There are currently stories in the national press about the worldwide decline of large predators.

In North America, we are successfully living with lots of large mammal predators. Between the black and grizzly bears, and the mountain lions, there are between half a million and a million predators in the United States and Canada large enough to eat a human when full-grown. Yet only about three people are killed by these predators yearly.

These big mammal predators have millions of opportunities to eat us for every time one actually does.

I had a friend who jumped off a cliff to escape a bear. The water was deep, he survived. But he risked his life because he incorrectly thought he was in great danger. Unrealistic fear can kill you.

The large mammal predators you will meet up with, particularly south of the Arctic, live in a world filled with animals that are dangerous to eat. I believe all amphibians are poisonous to eat whole, even though at least some frog legs are safe. There are poisonous snakes, porcupines, dangerous spiders, wasps, bees, skunks and, no doubt, others. A large mammal predator who randomly ate anything that moved would rarely survive long enough to reproduce.

So these large mammal predators largely eat what their mother taught them to eat. Their mothers did not teach them to eat humans, because if they did, we would have killed the mother and the young would not have survived.

If a large predator does kill a human, we must kill it or at least imprison it in a zoo or it will continue to eat people and teach its young and perhaps other large predators to do likewise.

Eating people is not normal behavior for large mammal predators. Saying that it is slanders them and endangers their survival.

As long as we do not tolerate the very rare bad behavior, we can coexist.

As it has been reported that a mountain lion walks along the north edge of Davis every few days, this story has local relevance.

Richard Bruce

Davis

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