions to literally walk into a village, knock the door on the hut down, grab the person inside and drag them out. deaths due to lion and tiger predation regularly run into the thousands.
it's easy to come up with other ideas, but they're rooted in a level of naivete. the governments in the areas have tried to create reserves for tigers and lions, but it doesn't have the effect of keeping them away from humans, it just gives them a safe haven in which they can prey on us. there's a real political discussion in some areas of africa right now about how the reserves are causing increases in predation, and this is only going to continue as the protection increases - if it does increase, which i must suggest it cannot.
nor can we speak of drawing these lines in the sand, a la "i love lucy" and telling the lions to stay on the other side. they will expand. they will colonize. and they will eat us...
humans are going to populate the earth. we're not going to check our population in order to allow the cats to thrive, and as we do so we are going to have no choice but to eliminate them from areas that we are inhabiting - because they will eat us if we do not.
we should not shed tears for the crocodiles, as they will only respond by eating us.
