Wild pets, wilder people

As Indiana’s flora drops its foliage, the state’s fauna is becoming substantially, and indeed frighteningly, wilder.

On Saturday morning, a Lawrence County police officer spotted a mountain lion gorging on a deer carcass along the Highway 37 roadside.

The sighting might not be troubling in, say, Wyoming, where the few people who sparsely populate the state are more likely to be armed and better prepared to meet a massive feline predator.

But the appearance of a big cat in the county just south of our own Monroe County has sent a shiver or two up my spine. I, for one, am not ready to defend myself against mountain lions on my daily trek through Dunn’s Woods.

It seems unlikely that a large wild creature would leave the rural solitude of feasting on Lawrence County roadkill to migrate to the heart of more densely populated Bloomington.

Yet the cat is on the prowl.

The officer’s Saturday morning sighting is supported by photos captured by an Indiana Department of Natural Resources camera this summer.

A mountain lion, perhaps the same one spotted on Saturday, was photographed in rural Greene County during the first week of May.  The DNR installed motion-activated cameras after multiple reports of a mountain lion surfaced in the Bloomfield area, located just to the west of Monroe County.

At the time, the DNR reported that it remained impossible to determine from the photos whether the animal was a migrating wild animal or whether it had been released from captivity.

But since mountain lions were wiped out within the first few decades of European settlement in Indiana, it seems unlikely that the photographed predator returned without human assistance.

It seems more reasonable to predict that the animal escaped from or was released by an incompetent or incapable private citizen who tried to tame a large and dangerous wild animal.

The undesirability of discovering animals such as mountain lions on the prowl in relatively populated areas speaks to the need to more closely enact and enforce prohibitions on private ownership of animals that can prey on humans.

It’s safe to say that the average Hoosier’s experience has not prepared him or her to confront predators on an afternoon hike in the forest.

But our responsibility to end an illegal and dangerous trade in exotic animals should not be motivated merely by a desire to keep mountain lions away from Griffy Lake.

Scientific American reported this week on the entirely avoidable crash of a plane recently in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

A wildlife smuggler carried a small crocodile onto a plane in his gym bag. When it escaped from the bag, the passengers ran to the cockpit en masse. The surge crashed the plane and 20 of the 21 passengers were killed.

We should do more to keep mountain lions out of Southern Indiana and crocodiles off planes in the DRC.

Wildlife smuggling risks many human lives both in obtaining and housing animals to satisfy a few people’s exotic pleasures.


E-mail: wallacen@indiana.edu