A response to 'Mountain lions, myths, and media.

AuthorBaron, David
PositionArticle by Wendy J. Keefover-Ring in this issue, p. 1083

Wendy Keefover-Ring calls The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature (The Beast in the Garden) "a well-intentioned attempt to warn us Westerners about the potential dangers of recreating or living in mountain lion country." (A1) This simplistic description reveals a fundamental misreading of the book, like calling Moby Dick a treatise on the dangers posed by white whales. Although The Beast in the Garden tells the true story of a fatal mountain lion attack, the book's message is not that cougars are inherently dangerous; rather, it is that humans are dangerous when they do not appreciate their impact on the natural world. The book's theme is the artificiality of the modern American landscape. Its moral is that people and natural ecosystems require thoughtful management along the urban-wild land interface.

Therefore, from the first sentence of her "critical reevaluation," Keefover-Ring misinterprets and misrepresents my book. Her essay does not improve by the second sentence. In fact, the very "sloppy methodology, unsatisfying leaps in logic, [and] historical inventions" she claims to find in the book are rife in her critique. (A2)

Keefover-Ring's litany of complaints can be divided into three broad categories: accusations about the book's style, substance, and impact. I shall address each category in turn.

First, Keefover-Ring critiques the book's style. She writes that The Beast in the Garden "disguises mountain lions as human beings" by instilling animals with human-like thought and emotion. (A3) As an example, she cites my description of Scott Lancaster's body, discovered haft-eaten behind his Colorado high school in January 1991. I do write that Lancaster's hollowed out body appeared as if it were the work of a deranged murderer, for this was the initial reaction of the search team that discovered the grisly scene. Never before in Colorado had a cougar been known to prey on a human being, and the searchers who found Lancaster's body had no inkling that a mountain lion had been the killer. My words describe what the searchers thought when they came upon the corpse. I did not write, and I do not believe, that the cougar killed Lancaster with "murderous intent," as Keefover-Ring suggests. Any careful reader should find this obvious from the context.

Even more outrageous is Keefover-Ring's statement that, "[a]ccording to Baron, mountain lions use ritualized murder no different than the Aztecs...." (A4) I do describe Lancaster's death as a kind of modern-day sacrifice, but let us be clear: this is a metaphor, and in this metaphor, who sacrificed Lancaster? It was not the cougar. As I write, Lancaster was killed "by a community embracing a myth: the idea that wilderness, true wilderness, could exist in modern America." (A5) In other words, he was killed by human beings who failed to understand how their behavior affected the surrounding environment, cougars included. Keefover-Ring may dislike the metaphor, and she may dispute my explanation for what caused a mountain lion to kill Lancaster, but for her to write that I claim cougars engage in ritualized murder is a ridiculous falsehood.

Less ridiculous, but equally false, are Keefover-Ring's attacks on my book's substance. The Beast in the Garden tells a true story, and I can back up every quotation and claim with evidence gleaned from a vast accumulation of newspaper clippings, police reports, trial transcripts, meeting minutes, memos, letters, photographs, and videotapes that document my book's central story; from the more than 200 hours of tape-recorded interviews I conducted with people involved in that story; from the 350 books and articles I read for background; and from the dozens of experts I consulted about cougar biology, animal behavior, western history, ecology, forensics, and other relevant topics. To guide readers to the sources I consulted, I included in my book an extensive bibliography and some 400 endnotes, and I am always glad to answer queries from researchers seeking access to my files. Had Keefover-Ring bothered to ask me for evidence of the "unsupportable historic claims" she contends exist in The Beast in the Garden, (A6) I would have happily shown her the evidence directly. As it is, I will have to do so in the context of this rebuttal.

Here is one of the claims Keefover-Ring calls "unsupportable": mountain lions were once lured to traps with catnip oil. (A7) Evidence of this fact is abundant. Author J. Frank Dobie wrote of the great...

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