Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

by Jon Mooallem

No single piece of research demonstrates this cycle of fear and reverence more clearly than a study, led by the geographer Jennifer Wolch, that examined how cougars were written about in the Los Angeles Times between 1985 and 1995. In the early 1970s, the cougar population in California had been ground down to as low as twenty-four hundred animals. But by 1990, a ban on hunting had allowed the species to come back; the cougar had become an icon of conservation in Southern California. It was described in the newspaper as “majestic” and “innocent,” an embodiment of nature’s grace, and a “symbol of our dwindling wilderness heritage.” But soon cougars started encroaching into the populated areas around Los Angeles. There were two fatal attacks. More people still died in America because of bee stings and black widow spider bites, Wolch writes, but “as reports of cougar-human interaction rose and public fears were fanned by episodic attacks, the images of cougars as charismatic and proud wild animals at home in nature were replaced by terms conjuring danger, death, and criminal intent.” It was as if a switch had flipped. Before 1990, the predominant image in the newspaper was of an “elusive and fascinating wild creature.” After 1990, cougars were “efficient four-legged killers” and baby-snatchers, “roaming like phantoms” in the nearby hills.