It yields to few creatures, save, bears and humans. An adult cougar can bring down a full-grown mule deer in seconds. It is equally at home in forest, desert, jungle, or swamp. It wanders enormous tracts of American wilderness at will. This majestic feline personifies strength, movement, grace, stealth, independence, and the wilderness spirit. The cougar works a powerful magic on the human imagination. They are shot when a rancher's livestock is lost, and when pets disappear. They are shot for recreation, for sport, and for trophies.
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It's a difficult life, full of potentially lethal challenges: even when the lion avoids humans.
Today, few lions live a full natural lifespan. "Mountain lions live a short 13 years in the wild - if they make it to old age.
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Read the book FREE online by clicking the chapters listed below. More than twice as many mountain lions were killed from 1971 to 2010 than were killed during the previous seven decades by bounty hunters. Only a few of us will have encountered an individual wild lion.Īnd this will be the greatest loss: That we knew just enough to save them, enough to change our behavior, enough to make a difference, and that we chose not to act. If we lose our big cats, we will mourn a species that we barely understood. We lose not just a member of the species, but mother lions that might train their kittens to avoid people, large and well-established males that have proved themselves able to survive entirely in the wild, and lions that feel, think, experience and behave in the world as individuals.Īnd each time we kill a lion, we lose a little bit of what distinguishes us as humans: our capacity for compassion, for making rational decisions that benefit the common good, for overcoming the urge to demonstrate power and dominance at the expense of our neighbors and our environment. Individual lions, and individual people, are diminished whenever we kill a lion unnecessarily.
They are shot when a rancher’s livestock is lost, and when pets disappear. It’s a difficult life, full of potentially lethal challenges: even when the lion avoids humans. Mountain lions live a short 13 years in the wild - if they make it to old age. In mountain lions, the sense of smell is not thought to play a large role in acquiring food and is thought to be more important in social behavior, such as mating.įor more details about mountain lion senses, read Cougar: The American Lion – Chapter 4: An Almost Perfect Predator below. It is also believed that an enlarged auditory bullae (the portion of the skull surrounding the middle ear) may enhance a cat’s sensitivity to certain sounds. They can hear frequencies in the ultrasonic range and are able to move their rounded ears together or independently to isolate sounds. They have round or oval pupils, which allows them to open as wide as possible at night, but close almost completely in bright light, which protects light sensitive cells.Īlthough there is little research on mountain lion hearing, it is known that domestic cats have very acute hearing and can detect prey using both sight and sound. Mountain lions have extraordinary vision. Their preferred prey are deer and elk and they have co-evolved with deer and elk as their primary prey.
Mountain lions also have retractable claws, which they use to climb trees and capture prey.
Mountain lions are obligate carnivores, meaning they only eat meat! As such, they have large canines and sharp, specialized carnassial teeth (molars) for shearing and tearing flesh. For more information about mountain lion life history, evolution and historical range, read Cougar: The American Lion below. Mountain lions used to be found throughout the United States, but due to bounty hunts in the early 1900's and threats such as persecution, trophy hunting, poaching, retaliation in response to livestock depredation, kitten orphaning, poisoning and habitat loss and fragmentation, mountain lions are now only found in 15 western states, and the genetically isolated Florida panther remains in the East. While their longitudinal range has remained, their latitudinal range has shrunk by more than half. Solitary cats, mountain lions are highly adaptable to situations and environments, and this adaptability has enabled them to survive across much of their original range in the America's, despite severe habitat loss and active threats. They are the most wide-ranging cat species in the world and are found as far north as Canada and as far south as Chile. Mountain lions are known by many names, including cougar, puma, catamount, painter, panther, and many more.
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