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Show It took awhile before seven-year-old Danni Reid could muster enough courage to go near enough to this small cougar for a picture. The animal theatened Danni's little equally nervous dog and tried to claw its way into the house to join the family for dinner. No one wanted to be on the menu, so Danni's dad Danny Reid, dispatched the cat when it turned and headed for his daughter. Looking For Dinner? Cougar Knocks On The Reid Family's Front Door ESCALANTE Escalante residents have been alarmed in recent months by what they have perceived as increased mountain lion activity in and around their community. Their anxieties have heightened since Sunday afternoon when Danny Reid shot a cougar that had scratched at his front door to gain entrance before heading toward his seven-year-old daughter playing in the family tractor. The Reid family was enjoying a relaxing Sunday afternoon when shortly after 5 p.m. 16-year-old Tempe looked out the window to see a cougar in the road in front of the house. As she alerted her family, the cougar raced toward the porch where the tiny family dog barked excitedly and hastily sprinted ran for cover. Danny Reid opened the main door only to see the cougar staring at him through the glass storm door. He glanced out to see his 7-year 7-year old daughter Danni playing in the cab of the family's tractor about 100 feet away. Growling and spitting, the young cougar, began scratching and clawing at the door as Reid rushed to his gun cabinet for a weapon. He unlocked the cabinet, grabbed his .243 rifle and ran back to the door where he tried to push it open against the persistent animal that remained in place momentarily before turning and jumping off the porch to head toward the tractor. Reid brought the cat down at about 20 feet. Division of Wildlife Resources Conservation Officer Mike Fowlks estimated the cougar at less than 50 pounds and said the youngster may have been prematurely weaned by its mother or its mother may have (See Escalante Cougars Page 2A) Cougars Sighted Often In Escalante From Page 1 died. He acknowledged that despite its small size it was still a wild animal and potentially dangerous. Danny Reid said he attempted to notify the Cedar City DWR Office on Sunday and when there was no response, he had called the DWR's Poaching Hotline and reported himself as a poacher. "He's certainly not a poacher;" Wildlife Program Manager Jeff Grandison said from the Cedar City DWR office on Tuesday, "he just did what anyone should under those conditions. We wouldn't presume to second-guess anyone who killed a cougar in such circumstances." Little Danni Reid was still terrified on Monday morning but finally worked up the courage later in the day to pose by the mountain lion. Her little dog wasn't in much better shape as neighbors came to look at the cougar, which her dad had also estimated to be "not much more than a yearling." "When I was a kid here," said Reid, "you never saw a cougar near town. If you saw a cougar in the hills, it would run away. They don't run away anymore." Reid's residence is about 500 feet north of the town boundary. There are seven others in the same area. "That little cougar was hungry, and my daughter's little dog just looked good," he said. Escalante resident Vergean Porter reported a startling encounter with a larger cougar on Mar. 14. He had gone to search for collector's items at an area near the city's dump about a mile from town where bottles and such left by settlers in the area could be found. He would stop his four-wheeler at a site while he searched. At one point, he had stopped, still astride the four-wheeler with its motor running. Suddenly, a cougar popped out from behind a tree just 10 feet away and headed straight for him, Porter said. "I gunned the engine and took off," he said. "After about 60 feet, I looked back and could see that the cougar had followed me for some distance but had slowed to a lope." Porter said that it amazed him that the cougar was not frightened by the sound of the four-wheeler's engine. "I've seen cougars all my life," he said, "but I've never seen one that didn't run away." The site of the cougar encounter is less than one-quarter mile from a group of about seven homes with small children, Porter said. Rachel Carter was on her way home from work about 7 p.m. in February when a cougar crossed the road in front of her car. She watched it casually make its way toward a state park at the edge of town. Doug Olsen 15, Travis Olsen 12, and Bronson Cotram 10, ready to leave for school, watched a large cougar saunter across their yard in the Moqui Gardens subdivision area on the west end of Escalante.. Last year, they saw a mother cougar with two kittens. Kathy Mclnelly said her father-in-law James Mclnelly, who lives in the middle of town, lost a sheep about two months ago to a cougar. "You can tell when it's a cougar," she said. "Dogs just don't have the power to do the same damage." Rex Stone, a butcher at Our Market in Escalante, who lives near the old closed-down sawmill, said he saw a cougar about 6 a.m. on Mar. 16 near the dumpster where he was taking his trash. Residents all over town have reported cougar sightings and tracks crisscrossing the area. They seem most concerned about their small children and what they perceive as increasing boldness in the mountain lions. Danny Reid said he had called Representative Tom Hatch, (Dist. 73) because he knew Hatch had concerns about cougars. Hatch, who had, at the recent session of the legislature, successfully sponsored a bill to reduce the penalty for poaching a cougar from a felony to a misdemeanor was unable to get his bill through that would make it legal to shoot cougars intruding into municipalities or agricultural areas. Hatch said he "took a lot of heat" on his bills in the urban areas but received broad support from rural areas where reports of increased cougar activity continue to multiply. He attributes the increase at least in part to decreasing deer herds and said he had also received wide support from Utah sportsmen. Cougars feed primarily on deer, Hatch said. Deer herds, Hatch believes, for safety, have tended to move down into the more inhabited areas to feed. The cougars have simply followed. "I've spent my whole life herding sheep and cattle," Hatch said. "Everywhere I look in the hills there are lion tracks today. Up until the 1960's, the state paid a bounty for cougars. When the state started protecting them in 1967, their numbers rapidly increased. He said that Utah might learn a lesson from California which prohibited the taking of any cougar for 10 years. When human deaths due to cougar attacks began taking place, the state moved to change its laws. "I'm strongly convinced that we have historically high levels of cougar populations in the state at this time," he said. Hatch, who testified before the state's Big Game Board, said he told them, "It's deer or lion." In Escalante, residents are beginning begin-ning to think it's a choice between human lives and lions. DWR officer Grandison said in Cedar City, "We've never had a human being killed by a cougar in the state of Utah." "Without a question," he said, "we are reducing overall cougar numbers. We issued 20 permits for cougar on Boulder last year, up from 16 in 1994 and may increase again this year." Grandison said, "Cougars are so shy and reclusive that some DWR people who spend a lot of time in the field have never seen one that wasn't in front of a pack of dogs." These days folks in Escalante are wishing that local cougars would demonstrate more of those shy and reclusive traits. |