The Province of B.C., Canada has a Cheetah on the loose...
Search suspended for cheetah spotted along highway in Kootenay area of B.C.
CBC.ca - Joe Caravetta, a B.C. Conservation Officer Service inspector, told the CBC he is certain the public is no longer in danger, but the service still wants to hear from the public if the animal is spotted.
Bright Lights, Big Predators
IT
was tea break one afternoon this past May, in a business park in
Mumbai, one of the world’s most crowded cities. The neighborhood was
chockablock with new 35-story skyscrapers adorned with Greek temples on
top. On the seventh-floor deck of one building, 20-something techies
took turns playing foosball and studying the wooded hillside in back
through a brass ship captain’s spyglass.
They
were looking at a leopard, also on tea break, up a favorite tree where
it goes to loaf many afternoons around 4:30. That is, it was a wild
leopard living unfenced and apparently well fed in the middle of the
city, on a dwindling forest patch roughly the size of Central Park
between 59th and 71st Streets. When I hiked the hillside the next day, I
found a massive slum just on the other side, heavy construction
equipment nibbling at the far end, and a developer’s private helipad up
top. And yet the leopard seemed to have mastered the art of avoiding
people, going out by night to pick off dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, rats
and other camp followers of human civilization.
Welcome
to the future of urban living. Predators are turning up in cities
everywhere, and living among us mostly without incident. Big, scary
predators, at that.
Wolves now live next door to Rome’s main airport,
and around Hadrian’s Villa, just outside the city.
A mountain lion roams
the Hollywood Hills and has his own Facebook page.
Coyotes have turned
all of Chicago into their territory.
Great white sharks, attracted by
booming seal populations, cruise Cape Cod beaches with renewed
frequency.
And in a kind of urban predator twofer, a photographer in
Vero Beach, Fla., recently snapped a bobcat grabbing a shark out of the
surf.
Predators
are living among people partly because they have fewer alternatives.
The land area consumed by cities and suburbs has increased substantially
over the past century and the rate of expansion is accelerating.
Worldwide, urban acreage will triple in the first three decades of this
century, consuming an additional 500,000 or so square miles of land,
much of it in areas that are now critical wildlife habitat in Africa,
China and India. That leopard on a hilltop in Mumbai didn’t move into
the city. The city rose up and engulfed its world.
Many
species are also getting used to the idea that humans do not
necessarily pose a threat. It helps that we no longer automatically
shoot predators on sight, or put a bounty on their heads. Prey species
like elk and deer have in many cases also learned to prefer cities and
suburbs because the relatively open habitat provides a margin of safety
from predators. Predators naturally follow. During moose calving season,
for instance, grizzly bears frequent the backyards of Anchorage.
Are
humans equally capable of adapting? Stan Gehrt, an Ohio State
University biologist who studies Chicago’s population of about 4,000
coyotes, says complaints have tapered off as city residents have become
accustomed to their new neighbors. The coyotes don’t bite or threaten
people, though they can be aggressive toward dogs. (When there is a
human on the other end of the leash, this can be alarming, he
acknowledged. But dogs in Cook County, which includes Chicago, bite
about 3,000 people every year.)
The
situation in Mumbai is more complicated. The city’s 21 million people
have encircled and encroached on a national park, where about 35
free-roaming leopards live. Mumbai’s leopards can of course kill people
and have done so a half-dozen times since 2011. But one man who survived
an attack at a village inside the park said his family had no plans to
move out to the grim little high-rise flats the city offers as an
alternative. It would mean too many bills and too little space: “Where
will the chickens go?” Instead, people adapt, he said. “In the night the
leopard is the king. He can go anywhere.”
The
city at large has so far also held to the belief that the leopards
should continue living where they always have. In the past when people
spotted a leopard in the neighborhood, a wildlife biologist told me,
they called park officials demanding its removal. But researchers there
have demonstrated that removing and relocating leopards simply leads to
more attacks, as the confused animals try to find their way in new
territory, and as other leopards with less experience at negotiating
human-dominated habitat take over their old territory. Now people phone
demanding a workshop on how to coexist safely with leopards. Last month,
the park issued a pamphlet of camera trap photos and names for all 35
leopards. (Your new neighbor is named “Mastikhor.” It means
“mischievous.”)
If
you are thinking, “Wait, that’s just nuts,” think again about the
nature of risk. We have learned to protect and restore rivers in our
cities, says Adrian Treves at the University of Wisconsin, even though
floods sometimes destroy homes and drown people. We cherish trees on
urban streets and in parks even though branches sometimes fall on our
heads. For that matter, we let cars dominate city streets, though they
kill more than 4,700 pedestrians in the United States every year (and
many times more in India).
Rivers,
forests and cars all justify themselves by being useful one way or
another to humanity. What good are predators? Clearly, a lot of people
struggle with this question, particularly certain philosophical sorts
who preach the genuinely nutty idea that we should eradicate predators
because they are cruel. But scientific research has repeatedly
demonstrated that losing predators leads to a cascade of unintended (and
often cruel) effects. Unchecked by predation, herbivores graze the
habitat to bare dirt. The water table drops. Species vanish. Ecosystems
collapse. Entirely apart from their ecological usefulness, we should
value predators for their stealth, their skill, their speed. A world of
sheep might sound like someone’s idea of heaven. But it would be a
deadly dull place to live.
Couldn’t
we at least keep the excitement out of our cities? That would require
preserving large areas of habitat, and habitat corridors, in the
countryside, and nobody appears to be willing to pick up that tab.
The
Land and Water Conservation Fund, paid for from oil industry royalties,
has served for 50 years as the nation’s single most effective tool for
habitat protection. But Congress allowed it to expire for the past two
months, then patted itself on the back for reauthorizing the fund on
Friday — at half the budget Congress allowed in 1965. Make that seven
percent of the original budget, adjusting for inflation. We seem to be
incapable of leaving existing protected areas intact, especially as the
human population quadruples from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 11 billion by
the end of this century. Instead of celebrating the protected areas
where the world’s last major tiger populations survive, for instance,
India (population 1.2 billion) now seems intent on running highways
through them.
So
we should hardly be surprised that predators and people wind up living
side by side in cities. Cities have always been the salvation of the
homeless, the unwanted, the wretched and the despised. The difference
now is that these refugees come to us not just on two legs, but on four.
Richard Conniff is the author of “The Species Seekers,” and a contributing opinion writer.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 20, 2015, on page SR6 of the New York edition with the headline: Bright Lights, Big Predators.
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