Cougar killing horses

[Ken45101]

The problem with the cats controlling the deer population is that DNR would change the hunting regs to allow the deer to recover DNR wants to keep the deer herd excessively high because it is a revenue stream for them.

And think about this: the deer hunting is the most restricted in populated areas. Best dining for cats is if they move to the city! :laughing:

The problem with firing warning shots at a cat to teach it fear of people is that very, very few people carry when casually out in the woods.

As for or not coyotes are round but not seen, we hear them a lot more than we see them and it's hard to mistake that sound!

 

[LMTC]

Good point, the reason you have a point is that we killed too many cats and now the unchecked deer are at about 700% of what they were 200 years ago. They along with exploding hog and rabbit populations over the last 50 years are why we now are having a predator population explosion. We'll have too many predators dangerous to humans until the natural balance is once again struck. Or until Dec 21.

I certainly don't disagree with you. I know Ohio's deer population is several hundred thousand more than it was app. 30 years ago. (just looked up stats...2011 estimate was 725,000 with a desired kill of 300,000, and only 239,000 killed in 2010...so actually we would need more like 3,000-6,000 cougars....no way that happens without major numbers of bad encounters with lions & people) That said, this is the situation we have, and I just can't support ignoring the presence of cougars here in order to try to control the deer population. Our groundhog and rabbit populations have not expanded, but have dwindled quite noticeably in the past two decades as the coyotes became more established.

I used to hunt both (rabbits and groundhogs) regularly, and stopped in the mid 90s as it became apparent both populations were shrinking rapidly. Now the problem is that the coyotes will come right up to the house at night, posing a huge danger to our pets. We are in a moderately rural area, and I hear them all the time and have seen their tracks within 20' of the house and right up to the barn. We had a verified sighting of a black bear less than a mile from us a couple years ago...ODNR confirmed and told people not to worry (right, of course the bear understands to leave people, livestock, and pets alone). The position of everyone I know around here for predators coyote size and up (no one seems threatened by foxes or hawks) is SOS.

 

[toppop52]

I agree, here the rabbits are way down, however the groundhogs are way up, but with the onset of coyotes that will soon change I'm sure. I saw a dead coyote yesterday in the middle of RT 90 near Ocean City, MD. I also agree that cougar populations above where they should be is bad all around. Originally before 1700 or so this area had about 20 breeding pairs of cats in an area that goes from Cape Charles, VA to Wilmington, DE. To control the deer it would take about 120 pairs! Then of course when the deer were down the cougars would die off but how long does the cycle take? People have to stop trying to save everything with fur and let cooler heads prevail and drastically cut the herd size so that everything gets back into balance, even the coyote population would lower.

 

[Larry Caldwell]

I'm not sure I understand the argument that cougars would control the deer population. How many deer will an adult cougar take down in a year? Maybe 30? 50? Even at 100, it would take 800 or so cougars to make a dent in the whitetail population in Ohio, and I darn sure don't want 800+ cougars in Ohio. At 50, we would need nearly 2000 mountain lions. When the deer get scarce come late winter they will move to the next most available food source. I realize they would certainly kill some deer, but not enough to provide the numbers needed for culling each year unless the mountain lion population was huge. I'm willing to listen to a well reasoned and detailed explanation, but I just don't see how cougars will exercise any serious control over the deer population.

Oregon has around 5000 cougars with few problems, but our black tail are nowhere near as numerous as eastern white tail. Cougar are by nature shy and avoid humans. If the cat has anything to say about it, there will not be any human-cougar interaction. That's why people don't think there are any cougar in Ohio. I periodically have cougar on my place, and the only way I know is that the dogs find cougar kills and haul the bones back to the house. :licking:

 

[LMTC]

Oregon has around 5000 cougars with few problems, but our black tail are nowhere near as numerous as eastern white tail. Cougar are by nature shy and avoid humans. If the cat has anything to say about it, there will not be any human-cougar interaction. That's why people don't think there are any cougar in Ohio. I periodically have cougar on my place, and the only way I know is that the dogs find cougar kills and haul the bones back to the house. :licking:

There's a bit of difference, with Oregon's population of 3.8 million in 98,000 square miles, vs Ohio's 11.5 million in 45,000 square miles. That's a population density of 38 people per square mile for Oregon vs 255 for Ohio, or close to seven times the population density, with what I have to believe is a far greater % of open ground between metro areas and fields (Ohio is the 5th or 6th leading state in corn production depending on which years you use for stats, so lots more open fields than folks who've never been here generally realize). A cougar population of 5,000 in Ohio would be calamitous, IMO.

As far as no interaction if the cat has a say in it....every time a hiker or biker has been attacked on a trail the cat had a say in it...so I don't think I can agree with that. I understand the argument about shrinking habitat, but the cat has a say in it when it attacks. If they avoided humans completely they wouldn't attack.

 

[Larry Caldwell]

What strikes me about this post is that horses are not a normal food source for mountain lions, assuming they are healthy animals and not newborns. A normal reclusive cougar wouldn't bother me a bit. There all over and nobody knows it most of the time. But horse as a food source just seems strange and would concern me.

I thought the same thing. Cougars are not big enough to take down an animal the size of a horse. Maybe if the horse was ready to die anyway. It's more likely the horse died and the carcass was scavenged by wildlife.

The definitive way to identify a cougar kill is that the cougar buries its kill in leaf litter and debris. It will stand on top of its kill and reach out to scrape leaves and twigs over the carcass. The length of the scrape marks gives you a pretty good read on the size of the cat.

 

[brewdog]

I saw some large cat tracks in the Allegheny National Forest between Kane and Warren this year in deer season. They were probably Bobcat tracks, but I wish now I had taken a photo of them. It's interesting that we probably have 5000 coyotes in every County now and we rarely if ever see them. The hunters in our area kill a huge number of coyotes hunting with dogs. It would be interesting to know if those hunters run across any large cats in the process.

Great posts and very interesting reading on how things are in other states.

 

[R_Walter]

I thought the same thing. Cougars are not big enough to take down an animal the size of a horse. Maybe if the horse was ready to die anyway. It's more likely the horse died and the carcass was scavenged by wildlife.

The definitive way to identify a cougar kill is that the cougar buries its kill in leaf litter and debris. It will stand on top of its kill and reach out to scrape leaves and twigs over the carcass. The length of the scrape marks gives you a pretty good read on the size of the cat.

I was thinking the exact same thing and hoped somebody would point it out (that it was unlikely that lions go around regularly killin horses) amongst all the 'hysteria' here from some posters. I hadn't read through all the posts, but it just struck me as pretty odd. I've lived in northern NM ranch country all my life and have never heard of horses being killed by lions. ( we refer to them as lions and not cougars. I suppose other parts of the country are different.) With the exception being an old, sick or possibly, lame horse. And even those exceptions I can count on one hand.

Let me just say, again, in my neck of the woods, lions don't go around killing horses.

 

[JRobyn]

I cannot say that it was a lion, but my neighbor across the hollow had something attack his old horse (I think it is somewhat lame/feeble). It did not kill it, but bit out a chunk from the right flank and left claw scratches across its back in an array about 10"-12" wide. I saw the damage, but not what did it. Seemed a lot like what a lion might do. I'm just sayin...

- Jay

 

[toppop52]

I cannot say that it was a lion, but my neighbor across the hollow had something attack his old horse (I think it is somewhat lame/feeble). It did not kill it, but bit out a chunk from the right flank and left claw scratches across its back in an array about 10"-12" wide. I saw the damage, but not what did it. Seemed a lot like what a lion might do. I'm just sayin...

- Jay

That could be a bear, too.
We haven't had bears on the Eastern Shore in about a hundred years, but sightings are on the increase and pretty much all parts of the northern 2/3 of the peninsula from the VA line north into MD and DE. Big cat sightings have been ongoing since I moved here 39 years ago. They claim they aren't here, for that matter same goes for bobcats and they never left, but are very scarce. In NE NC where I grew up both bear and bobcat were plentiful but you rarely saw either.