Leopards and Cougars, India and L.A.

The trouble started a year ago yesterday, when a cougar at Orange County’s Whiting Ranch Park shifted its choice of prey from deer to mountain bikers, resulting in two attacks -- one fatal, the other nearly so -- in a single day. In the months that followed, mountain lions seemed to turn up everywhere: outside a high school in Rancho Santa Margarita, near a children’s playground in Ventura County, by the old Toyon landfill in Griffith Park, up a tree in a La Canada Flintridge backyard. Each new sighting renewed concerns for public safety.

But if you think it was a bad year for big cats in the Los Angeles area, consider Bombay.

India’s largest and most prosperous city spent much of 2004 gripped by panic over leopards, which in the last 12 months have killed 19 people. One of the spotted cats attacked a girl who had just returned home on a summer evening; it snatched her from outside the front door and dragged her into the darkness. Another leopard pounced on a middle-aged lawyer during his usual early morning meditative stroll. Many of the people killed were residents of slum dwellings without indoor plumbing. The cats struck as their victims squatted outside, heeding nature’s call.

All of the leopard attacks occurred in or around Sanjay Gandhi National Park, a forest on Bombay’s northern end that has lately been engulfed by urban development. It’s a literal jungle -- fat vines and bamboo thickets -- surrounded by a metaphorical concrete one.

The leopards that live in the park often roam beyond it, ending up on fourth-floor balconies or beneath city buses. The cats have become a common sight on the nearby campus of the Indian Institute of Technology and the studio grounds of Film City, the heart of the Bollywood movie industry.

Leopard attacks are nothing new in Bombay, but when the cats killed 10 people in June alone, the simmering problem boiled over into a full-blown crisis.

Concerned citizens and politicians demanded action. Some suggested building a high wall or electric fence to keep the leopards in, an impractical solution for a park half as large as Catalina Island. Environmentalists theorized that the leopards might be leaving the park because of a lack of natural prey (a contention disputed by park officials), so wildlife authorities released pigs and rabbits into the forest to supplement the leopards’ menu. That didn’t stop the cats from wandering.

The government then took a more direct approach. It began rounding up leopards seen outside the park and releasing them into distant forests. But people living near the release site protested, given the dangerous reputation of Bombay’s cats. So now the captured leopards -- 16 at last count -- remain warehoused, crowded into concrete-and-steel cages where they suffer out of the public eye.

Bombay presents an exaggerated vision of what L.A.’s future could be. Not that cougars are likely ever to attack people at anywhere near the rate achieved by Bombay’s leopards. The mountain lion is, as Theodore Roosevelt observed, “the least dangerous to man of all the big cats,” a fact for which Americans can be thankful. But Bombay’s crisis stems from the same confluence of factors that has caused L.A.’s recent big-cat troubles: a clash between a conservation success and a land-use planning failure.

On the success side, India and California respectively have far more leopards and cougars today than they did a few decades ago, the intended result of hunting bans in force since the early 1970s. (By one government estimate, India’s leopards have doubled in population since 1993, despite widespread poaching.) As the number of cats has grown, so has the number of people, who now crowd into sprawling metropolises that infiltrate and then envelop what’s left of undeveloped land. This pattern of development isolates the cats in islands of habitat separated by a sea of highways and high rises.

It’s a bad situation for all involved. The stranded cats -- endangered by geographic and genetic isolation -- are unlikely to survive in the long run, and in the short run they’re likely to cause trouble for people. Cougars and leopards are born with an urge to disperse, and when development blocks their historical routes of movement they end up in our backyards, where they prey on dogs and pose a growing threat to people.

An Indian wildlife official summed up the problem in a recent article for a newspaper, the Hindu: “A century ago, rural India lived in the leopard’s domain, but now the animal finds itself in isolated and restricted habitats in man’s universal domain. With expanding habitation and shrinking forests, the emergence of the man-eater is becoming unavoidable.”

As Southern California’s sprawl further surrounds cougar habitat in places like the Santa Monica and Santa Ana mountains, the conflict between people and lions will similarly worsen. Forward-thinking land managers are trying to head off this problem. Local, state and federal agencies (including the National Park Service and Caltrans) have begun working with environmental groups to identify and protect “missing linkages” -- key parcels of land that connect Southern California’s large remaining wild areas. Their goal: to create a network of easements, corridors and highway crossings that will allow mountain lions to roam across the region even as cities swell.

It’s a worthy and ambitious plan, but can the forces of preservation outrun the developers’ bulldozers? And what about the people who will live along the proposed cougar travel routes? Can they be counted on to take proper precautions -- for instance, keeping their dogs in lion-proof pens -- so they don’t provoke conflict with the cougars passing by?

If not, L.A.’s mountain lions face a dim future, much like the bleak present of Bombay’s leopards -- removed from their habitat for misbehavior or imprisoned in forests ringed by concrete.