Proceedings of the Seventh Mountain Lion Workshop

90 REDUCING PUMA ATTACKS · Fitzhugh et al.
attack humans. Beier believed he had
discovered all fatal attacks since 1890 that
met his criteria, and all non-fatal attacks
since 1970. Based on the ratio of fatal to
non-fatal attacks during 1970-1990, he
estimated that he had failed to identify about
12 non-fatal attacks between 1890 and 1970.
Beier documented an increase in frequency
of attacks from the 1890-1969 period to
1970-1990. While Beier did not tabulate
“near-attacks,” he did analyze the victim’s
actions that may have served to prevent the
attack. “Fighting back” and shouting loudly
were actions that seemed to avert or repel
attacks, as did waving arms, poking or
hitting with sticks, throwing rocks, etc.
Beier also reported an attempt at aversive
conditioning of one puma, but it failed to
prevent future aggression. We substantiated
most of Beier’s findings and, because we
have more data, we produced some
additional tentative findings.
We have accounts of a total of 224
attacks by pumas on humans and 155
behavioral interactions that did not result in
an actual attack. The number of accounts
through April 2003 that have information
useful for analyzing any specific question is
variable, but only 108 accounts meet Beier’s
(1991) criteria. Of the 116 attacks that failed
Beier’s criteria, 32 were fatal and 84 were
non-fatal. Reasons for failure include lack of
physical contact, lack of verification,
occurrence in Latin America, occurrence
prior to 1890, or because they were attacks
on hunters. Beier’s strict criteria avoid
errors of commission, but allow for many
omissions. Because we are interested in
behavior more than just counting attacks, we
decided to relax the Beier limitations as long
as accounts seemed plausible and contained
useful information. Our intent is to analyze
human and puma behavior in these
situations where data are available and
compare attacks with encounters to try to
provide better advice for people who come
PROCEEDINGS OF THE SEVENTH MOUNTAIN LION WORKSHOP
face-to-face with a puma, or who want to
prepare for that eventuality. We are still
organizing the data, so this report is not the
final one, but we do have a few
recommendations to make at this time, and
we will make some observations about
reliability of reports and frequency of
attacks in general.
METHODS
We defined “non-attack encounters” as
behavioral interactions between pumas and
humans at close proximity that do not result
in an attack. We purposely did not define
“close proximity” to place emphasis on
“behavioral interactions.” We excluded
incidents in which the puma was sighted and
then left, and included incidents in which the
puma and human exchanged multiple
behaviors. “Close proximity” is necessary
for this to occur, but the distance may vary,
and we were more flexible regarding
distance criteria than for behavioral criteria.
If we believed we could learn from the
interaction, we included it. Most of our data
are from published popular accounts,
sometimes substantiated by an agency
incident report. Etling (2001), in particular,
solicited personal accounts from individuals
in their own words, both before and after
publication of her book. We categorized
incidents in several ways to better analyze
and evaluate the data. One mentioned in
this paper is a category we called “attacks
terminated by humans.” These are incidents
in which a puma was shot while charging, or
at least clearly intent on creeping up very
close to a human in spite of the person’s
efforts to discourage such behavior. We
have 20 such accounts, 10 of which are from
hunters. In only 3 of the hunting accounts
was it clear that the hunter was doing
something that might attract a puma (e.g.,
using deer scent, calling turkeys, etc.). Six
accounts were of agency employees
investigating previous encounters between
humans and pumas.