Early on, this old columnist learned that nothing drew reader fire quite like writing anything — good or bad — about coyotes or, no connection, First Nations and their hunting rights. Now, add cougars to that short list.
The recent review of Paula Wild’s book The Cougar, Beautiful, Wild and Dangerous has received much reader comment, including a signed threat of personal violence for suggesting, among other things, that the result of changing the status of the big cats from varmints to game animals is that we now have far too many of them in Alberta.
Ironically, one of the two anonymous death threats the column has received, blue-crayoned on a big page torn from a scrapbook, was inspired by a tongue-in-cheek column suggesting that the way to deal with the serious stray domestic cat problem was to declare them a game animal.
Rick James, the partner of Paula Wild, who admits she flinched while reading too many cougar attack stories while researching her book, writes to advise me to stop flinching, that I have a far greater chance of being maimed or killed by a motor vehicle than I do by a cougar. Not in his neck of the woods (Vancouver Island), nor mine, generally west of Rocky Mountain House, the focal point of cougar study after cougar study in Alberta. Yes, accidents do happen, both with vehicles and defensive bears, but cougars are no accident: they are out to get you.
A reader who both lives and works in the country, who I’ll keep anonymous for his own good, has an interesting take on the cougar study ‘industry:’ “People that study cougars for a living (government biologists) want more around and don’t care about people who live in the country where the expansion has occurred. For the most part they are townies, city slickers, weekend warriors who like to study cougars in controlled situations. A cougar is not trying to stalk you when hired hounds are chasing it around. They do not have kids who want to play on the backyard swing set one jump from the bush edge. Their idea of fun is to chase them on the odd field day, and then declare they have a huge respect for them and the rest of society doesn’t understand the beasts. It is a circular, self-serving relationship they have with a large predator, and the media eat it up.”
Not this media, although I do admit to having eaten roast haunch of cougar on two occasions, the meat having been provided both times by the late Dewey Browning, a big horn guide and cougar houndsman. Dewey told me years before the current overpopulation that the country north of his place west of Caroline to my Stump Ranch south of Rocky Mountain House was full of cougars.
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Many readers express concern over plans to reintroduce bison to allegedly secure enclosures in Banff National Park. Bison go where the please, when they please and, in Yellowstone National Park, injure and kill more people than grizzlies . . . and cougars.
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Much email ado about the new environmental bete noir — fracking — an oil and gas drilling process, frequently involving horizontal, rather than vertical drilling, where a cocktail of sand, water and powerful toxic chemicals is pumped down the hole at high pressure to fracture the rock formation, generally shale, and free the flow of hydrocarbons, including natural gas.
Recently people have demonstrated against fracking in New Brunswick and, in France, courts have upheld a total ban on fracking. Judging from my volume of outraged reader email, particularly from the Rimbey, Rocky Mountain House areas, we may soon see mass anti-fracking protests in Alberta.
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A mixed bag of reports comes from hunters on the upland bird season thus far. Pheasants and Hungarian partridge are spotty, non-existent in some places and abundant just a few kilometres away. Several hunters report a mini boom of ruffed grouse, especially north and west of Edmonton. Most surprising to me are reports from my old hunting grounds north and east of Brooks of many good coveys of sharp tail grouse, where they have been all but extinct for the last two decades.
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A year and a half ago I did a column on the email blogs of Don Cahoon, of Calgary, including his superb pictures, of his weekly early morning trips into the foothills and mountains southwest of Calgary to check on “the wild things that abound in the area,” always pausing for a superb breakfast at the Chuckwagon Café in Turner Valley.
Then, in late spring, early summer, the posts suddenly stopped. Mutual friends told me Don was in hospital and would not be returning home. Don Cahoon, the self-styled “Old Curmudgeon,” died on Oct. 24, at the age of 85. Cahoon and his companions were particularly concerned about and would regularly check on Gimpy, a limping big horn ram that hung around a particular ridge on the OH Ranch.
Cahoon’s pictures of Gimpy always made me think the big ram was checking on Don and his fellow travellers, the Haggis, Goober, etc.
Bob Scammell is an award-winning columnist who lives in Red Deer. He can be reached at bscam@telusplanet.net.