The Beast In The Garden

"This is a book about a series of mountain lion attacks in Boulder, Colorado. The way it fits in with what I’m talking about here and invasive species is that, of course, man is an invasive species. People have moved farther and farther out from the city centre to the hills and suburbs, which was traditionally territory for mountain lions. Meanwhile, these people love wildlife, so they began to put out food for various other animals including deer. The deer began to crowd their gardens, and this brought the mountain lions back to hunt the deer. However, there was other prey available – dogs. A young lion cub will eat what its mother catches to give it. In the wild they live almost exclusively on deer, but in the suburbs dogs were available and easy to catch, and I presume so absolutely delicious that some lions grew up eating nothing but dogs. There may be a small step from dog to human, so a mother in the woods there was pursued by two mountain lions. She fought them off by climbing a tree but, of course, they climbed up after her. She kicked them but they raked her legs with their claws. They waited at the bottom of the tree for four hours until a deer appeared and they vanished. A week later, a high school boy was running in the woods and was killed by one of these lions. His body was found and they thought a serial killer had killed him, because in his chest cavity an almost perfect circle was removed, as if a surgeon had done it. They were looking, horrified, at this corpse when they heard a growl from the nearby bushes. Grrrrr. So, do you want to come here and walk in the woods with me? It is pretty exciting. Cynical and depressed about it as I may be, I still just love to be a creature alone in nature and feel this thing bigger than all of us. I am thrilled that there are these creatures here in the west of the America. I don’t want to be killed or attacked, but the only animals that have attacked me recently, both savagely and unprovoked, were tics. Be careful. What can I say?"