Proceedings of the Seventh Mountain Lion Workshop

92 REDUCING PUMA ATTACKS · Fitzhugh et al.
cat.
What was puma doing with its feet at time
of first sighting?
Bounding toward me.
Victim behavior just after first sighting?
Putting rifle to shoulder and firing.
Were there signs of aggression by puma?
The cougar was charging me, full speed
ahead, which seemed pretty aggressive to
me at the time.
Did victim fight back?
Yes.
How?
I shot the puma in the throat/chest.
Puma response:
Puma rolled and died.
Was puma injured by victim?
Yes, severely.
Quality of Data
Some accounts are not included in this
analysis. The 224 attacks and 155
encounters we analyze do not include 14
incidents for which we believe additional
investigation is needed to validate their
accuracy. Nor do we include 8 other
incidents we suspect, but cannot prove, are
duplicates of incidents included in the tally.
In addition, we have 10 more reports that we
decided not to use because they included too
little information or were of doubtful
validity. Our data do include incidents that
do not meet Beier’s criteria, but we kept
those separate in order not to invalidate
comparison with Beier’s (1991) findings. As
we analyze data more completely, more of
the incidents may be excluded, primarily for
lack of information. Our files also include
several accounts that have recently come to
our attention that are not yet entered in the
database and are not included in this paper.
These latter data, and additional details from
the accounts we have analyzed will be
included in a later, more complete treatment.
As already mentioned, we included all
the accounts we have discovered, and we
tried to estimate the validity of each. The
PROCEEDINGS OF THE SEVENTH MOUNTAIN LION WORKSHOP
editor of Outdoor Life, from 1897 to 1925,
asked his readers to provide accounts of
puma attacks on humans. He then tried to
verify the accuracy of each account,
generally without success. In each case, he
was either unable to locate the respondent,
or the knowledgeable people from the area
where the attack was supposed to have
occurred claimed no knowledge of it
(Anonymous 1925, cited by Beier 1991).
During this same period, Forest and Stream,
which became Field and Stream, also
printed numerous personal accounts of
encounters with pumas. At this time, we
have been able to locate only 1 reference to
incidents that may have been confirmed
(Marsh 1917), or failed confirmation, by
Outdoor Life (Anonymous 1917). We are
aware of one, and perhaps three fraudulent
accounts in recent years, and we also
questioned the validity of one unusual
account that we later found had been
confirmed by an agency. We recently tried,
unsuccessfully, to obtain agency
confirmation of an account, only later to find
that the confirmation had been provided to
Etling several years earlier. Therefore, the
verifications themselves can be erroneous in
either direction. It is possible that we have
analyzed a few spurious reports, but if so,
their effect on our findings should be minor.
We have placed our 379 useful incidents
in categories of similar types of incidents
and levels of reliability. The 108 fatal and
non-fatal incidents that meet Beier’s (1991)
criteria may be considered to be a complete
count of well-defined and verified attacks.
(See a more complete defense of this
assumption in the results and discussion
section). The few verified non-fatal
incidents we may have missed would not
affect group values in an important way.
The 116 other attacks and 155 encounters
represent neither a total count nor a
statistical sample, nor do we know anything
about the underlying statistical distribution