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Old May 29, 2006, 03:39 AM   #9
Senior Member
Join Date: November 28, 2004
Location: Silicon Valley, Ca
Posts: 7,089
Oh that poor mountain lion! How can that man justify using a pellet gun!? After all, the animal is just hungry and searching for food. But that man will put hard pellet in the mountain lion, it'll start to heal over, get infected and become a debilitating abcess dooming the noble mountian lion to death by starvaton. It is better than the man move his family back to the city and have his mountainside home destroyed.

Lest you think the above is entirely in jest...

In May of 2004, police in the city of Palo Alto, CA (a very upscale city and home to companies like HP, Kodak and Xerox at the northern edge of "Silicon Valley") shot and killed a mountain lion in a residential neighborhood. This occurred about 8 hours after the lion was first spotted.

Officer Corey Preheim pulled up to a house on Walter Hays Drive, aimed her AR-15 assault rifle into a tree and fired. The lion fell about 30 feet to the ground, scrambled up and ran two lots before collapsing. Officers confirmed that it was dead.
Not only did a group of Enviro-nuts decide to hold a special "prayer & seance gathering" for the dead lion (no, I am not making this up!), but they criticized the PD for shooting the poor hapless creature. For two weeks people wrote to newspapers to show their :barf: stupidity, such as these samples;

Why couldn't the city of Palo Alto (Page 1A, May 18) have spared the life of a non-threatening mountain lion? This animal posed no immediate danger to anyone. Clearly this animal was scared wandering into unfamiliar territory.
(No immediate danger until no one is looking, then someone's cat, dog or small child will become a litter-box deposit. How long should we wait? I wonder what the author's reaction would be if they found "Fluffy" half eaten on their doorstep?)

I do not understand why the Palo Alto police department couldn't have tranquilized this animal and relocated it. We live in mountain lion territory, they do not live in ours. It was wrong to kill this animal.
(Let's see, Mt.Lion takes a 10 yard hit from a 5.56mm JSP, bounds up and runs two houses away. Drugs take 20 minutes to work - how many blocks could that cat run in 20 minutes? Besides, the cat was discovered by the officer looking into a tree and seeing the cat hunch down as if to jump or attack. Maybe these idiots think the cat would have heeded a warning shot?)

Yes, to have darted the mountain lion with a tranquilizer and then released it to a sanctuary would have been sentimental -- indeed, it would have been the action of a virtuous society. Obviously we have not yet evolved to that higher ethical plane of existence. A cat treed by a dog and surrounded by at least 12 armed police officers posed no possible threat. Let us be honest about that. A god of the wild had condescended to visit us -- but we were not worthy of it.
Let's be honest about this - the author obviously has been utilizing too many recreational pharmaceuticals. Apparently citizens forget that the cat also poses a threat to the Police officers who are there doing a job that the citizens don't want to do themselves. I wonder what this half-wit would do if he found this "god of the wild" gnawing on his Schnauser?
BillCA in CA (Unfortunately)
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