The big horse killing cat . . . with a
heart both craven and cruel.

—Theodore Roosevelt,
A Book-Lover’s Holiday in the Open

By the turn of the twentieth century, cougars were being hunted for sport as well as bounty. Theodore Roosevelt, one of the most well-known big game hunters in North America, was renowned for his hunting escapades and lived up to his reputation when it came to bagging his first cougar. As he once wrote to his thirteen-year-old son: “ After a couple of hundred yards, the dogs caught him, and a great fight followed. They could have killed him by themselves, but he bit or clawed four of them, and for fear he might kill one I ran in and stabbed him behind the shoulder, thrusting the knife you loaned me right into his heart. I have always wished to kill a cougar as I did this one, with dogs and the knife.” The letter, eventually published in Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children, was dated January 14, 1901.

Roosevelt, who later that year would become the twenty-sixth president of the United States, had just finished a five-week hunting trip with guide Johnny B. Goff at the Keystone Ranch in Colorado. They’d bagged fourteen cougars in all. The largest—the one Roosevelt killed with a knife—weighed 103 kilograms (227 pounds) and was 2.5 metres (8 feet) long. Roosevelt was ecstatic. He’d been keen on cougars for some time but had never seen one up close before.

By today’s standards, Roosevelt’s hunting expedition would be deemed a cruel and needless massacre. But it took place in another time with different beliefs and long before modern methods of studying wildlife were available. Roosevelt considered his write-up of the hunt, published in 1905 as Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter, “the first reasonably full and trustworthy life history of the cougar as regards its most essential details.”

Born in New York City on October 27, 1858, Roosevelt experienced poor health as a child and had such severe asthma he had to be home-schooled in his early years. He loved natural history, however, and at age eight saw a dead seal at a market, obtained the head and, with a couple of buddies, formed a kids’ club called the Roosevelt Museum of Natural History. After graduating from Harvard he was diagnosed with a heart condition and advised to get a desk job. Instead, Roosevelt opted to follow what he called “a strenuous life,” which included boxing, polo, judo and a variety of other activities such as horseback riding, hunting and skinny-
dipping in the Potomac River in the winter. Through determination and a vigorous lifestyle the sickly kid transformed himself into a robust, barrel-chested man.

 

Poor health as a child and a heart condition didn’t prevent Theodore Roosevelt from becoming a robust outdoorsman and one of the most well-known big game hunters in North America. He killed his first cougar with a knife and, as the twenty-sixth president of the United States, set aside large parcels of land for national parks and became involved in the conservation movement. Photo courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC, Bain Collection

 

As well as being deeply involved in politics and an avid outdoorsman, Roosevelt was a prolific writer who documented his hunting exploits in numerous articles and books. Reading these accounts it’s obvious that like many hunters, Roosevelt loved the physical and mental stimulation of hunting cougars and relished the excitement of the chase more than the fatal shot.

Stories about sports hunting can be traced back to ancient Egypt and Babylonia, where royalty of both sexes enjoyed the adventure of pursuing large land animals. On occasion dogs, or captive panthers and leopards, were used to flush and chase game. It’s said that European and British nobility looked forward to hunting almost as much as engaging in battle, and that they viewed tracking and killing big game excellent hands-on training for warfare. In Canada and the US hunting was initially a way to obtain food for the table and to earn a living by acquiring furs to trade. With the advent of agriculture and animal husbandry, people began eliminating predators that interfered with their ability to provide for themselves, and the introduction of the bounty system added a cash incentive to the defence of private property. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, as a portion of the population found themselves with more leisure time, money and easy access to wilderness areas, killing big game for pleasure became more common.

But even before sports hunting became popular, cougars were sometimes exploited for “sporting” purposes. In California Grizzly, Tracy Irwin Storer and Lloyd Pacheco Tevis related how bears were pitted against bulls and occasionally cougars in arenas. A witness to an 1865 fight in Castroville, California, said the cougar leapt onto the grizzly’s back and reached around to rake its eyes and nose with its claws. The bear kept rolling over to remove the cat from its back but every time it regained its feet, the cougar attacked again. Cougars and bears don’t get along at the best of times—it’s not unheard of for a bear to drive a cougar off its kill or scavenge the carcass, and the two predators kill each other’s young on occasion. No mention is made of whether the Castroville incident was a fight to the death, but the cougar was declared the winner of the bout.

As sports hunting increased in popularity, men and sometimes women hunted deer, bighorn sheep, bears, wolves, cougars and other large game, gaining prestige for bagging the biggest horns or heaviest animal. Skins were tanned and displayed and heads, antlers and sometimes entire bodies were mounted as trophies. And there was an extra thrill in hunting and killing animals that were difficult to locate and potentially dangerous to confront.

Indiscriminate hunting, along with the ongoing increase in human population and changes to the terrain due to settlements, ranches and farms, resulted in a dramatic decrease in ungulate populations. Now, in addition to viewing cougars as a threat to livestock, hunters also saw them as competitors for big game. Sports hunting clubs had formed as early as the 1830s but in the late 1800s organizations across the continent began lobbying governments to pass laws to regulate hunting and increase predator control.

In 1906, as president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt established the Grand Canyon National Game Preserve on the Kaibab Plateau in Arizona, to protect “the finest deer herd in America.” Ranging across what is now the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, the mule deer in the region sported record-breaking large antlers. “The preservation of game and of wild life generally—aside from the noxious species—on these reserves is of incalculable benefit to the people as a whole,” wrote Roosevelt in A Book-Lover’s Holiday in the Open. “As the game increases in these national refuges and nurseries it overflows into the surrounding country. Very wealthy men can have private game-preserves of their own. But the average man of small or moderate means can enjoy the vigorous pastime of the chase, and, indeed, can enjoy wild nature, only if there are good general laws, properly enforced, for the preservation of the game and wildlife, and if there are big parks or reserves provided for the use of all our people, like those of the Yellowstone, the Yosemite, and the Colorado.”

Hunting was banned in the Kaibab and a vigorous extermination program to eliminate the plateau of all predators, especially cougars and coyotes, was launched. James T. Owen, alternately called “Uncle Jimmy” or “Cougar Killer of the Kaibab,” was appointed game warden for the area. It’s said that in his twelve-year tenure he killed anywhere from three hundred to more than six hundred cougars. Roosevelt, who accompanied Owen on several hunts, wrote, “They [cougars] are the most successful of all still-hunters, killing deer much more easily than a wolf can; and those we killed were very fat. Their every movement is so lithe and stealthy, they move with such sinuous and noiseless caution, and are such past masters in the art of concealment, that they are hardly ever seen unless roused by dogs.”

And sure enough, as predators were killed, the number of mule deer increased. In 1906 the deer population of the Kaibab was estimated at four thousand. Aldo Leopold, an author and scientist sometimes called “the father of wildlife ecology,” later determined that the carrying capacity of the region at that time would have been around thirty thousand. But by 1919, the year the Grand Canyon became a national park, forest officials worried that burgeoning deer herds would eventually destroy all vegetation on the plateau. In typical fashion, governments and bureaucracies had different opinions on both the problem and appropriate ways to deal with it. Many felt the situation didn’t require immediate attention and, perhaps more importantly, deer watching had become a primary tourist draw for the park and no one wanted to jeopardize that.

By 1924 the deer population had grown to one hundred thousand and the ungulates had stripped the land of all edible foliage up to a height of 2.5 metres (8 feet). The area was opened for deer hunting but estimates suggest that over the next two years as many as sixty thousand deer starved to death. By 1931 the number of deer had dwindled to twenty thousand, and eight years later less than ten thousand were still alive.

The Kaibab fiasco and similar predator control programs were sharp reminders of what can happen when humans disrupt the complex balance of nature. It’s now known that while cougars can pose serious threats to isolated and endangered herds of elk, caribou and bighorn sheep, in most situations they don’t decimate deer populations. Instead, they keep the ungulates a little bit on edge, which means they’re constantly moving from one place to the next and don’t over-browse any one location.

Popular western writer Zane Grey summed up the situation in his book The Deer Stalker, which tells the story of the 1924 attempt to save the starving Kaibab deer by driving them to another area. Grey participated in the event and his fictionalized rendition is supposed to be fairly accurate. One of his characters, Jim Evans, is based on “Uncle Jimmy” Owen, the hunter hired to kill predators on the plateau. In one chapter Evans explains that humans have upset the balance of nature by “killin’ off the varmints, specially the cougars.” The fictional hunter continues, “These heah deer ain’t had nothin’ to check their overbreedin’ an’ inbreedin’.”

But even before the Kaibab disaster, a subtle shift in the way people thought about the land and the animals inhabiting it was taking place. Some wondered if, rather than exploiting the wilderness and its resources without thought, humankind might be better served if the natural world was preserved for future generations. And that perhaps people, animals and the environment were not separate entities, but were intrinsically linked so that what happened to one eventually affected the others.

John James Audubon shared this point of view. In 1803, at age eighteen, he emigrated from Haiti to America, where he studied and painted birds on his family’s estate near Philadelphia. Audubon spent hours in the field observing birds and, like his contemporaries, shot specimens so he could examine them in detail. His goal was to record all bird species in North America. But contrary to the usual practice of painting wildlife in formal, ridgid poses, Audubon placed them in life-like positions surrounded by elements of their natural habitat. His 1827 publication The Birds of America, frequently cited as one of the finest ornithological books in the world, presented the public with a more holistic view of nature than many had been exposed to in the past.

Award-winning illustrator and author Ernest Thompson Seton increasingly decried the mass killing of cougars. Seton believed that creatures had wants and feelings similar to humans and, as such, had rights as well. In 1909 he wrote, “Of all that has been written or is known of the American cougar . . . fully ninety-nine percent deals with how we may hunt, pursue, murder and destroy this wonderful beautiful animal. Of the one percent remaining, about one-half deals with alleged more or less doubtful attacks of this splendid creature on man . . . ‘Kill, kill, kill’ is their cry . . . fifty pages there are of senseless, brutal killing and only one of ‘Stop.’”

Another writer who sided with cougars was Charles G.D. Roberts. Born in New Brunswick in 1860, Roberts worked as a teacher, editor, English professor and, eventually, full-time writer. After his poetry, Roberts was most well-known for his animal stories that, like Seton’s, presented the narrative from the animals’ point of view. Author Lyn Hancock has pointed out that his 1895 short story “Do Seek Their Meat from God” may be the first published Canadian fiction to feature a cougar. In the tale, a male and a female cougar are having trouble finding food due to settlers’ impact on the countryside. They come across a small child and are about to attack it when they are killed by a man passing by. The man later finds two cougar cubs dead from starvation.

When Roberts wrote “They are but seeking with the strength, the cunning, the deadly swiftness given them to that end, the food convenient for them,” he presented cougars not as wanton killers but as creatures doing only what is necessary to survive. “Do Seek Their Meat from God” also brings up a dilemma still discussed today: when people move into or alter an animal’s habitat, are they justified in killing the animal when it follows its natural instincts?

 

Stealthy and silent, cougars are rarely seen even by people who work in wilderness areas. Part of the reason is their colouring, which allows them to blend in with any landscape. And their huge padded paws mean they can creep up on prey without a sound.

 

These artists and writers and others like John Muir, Henry David Thoreau and Charles Darwin encouraged people to think of wild animals and nature from a different point of view. In turn, they were supported in their endeavours by book publishers, magazine editors and art galleries. But even as they were laying the groundwork for the early conservation movement, they were also revealing just how little scientific information about North American wildlife was available. Some common misconceptions about cougars were that they never attacked humans unless defending their cubs, that they killed prey and hauled it up a tree to eat it, and that they mated for life and raised their young together.

As it became apparent that Canada and the US did not contain an endless supply of wildlife, conservation became an increasingly popular topic. In addition to providing tips on how to bag a big buck or which fly was favoured by rainbow trout, articles in periodicals such as Field & Stream began covering the dwindling populations of some species. The late 1800s and early 1900s also saw the formation of numerous wildlife organizations, such as the Sierra Club, the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Audubon Society.

Long before the days of sophisticated equipment like radio telemetry collars, motion sensor trail cameras or GPS units, a common way to research wildlife was to shoot it and skin it or stuff it so the skull, skeleton and hides or feathers could be examined at leisure. In May 1922 the National Collection of Heads and Horns opened “In Memory of the Vanishing Big Game of the World,” at the Bronx Zoo in New York. According to a New York Times article, the specimens were “either presented by the sportsmen who shot them, or purchased with funds contributed by men and women keenly interested in wild animals and public education along zoological lines.”

Roosevelt donated numerous samples he’d collected on big game expeditions. In fact, for many years the skull of the big cat he killed on his 1901 Colorado hunting trip held the world’s record for size. A year after Heads and Horns opened, Roosevelt, George Bird Grinnell, editor of Forest and Stream magazine, and other associates formed the Boone and Crockett Club, to “promote the conservation and management of wildlife, especially big game, and its habitat, to preserve and encourage hunting and to maintain the highest ethical standards of fair chase and sportsmanship in North America.”

 

One look at a cougar’s fangs and it’s easy to see why settlers feared the big cats as man-eating beasts. But as more information became available, people began to value the predator’s role in the environment. This 82- kilogram (180-pound) male was the first cougar captured and collared in the Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park in Alberta and Saskatchewan. He was around six years old when this photo was taken in 2008. A year later he died with his ribs kicked in, leading researchers from the University of Alberta to speculate that he’d been killed attempting to take down an elk. Photo by Michelle Bacon

 

Like any change in consciousness, the concept of conservation took a while to catch on. Despite being extirpated in eastern Canada and the US, many years passed before cougars were recognized as anything other than vermin. Gradually, bounty programs were phased out, cougars were classified as big game animals and hunting seasons, bag limits and regulations were introduced. But even some who hunted the big cats for recreation or profit were beginning to reconsider the ethics of their behaviour.

Zane Grey grew up in Zanesville, Ohio, which had been founded by his maternal great-grandfather. Baseball, writing and fishing were his passions. He attended the University of Pennsylvania on a baseball scholarship but, to be practical, graduated in 1896 with a degree in dentistry. After an invitation to hunt lions with Charles Jesse “Buffalo” Jones, Grey ditched his dental drill and began churning out fiction and non-fiction western adventure books. The “burly shouldered, bronzed faced and grim” Buffalo Jones served as a template for many of Grey’s fictional protagonists, but in Roping American Lions in the Grand Canyon he served up the real deal. In it Grey tells the story of his 1908 trip with Jones and how they and three other men chased lions up and down escarpments and across Powell’s Plateau. According to Grey they “stumbled on a lion home, the breeding place of hundreds of lions,” as well as lion runways littered with hundreds of deer carcasses. The terrain was rough. At times the men were forced to lower the dogs over cliffs on ropes and rappel down after them. Despite the rigours of the hunt Grey always hoped it wouldn’t end too soon, “because the race was too splendid a thing to cut short.”

Buffalo Jones, sixty-four years old at the time, was known for his ability to rope live lions. After the dogs treed a cat, he’d climb up after it with a length of rope on a long stick. While the cat snarled and hissed, he’d loop the rope over the lion’s head with the stick and yell, “Pull!” One or more of the men below would do so and soon the lion would be hanging over a branch. It was then slowly lowered far enough to tie its paws, jam a stick behind the canine teeth and wrap some wire around the muzzle. After a lion was secured, its bound paws were slung over a pole and it was packed back to camp. There it was tied to a tree along with other prizes of the hunt. On one expedition Buffalo Jones’s crew had six waiting to be transported to zoos. The lions constantly snarled and twisted against their restraints, determined to get away.

One time Grey leaned toward a bound lion until its face was only 15 centimetres (6 inches) from his. “He promptly spat on me,” Grey wrote in Roping American Lions in the Grand Canyon.

“I had to steel my nerve to keep so close. But I wanted to see a wild lion’s eyes at close range. They were exquisitely beautiful, their physical properties as wonderful as their expression. Great globes of tawny amber, streaked with delicate wavy lines of black, surrounding pupils of intense purple fire. Pictures shone and faded in the amber light—the shaggy tipped plateau, the dark pines and smoky canyons, the great dotted downward slopes, the yellow cliffs and crags. Deep in those live pupils, changing, quickening with a thousand vibrations, quivered the soul of this savage beast, the wildest of all wild Nature, unquenchable love of life and freedom, flame of defiance and hate.”

Grey wasn’t the only person to be mesmerized by a cougar’s eyes; Roosevelt described them as “two discs of pure gold,” and after a close encounter Frank Hibben recalled “the burning green eyes I will see in nightmares for the rest of my life.”

At the end of Grey’s book the men seized Sultan, a legendary lion and the largest any of them had ever seen. But before his paws could be tied, Sultan leapt over a precipice and, because he was so heavy, strangled before the men could pull him up. That’s when Jones announced he’d never rope another lion. In his 1924 introduction to the book Grey said he hoped readers would find “more than mere entertainment” and that the stories of lions would “generate the impulse which may help to preserve our great outdoors for future generations.”

As well as sharing Grey’s love of fishing and writing, author and magistrate Roderick Haig-Brown echoed his sentiments regarding wildlife and nature. In the preface of an edition of Panther, the Campbell River, BC, resident wrote,

“During the course of the research for the book I became reluctant to kill cougars and started to follow and check their movements simply by visual tracking . . . the most important new thing to come from [recent] sophisticated research is the firm establishment of the fact that cougars have a proper and valuable place in the ecology of deer and elk ranges . . . many of us believed something of the sort even as long as 40 years ago, and were arguing against strong opposition for the abolition of bounty killing.

“We were aware that cougars, like most wild animals, seldom kill wastefully and that when they did there was always some explanation,” he continued. “A few aberrant individuals may become too dangerous to domestic livestock or even to humans and these should be promptly hunted down and removed to protect the reputation of the species as a whole.”

Haig-Brown’s increasing awareness of nature as a valuable and fragile entity led him to write about and give talks on the topic throughout Canada and the US. “What is the nature of man in relation to his environment?” he wrote. “Can he become sensitive, generous and considerate to his world and the other creatures that share it, or is his nature rooted in blood, sex and darkness?”

Haig-Brown wrote Panther in 1934. Eight years later, Walt Disney Productions released Bambi. Although the animated film failed to make money in its initial box office release and raised the ire of big game hunters, it is recognized as a classic depiction of heartless humans threatening wildlife. And there’s no doubt the film influenced many; even former Beatle Paul McCartney once said the death of Bambi’s mother was the catalyst for his interest in animal rights. By the 1960s the building momentum of the environmental movement had spilled over into mainstream society. Saving wildlife and natural areas was the cool thing to do.

As the cougar acquired varying levels of protection, the secretive cat also gained increasing cachet as a sign of status and prestige. Advertising gurus have long taken advantage of the cat’s allure and many a tawny feline has been paired with a sleek model to catch the consumer’s eye. Most folks are familiar with the Mercury Cougar automobile and PUMA brand sportswear. Other items ranging from handguns to bourbon and beer also bear the name cougar. Even Apple got into the act with a Mountain Lion operating system.

Research for this book included setting up a Google Alert for “cougars” to keep informed about studies, sightings and encounters. To my surprise, ninety percent or more of the links Google sent my way were related to university and college sports teams. The second most frequent “cougar” story was about older women dating or marrying younger men. Despite being controversial, this modern form of cougar culture has become big business, featuring puma parties and cougar clubs and contests.

But as much as cougars have become an icon of all that is sexy, strong and fierce, it’s important to not forget that the actual animal is unpredictable and potentially dangerous, whether it’s encountered in the wilderness, viewed in a roadside zoo or introduced as someone’s pet.

 

Cougars are popular mascots for university sports teams. In the past it wasn’t unusual for the big cats to be kept in cages on campus and toured around sports fields during breaks in the game. Today, the University of Houston is probably the only school to have a live cougar as a mascot. The cub shown here was one of three orphaned kittens. His siblings were quickly rescued but Shasta VI, as he’s now called, remained hidden until a biologist gave a cougar-like chirp. Shasta VI lives at the Houston Zoo and appears at UH events via a webcam. Photo courtesy the University of Houston Alumni Association and the Houston Zoo, Inc.