Story, Wyoming, home to kindly people who like to feed deer because they "love" them. Isn't that heartwarming. The deer love Story and the free food a lot, too. So much so that they are swarming the area. And as a result, the storied kindly-hearted people of story are getting even more gratitude from the animal kingdom. The mountain lions are just loving the snack bar the folks in Story are running. Deer are good eating.
Story, a small community tucked into the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains, is popular with tourists, deer and mountain lions, according to Wyoming Game and Fish Department biologist Dan Thiele.
While visitors frequent Story’s shops and bed-and-breakfast inns, whitetail and mule deer frequent the nearby hills, fields and thickets — drawn by abundant forage and the occasional handout from locals who just can’t resist putting food out for their hooved friends.
“It can be a contentious issue, because people do love deer," Thiele said.
What complicates things is that the large number of deer in the area have attracted another sort of visitor — mountain lions, which find the abundant prey base nearly irresistible.
Thiele said there have been many, many sightings of mountain lions in the rural community. People there are so sensitive about the big cats that house cats have been spotted and thought to be mountain lions, he said.
The growing awareness about lions drawn into residential settings and human safety has resulted in four of the big cats removed by game officials this year — two from the Buffalo area, one from Sheridan and another from near Big Horn.
The problems will really start when the mountain lions decide they want a little variety in their diet. If the folks in Story are lucky, they'll only lose pets in that deal. The Disneyfication of wildlife has morphed cute fuzzy bunnies into cute, fuzzy deer and now cute, fuzzy mountain lions. But I can assure you that the mountain lions did not get the memo. And the experts are not sure how dangerous all this is, so they are trying to get funding to study it – before a cat tries a haunch of human.
“We’d like to look at their behavior, see how much time they spend around residences,” Thiele told the board during its meeting in Casper. That would enable officials to get a better handle on the whole safety issue and compare public reports about sightings with GPS mapping records of mountain lions moving in and around Story.
Longtime readers know I have no patience with this sort of behavior. Leave the wildlife alone. They will not conform to your Disneyfied outlook on life.
The thing that gets me is where they “remove” the mountain lions (and bears) to… We used to get society’s rejects up by the farm and they were hell-raisers.
Good post! Just enforces what happens when people start messing in things. So, I assume that when things get really out of hand, they are going to want Uncle Sam to bail them out?