Cougar

by Harold P. Danz

In this frank and thorough look at the relationship between humans and the cats, Danz integrates the past history of the cougar, its behaviour, habits and interaction with other species, with current conditions and discusses the continued existential probabilities for it as a wild animal.

Genres: Natural History

325 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1999

Reviews

[Maryanne]

Cougar! 10122007 Harold P. Danz C. Ryan
I spent two months last winter in a mountain cabin far up a back road in Washington's Methow Valley, just below the Canadian border and just east of the North Cascade National Park, where there are many cougars. One broke into my nearest neighbor's house and I found fresh tracks one morning beside the road into town. So with all the cougar excitement in the Valley, I decided to learn more about them by reading this book. It's a good place to start if you want to know more about the big cats that are becoming a more common part of life throughout the West .


Cougar! is a comprehensive historical and natural history coverage of the cats by a retired National Park Service employee. Besides a description of cougar habits and hunting techniques with each of their prey species, interesting chapters describe the human-cougar relationship from Native Americans and Colonial times, through the bounty hunter years and on to the present.


There is a fascinating section in Cougar! that describes all documented cougar attacks, both fatal and non-fatal, in the U.S. and Canada from 1751 through mid-1998. Danz reports that the only fatal cougar attack in the United States between 1909 and 1974, was of a 13-year old boy traveling on snowshoes near Lake Chelan (not far from my winter retreat) in December 1924. When his body was found it was deduced that the young victim had cut off one of the cougar's front claws (!) while unsuccessfully defending himself with a pocketknife. Contemporary cougar fans may find poetic justice in descriptions of two recent non-fatal incidents where National Park campers were forced by cougars to spend the night up in a tree (!) until someone came to their assistance. There is also a description of historic and current cougar populations in each state (Washington, with 2,300, has one of the largest populations) and Canadian province, as well as the exhaustive bibliography you'd expect from a university press.
I really enjoyed Cougar!, and while the grainy black and white photos don't compare with those in Mountain Lion, it is the much more informative and interesting of the two books.
Disappointing, January 3, 2005
Beach Guy-I've read other books about cougars lately, and although none of them is great, this one impressed me the least. A key problem is the author's lack of focus...he repeatedly confuses minor details with central issues. For example, he devotes fifteen pages (15!!!!) to a totally pointless discussion of the cougar's many alternate names: puma, catamount, panther, etc. I am dumbfounded to discover that any author actually believes there is a strong interest in this utterly unimportant issue! But wait, that's only the beginning. In his discussion of cougar habitat (and our "vanishing wilderness"), he gives us an entire chapter that reprises the basic history of the discovery of the Americas and the settlement of the United States! This painful tour of irrelevancies is made worse by a typical, unexamined, stereotype-laden reprise of the eco-myth of our era: the Native American lived in peaceful harmony with Nature until Europeans arrived to despoil the Western Hemisphere. There is little room left for facts after one has allowed a half-truth here and a stereotype there to blossom into this new, sacrosanct religious doctrine. But the worst flaw of all is that the book's information is outdated. The cougar population has grown very rapidly during the last 50 years, and the result is that some highly regarded wildlife biologists now believe there are more cougars in America today than when Columbus arrived. They have not yet fully re-occupied the territory they once did, but they have clearly returned to the eastern United States in great numbers. Since this book was written before these facts were fully recognized, the author's pronouncements and recommendations are just not as relevant as they probably once seemed. Unless readers have excess time on their handsand a low regard for how they use it, I suggest they look elsewhere for cougar info.

[David Corleto-Bales]

Outstanding natural history of the cougar, or mountain lion, with emphasis on the cougar in North America; detailed are stories of the cougar among Native Americans, mystical and spiritual beliefs of the Indian tribes toward the animal, the cougar's reputation in colonial times and throughout the days of the American west, the cougar's relationships with other animals of North America, and the struggle--usually won by man--between the cougar and human "civilization." Like many other predators, the cougar was classified as "vermin" and subject to extermination by bounty hunting. The fact that it survived--and perhaps thrived--after other predators like the wolf and grizzly bear were more or less wiped out in 98% of their previous habitat is explained. Danz has great chapters on cougar lore and a detailed chart of cougar attacks on people from the earliest recorded one in 1751 to the mid-1990s.

[Cassandra Cridland]

I enjoyed the book for basic and historical information. However, I didn't agree with all of the premises the author put forth.