Wildlife Corridors Are Edgy

Wildlife corridors are often thought of as "hallways" connecting the "rooms" where wildlife live. We imagine furry creatures cruising along from one end to the other, arriving happily at their destinations. But this idea is misleading.

Corridors are intended to serve as linkages between wild areas, but in many cases they also serve as the wild areas themselves. They make up part of a patchwork of natural areas that provide habitat for a variety of species. Wide-ranging animals that cover a lot of ground quickly, like elk or bears, may pass through a corridor quickly, using them for dispersal, seasonal migration, or as part of a larger home range.

But other species can live their whole lives in the corridors. Animals with smaller home ranges like squirrels or foxes may take several generations to effectively cross a corridor. For them the corridor isn't merely a hallway, it's home. It's also good for these species in the larger scheme of things. It provides connectivity in the landscape that helps maintain geneflow through out the populations, preventing the negative effects of inbreeding and reduced genetic diversity that wreak havoc on isolated populations.

When we realize that corridors aren't just trails from one area to another, it can help us understand why the quality and quantity of habitat in a corridor is so important.

Corridors need to appeal to animals that shy away from human altered landscapes. They need to be far enough away from roads, artificial lighting, and human-use areas for wild animals to utilize them as they would any other part of their range. The animals don't have a birds-eye view (unless they're birds) allowing them to distinguish between a corridor and a wildland block, so for the corridor to be useful, it has to have characteristics similar to the wildland blocks.

Designing functional corridors can be challenging, especially considering that corridors are susceptible to edge effects; habitat quality along the edge of a habitat fragment is often much lower than in areas further from the habitat edge. Linear corridors have a lot of "edge". Edges are inviting to pets, lighting, noise, invasive species- all of which degrade the habitat quality in a corridor.

To address these effects, we need to ensure that wildlife corridors meet a minimum width. When I worked for the Arizona Missing Linkages project we tried to identify corridors that met a minimum width of 1 kilometer. While there is no national standard, the general consensus among biologists is, the wider the better.

That's why it's disturbing that commisioners in Pasco County are balking over the suggestion that wildlife corridors meet a minimum width. They want to alter a wildlife corridor proposal by allowing people to "reduce" the corridor's width to meet their own specifications. In Florida, the natural habitats are dwindling -and so are the wildlife- including the Florida panther. Corridors are vital in such a patchy matrix of wildland and high-density developments. Maybe the commissioners don't realize that the wildlife corridor may not serve as a corridor at all if it doesn't meet certain specifications.

It is important when protecting wildlife corridors that certain characteristics, including a minimum width, be adhered to in order to maximize the functionality of the corridor. These aren't merely hallways, they are vital wildlands. Let's not skimp on wildlife corridors.

Should Arizona sell sheep tags to lions?

The Kofa National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Arizona is under fire. Advocates of mountain lions are up in arms with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposal to create a sport hunting season on mountain lions in the Kofa. Shouldn't wildlife be protected, they ask, in a wildlife refuge?

The agencies (USFWS and Arizona Game and Fish) insist that recovering the critically important Kofa desert bighorn sheep herd from near record-low population levels will be challenging due to additive mountain lion predation (emphasis my own). And their big guns- According to AmmoLand.com, data from a collared lion that reveals that it's killing and eating the endangered sheep at a high rate- ie. 16 sheep since February.

Sure, killing off the predators will keep the prey safe, for a little while. Perhaps a month, or a week, or maybe even just one night... Any biologist knows that where there is a sustainable population of lions, when one lion dies another takes its place. How long until a young adult in search of his own territory finds this sheep haven, or until another lion in an adjacent territory expands its range? It's inevitable.

Killing the offending lion and a few of his or her furry friends may give the sheep a brief respite from imminent death, but it's not a long-term solution. It is simply putting a bandaid over a persistent problem. A problem that needs creative, forward-thinking, and more permanent solutions. In order to protect the sheep, we need to take a step back and ask, how is it that they became so critically endangered in the first place? And, how can we address those issues?

The Kofa bighorn face a barrage of threats: limited water availability, diseases (including those spread by domestic sheep), isolation, habitat fragmentation caused by Interstates 8 and 10, State Routes 85 and 95, and human development, hunting pressure, and predation.

They need habitat protections, connectivity, increased gene flow, wildlife crossings, smart planning in regards to future development, and if we're going to talk about additional pressures, it's common sense that two other contributing factors be addressed, namely 1) cut back on sheep tags for trophy hunting, and 2) reduce the risk of disease by keeping domestic sheep out of the Kofa.

That's right, the Kofa offers a "once in a lifetime sheep hunt" according to AGFD who has separated the Kofa into 3 Game Management Units, and sells tags for each one. The hunter success rate has averaged 89% over the last 20 years. So, just to recap, the message AGFD is sending is: A) You have the right to kill protected sheep as long as you pay a fee to the state, and 2) It's okay for humans to kill sheep for fun, but not for lions to kill sheep for subsistence.
The agency misfired completely on this one. Perhaps if the lions could buy hunting tags they wouldn't be under attack?

Inconsistent management policies aside, addressing only predation by mountain lions is oversimplifying the problem. They're effectively making the lion the scapegoat in an anthropologically-created arena. Taking aim at a defenseless creature (okay you may not think of lions as defenseless, but against the heavy artillery this guy wants to level at them, they are) is a great way to divert our attention away from our own faults.

What did we do? We created the fragmentation that isolated the populations in the first place, with major multi-lane interstates and towns right in the middle of the natural corridors connecting the mountainous habitats that the sheep rely on. We've affected the metapopulation of desert sheep that would otherwise replenish the herds with mismanagement, over harvesting, fragmenting habitats, and more. Let's accept responsibility for what we've done and take steps to repair it, instead of pointing the finger, or in this case the gun, at others.

Photo Caption: Hunter with a Kofa Ram

Montana gets even better!

Yay- my home state gets its first wildlife overpass! Montana is one of my all-time favorite places. It's beautiful. The wide-open landscapes, the big sky, the rivers, the mountains, and the wildlife are incredible. Knowing that you are in a place where the suite of endemic "charismatic megafauna"- wolves, lions, grizzly bears, black bears, moose, elk, bison, pronghorn- is intact, is awesome.

Most other states in the lower 48 have already lost a number of these species. In many places they were extirpated (a polite term for local extinctions caused by over-hunting and trapping when the country was settled --often spurred by management agencies offering a bounty). But Montana has it all, now to keep it that way- and provide safer highways for people- they'll be building wildlife crossings including a huge wildlife overpass over I-93 near Evaro. This will help animals cross highways safely and provide a more permeable landscape, a landscape in which connected wildlife populations can thrive, roaming and reproducing freely and avoiding the perils facing small, local populations trapped in isolated habitats. yippee!

Recipe for Reducing Roadkill

A lion that was struck by a car earlier this week in Washington had to be shot (4 times) to end its life while it was reportedly screaming and thrashing in the ditch on the side of the road. Endangered Florida panthers living amidst a network of roads in the last vestige of wildlands in Florida are facing dangers like getting flattened by semis. A small, isolated population of lions in the Santa Monica Mountains gets closer to extinction every time one gets hit on the freeway. And families enjoying one of the seven wonders of the world have their vacation come to a screeching halt when their car collides with a mountain lion at Grand Canyon National Park (see photo).

Photo caption: P8, a subadult male, suffered fatal injuries while crossing East Rim Drive, July 2005

Roadkill is nasty for drivers and animals alike. And it takes a toll on wildlife. All told, millions of animals are killed by vehicles each year across the world. For large mammals like mountain lions that tend to occur in low densities and take several years to raise their young, the loss of an individual can have a snowball effect on the population dynamics. For example, if you were to hit, say, the last known female mountain lion in the Santa Monica Mountains while she was raising her litter of four cubs, that could have spelled the end of that population. That's what we in the field call a local extinction. For larger, more connected populations that aren't currently on the brink of extinction, combining road kill with the usual sources of mortality (like disease, poaching, hunting, eating rat poison, rampant habitat loss, fighting over territory, and wandering into towns) could put them on that trajectory.

Even if you don't give a rat's ass about maintaining connected populations of wildlife, you should be worried about roadkill. Deer, elk, and moose could be considered the most dangerous animals in the United States. They hop out in front of cars like so many obstacles in an obstacle course in great numbers every single night and get hit by cars, causing all kinds of damage to vehicles, injuring drivers and passengers, slowing down traffic, and generally making life miserable for the people who collided with them.

There are more and more roads, and more and more cars on those roads everyday. And in my opinion, not enough is being done to decrease the ever skyrocketing amount of roadkill that comes along with all those cars on all those roads.

But there is a solution! Wildlife crossings. In fact biologists have been studying wildlife crossings for quite some time now, determining what type of crossing appeals to which creature, how big, small, light, or dark it should be, even using data from GPS collars to determine where the crossings should be. Deer and Elk tend to like wide open, vegetated structures, while lions, foxes, and turtles can make do with dimly lit culverts. Yippee, you say, why don't we have these wonderful crossings everywhere?

Exactly. Canada has some great examples we can follow, especially near Banff National Park where they have reduced the traffic-related mortality of all large mammals on the Trans Canadian Highway by more than 80 percent.

So what are we waiting for? We're not. Construction of wildlife crossings is underway in some parts of the country including the Oro Valley near Tucson, AZ. Nevada is building its first wildlife overpass, and groups like the I-90 Wildlife Bridges coalition, Green Highways, statewide Missing Linkages projects in California and Arizona (full disclosure: my pet projects), and countless others have been on top of this issue for a while, pushing for a more wildlife-friendly transportation infrastructure. I hope that the trend toward building safer highways for us all takes off.

Mountain Lion Death at Grand Canyon - R.I.P. P8

I was recently reading an article about a cougar that had to be killed after it was mortally wounded by a car on the U.S. Highway 101. It was a small car- a Dodge neon, but it packed a mean punch. The story reminded me of the first time I went to investigate a lion hit by a car while I was working at the Grand Canyon. And the second time. And the third....

I got a call from my partner Eric very early on the 4th of July. He was on the road around 4 a.m. heading to the North Rim to try to track P5, (nomenclature: P is for Puma, and 5 for the fifth one collared) a 5 year-old female we had captured in April who headed straight down into the canyon, swam across the Colorado River near Hermit's Rapids, and scrambled up to the North Rim, all in under 24 hours. An incredible feat by any standards. And now her collar was emitting a mortality signal. But that's not what this story is about.

Driving along the edge of the South Rim, Eric set the VHF receiver to scan all our channels so it would pick up telemetry signals from any of the other collared lions within range. He came across P8's signal coming in really strong right along the road. Also emitting a mortality signal. He suddenly spotted P8's collar on the side of the road, bloody and broken.....but P8 was not in sight.

P8 was a young adult male we had captured and collared just the week before. We caught him in a snare on narrow stretch of land that spans between the rim and the road, not far from where a large adult male lion was hit by a tour bus in the fall of 2003.


Photo caption: P8 and Eric at a capture site in late June, 2005

When I got off the phone with Eric, I did some investigating. I called Park Dispatch to see if anyone had reported hitting a lion, seeing a lion, or anything at all about a lion over the night. They searched through their records- that surprised me because usually if anyone said anything about a lion, everybody knew about it, so there shouldn't really be any need to search through records. There wasn't anything in their records. I was duped. How could someone hit a mountain lion with their car and not even report it, I wondered.

I went to the site where P8's collar had been found. It was a place where the road both dipped down and curved sharply to the north. A driver coming from the east wouldn't be able to see anything on the road until it was like, 10 or 15 feet in front of him. Skid marks were visible for about 70 feet.....mixed with spots of blood and fur.... P8 must have been drug underneath the carriage. What condition was he in now? I searched the area above the rim and between the road, but couldn't find any sign of him.

It wasn't until that afternoon that the Condors appeared, circling above a slope just below the canyon rim. Eric and I hiked in. We dropped down into the canyon off-trail, heading toward the commotion the giant birds were making. They'd found P8, who had apparently succumbed to his wounds after crawling below the rim. We came upon his broken body. He had a small but very deep gash on the left side of his body.

We left the carcass where we found it, knowing that the endangered California Condors and other scavengers would have a feast. We set up a remote still camera and a remote video camera to record the action. We were able get to get the only footage ever taken of California Condors feeding on a mountain lion carcass, at least that I know of.  It's disgusting.Photo caption: Condors feeding on P8's remains, July 2005

A few days later I heard from a co-worker whose sweetie worked in Dispatch that in fact there had been a report of a mountain lion getting hit that night. The story that I heard third hand- and now you're hearing it fourth so it's bound to have been warped a bit- is that there was a family that was pulled over for driving erratically. They explained to the officer that they were driving that way because they had just collided with some big animal, possibly a mountain lion. The way it was told to me, the officer didn't believe them. He cruised up and down the road and didn't see a carcass, so he didn't put that information in his official report.

I couldn't help but wonder, if we didn't have a collar on P8, would we ever have known about his fate? How many other animals do we lose everyday without even knowing? The effects of roads on wildlife in this country, and across the world, are enormous. And if we can't even keep the wildlife safe from cars inside of our National Parks, where can we?

Blood thirsty lions attack us all the time

John Pluntze in Ketchum, Idaho wrote a letter expressing his concern about the dangers of mountain lions near towns. In it he alleges that mountain lions "more often than not," attack us just for being in their territory. He makes it sound like you can't walk out your door without getting smacked around by a lion.

He also says that you can look it up on the internet if you don't believe him. Way to back up your argument, man.

Some dude who commented says that wolves are super deadly too, and that you can look that up on the internet too. A) That's not true. Wild wolves hardly pose a threat to humans in North America. And 2) What's with people citing the internet in general, instead of specifying sources? Is this a common practice amongst wackadoozles?

Spreading this kind of misinformation leads to legislating some really asinine measures, like an automated telephone system to call you every time a mountain lion is sighted. Mountain lions and wolves alike are actually very tolerant of humans being in their territory. People recreate, hunt, fish, picnic, log, mine, camp, swim, start forest fires, ride ATVs, and build houses and golf courses and ski resorts in lion and wolf territory everyday, usually without being attacked. If anything, it's we who kill them for being in our territory. How many times have you read an article about a lion meandering into a nieghborhood/golf course/insert-name-of-human-territory-here and being shot? That actually does happen all the time.

I think its important to sort out fact from fiction, so I looked up a few facts on the internet:

Research by Dr. Paul Beier, Cougar expert at Northern Arizona University, tells us that less than 1 person per year is killed by a mountain lion.

Yes, wild animals are unpredictable, dangerous, and capable of killing us. We should take precautions to keep ourselves safe. But let's not exaggerate the facts. We don't need to make lions out to be the blood thirsty killers of horror movies. Let's keep it real.

Photo Caption: P2 (lived from approximately 2002-2006 without ever killing a person, and then was killed by a person), photo by Emily

Freedom to roam

Patagonia has adopted an environmental initiative known as "Freedom to Roam"

They're campaigning to develop awareness and support for wildlife corridors and protection of migratory routes for wildlife.

They also posted a really good article about H.R. 2454 -the bill I discussed in Save Our National Parks.

And the coolest part- videos of large critters using safe wildlife crossing structures. Patagonia is so cool!

Has anybody been hearing about the rash of sightings of "Black Mountain lions" in the Bay area?

It sounds like more of that contagious sighting phenomenon I've been railing on, especially considering that there is no such thing as a black mountain lion. There's just not. That's all there is to it. Really. That's what makes this so awesome.

Believing is Seeing

While working at Grand Canyon National Park, one of my duties was to catalog and -whenever possible-respond to mountain lion sightings in the Park. Sometimes this meant painstakingly reviewing all of the "wildlife sighting" observation cards turned into rangers throughout the summer. Other times it was more exciting, like the time I jumped in the car and raced out to Mojave Point, a popular view point along the West Rim where all of the tour buses stop and passengers get out to admire the view. The report, given third hand to me, was that there was a mountain lion standing astride a deer carcass, and that it seemed aggressive. My supervisor and I cruised out there, hearts pounding, wondering out loud how we were going to handle the situation. Would we have to close off the area to buses and visitors until the lion moved on? Move the deer carcass to encourage the lion to move on? And what did they mean by appeared to be aggressive?

When we arrived, we didn't see a thing, aside from the usual throng of tourists and a few buses parked along the rim. We gingerly stepped into the treed area, a triangle-shaped patch of land between the pullout and the main road. After about 10 minutes of searching the area for lion sign, I noticed a small bobcat underneath a bush, doing it's best to hide. I pointed it out to Elaine, and as soon as the cat realized it was spotted, the little cat ran for cover under another bush. We continued to scour the ground for additional sign, and came upon the deer carcass. It was not a lion kill, but it did appear that the timid little bobcat had been feeding on it. I kept an eye on Mojave Point for the next 3 to 4 days, making notes on the bobcat's behavior as it continued to feed on the deer.Photo caption: Bobcat with Elk Carcass on East Rim Drive, reported as mountain lion ( different story, same general theme), 2002. Photo by remote camera.

This experience was one of many examples of investigating a lion report that turned out to be false. In fact, the vast majority of sightings were cases of mistaken identity, and in some cases pure hype. That's not to say that all sightings are false. On occasion there were sightings reported by people traveling in remote areas like the river corridor, who found lion tracks, or came across a lion on a trail. These people would report the sighting as soon as they got back to civilization, sometimes 2 or 3 weeks after the encounter, so I wasn't able to race to the scene to verify their accounts. I sometimes led more credence to these backcountry sightings, which often came in singly, involved more detail, and weren't spurred by hype. There was a catchy phenomena I noticed that surrounded the "front-country" sightings. When one person said they saw a lion, suddenly everything that went bump in the night was thought to be a lion. They were contagious.

Once people heard that there was a lion sighting in an area, more subsequent sightings would come pouring in over the course of the next few days or weeks, in or around that area, regardless of whether the original sighting had been confirmed or discounted. When one person said they saw a lion, suddenly everything that went bump in the night was thought to be a lion.

Take Mather Campground, for example. Sure, there may have been a confirmed sighting once or twice in the 5 years that I spent with the Park Service, but there were infinitely more legendary sightings.

One Sunday morning, I was at home when I got a call from Park Dispatch. There's a lion in Campsite number 57 right now they said. Lounging comfortably under a bush. As usual, I raced over to investigate, heart pounding so loud that the sound filled my ears. How was I going to deal with such a brazen, and evidently, mellow, lion? The rangers working at the entrance kiosk to the campground assured me that there was a lion reported in the campsite earlier that morning, said to be "as big as a German Shepherd", and reportedly, it was still there.

They handed me a sighting form filled out by the European couple who had checked out minutes before my arrival, not because of the visitor in their campsite, but simply because they had to get on with their trip. I glanced over the meticulously filled in form. The couple had written simply that there was a "cat" in the campsite, which they described as being gray in color, and about 40 - 50 cm long. Now I'm not super familiar with the metric system, but I think that's like, a foot or more. The size of your basic house cat, let's say.

I arrived at the campsite on full alert and looked around for the German Shepherd-size cat said to be lounging around. Nada. After poking around the capsite perimeter for a bit, I came across a little gray feral housecat, softly mewling as it lay staring at me from under a bush. German shepherd my ass, I thought, who was it that reported this as a mountain lion anyway? Clearly the couple that reported it simply said there was a cat in their campsite, and from there the rumors snowballed out of control. The little gray housecat ran into a culvert under the road as I approached, so I left the campsite, stopping by the campground kiosk on my way out to let the rangers know that the coast was clear. No danger today folks, just a little kittycat.

But by then it was too late. The girlscout troop in the campsite across the road from the little gray cat's lair had already heard about the mountain lion sighting.
That night, as they lay terrified in their sleeping bags all in a row, they were reportedly kept up by the sounds of the wild animal throughout the night. On the sighting form that they completed, they said that it "sounded really big." Of course they heard a really big lion all night, after hearing that one was lounging less than 20 feet away from where you were camping, wouldn't you?

Sightings and other various reports of lion activity from the campground continued over the next few weeks. Rumors spread like wildfire throughout the park. Friends and coworkers would repeatedly ask me about the lion in the campground. Had I heard? What was I going to do about it? We set some humane cage traps for the feral kitty, hoping to catch and relocate her and stop the madness, but she was elusive. I couldn't catch her. I joked to friends that I wanted to catch her and make her my pet, taking her around to show people the lion that terrorized the campground. I never did. Eventually she moved off on her own, leaving the legend as her legacy.

Years later, responding to yet another lion reported in Mather Campground (I found bobcat tracks in the mud where the "lion" had been), the ranger working in the kiosk informed me that a few summers back there had been a lion hanging around in the campground for a while. In campsite number 57, she proclaimed. Oh yeah, I told her, I was there, and it turned out to be a feral cat. No, she argued, insisting that this was a different one. This one was as big as a German Shepherd....

Save Our National Parks- and everything else too!

In an All Things Considered story in the series "Climate Connections," Ken Cole of the U.S. Geological Survey said "It looks from our modeling that Joshua Tree National Park and pretty much the southern half of the range would be too warm in the next 50 to 100 years to support Joshua trees anymore." Fifty to one hundred years? That's next to no time. It means that if we are going to take action to conserve resources threatened by advancing climate change, we need to act now. That's why I was so happy to see this article.

The National Park Service is being called upon to develop a detailed plan -and acquire associated funding- to address temperature-related ecosystem changes. NPS may even get funding from Congress to implement their plan, which would include identifying corridors for wildlife and plant movement. Corridors that could allow entire ecosystems to migrate north, or to higher elevations, to accommodate movement as the climate causes the location of ecosystems to shift. According to the article, a major climate bill passed by the House in June would allocate more than $500 million a year to natural resources adaptation under a proposed carbon-trading program. I'm so happy to see support for planning and protecting wildlife corridors.

The National Park Service isn't the only agency on board. In June of 2008, the Western Governors adopted the “Wildlife Corridors Initiative Report.” They established a council to identify key wildlife corridors and crucial wildlife habitats in the West, and conserve these lands—and the vast wildlife species that depend upon them—for future generations.

Groups like SC Wildlands and the Arizona Missing Linkages project have already started developing- and implementing- plans known as "Linkage Designs" that address these very issues by working collaboratively with local, state, and federal governments and countless other partners throughout California and Arizona to identify areas key to wildlife movement and create detailed plans for conserving them.

Wildlife habitat doesn't follow ownership boundaries delineated by people or land management agencies. A wild herd of elk may migrate across several different jurisdictions including state land, Forest Service land, Park Service land, land managed by timber companies or land conservancies, and even private land when moving from their winter foraging ground to their summer playground. The landscape is made up of a patchy matrix of ownership boundaries, fences, roads, and in some cases major obstacles to wildlife movement like busy highways, oil and gas drilling pads, solar energy farms, or new housing developments. The animals have to weave their way through this matrix at their own risk. They don't have the advantage of Google Earth or a GPS unit to let them know where the maze ends and the next patch of wildland begins. They get caught in fences, hit by cars, and in some cases, like that of the pronghorn antelope in the Prescott Valley, herds can become completely enclosed by encroaching development on all sides, the population destined to die off. We can help by conserving connected lands in the form of wildlife corridors to facilitate the movements of free-ranging wildlife now and in the future; to allow for migration, gene-flow, dispersal, and climate change. It's incredibly important that state and federal governments partner with eachother and with as many other groups as they can to identify and protect wildlife corridors. I hope that state and federal governments step up to support the work that needs to be done in designing and implementing the plans.

Don't go outside and associated hype surrounding lion sightings

Did you know that California has an automated telephone system that calls and warns residents to stay inside when a big cat is sighted? This article depicts the problem with this hysteria- driven policy. Over 600 residents were called and told to stay inside because there was, get this, a big stray cat on the loose.

So for starters this wasn't even a lion. But if it were, is this kind of management necessary or could they be overreacting? I'm all for taking pro-active measures to keep yourself safe from lions at home. You can take steps make your yard less lion-friendly, ie. Don't plant deer-attracting vegetation in your yard; Keep your pets, their food, and their water indoors especially at night; Clear dense shrubbery from around your yard; and by all means Don't Feed Wildlife! But to sequester yourself indoors because there could maybe, possibly, based on some totally unsubstantiated report, be something like a lion outside somewhere?

Well, here's the deal (provided you live within current mountain lion range): 1) There are lions outside. That's where they live. If you live near lion habitat, according to this policy you may as well build a bunker. If you're not sure if you live near lion habitat, look outside. Are there any deer? Because 2) often times where there are deer, there will be lions. Not all the time, by any means. Lions occur at very low densities and individuals cover large home ranges so they are few and far between, but if your yard is prime deer habitat, it could serve as lion habitat at least some of the time.

Does this increase your chances of being attacked by a wild mountain lion? Sure, I mean-- more so than if you live in the Bronx. But how high are the chances? They are still very, very low. And if you want to further reduce that chance, see the measures listed above.

Now, I'm no mathematician, but I know that the average number of people killed by mountain lions annually in the U.S. is some fraction of a whole number. It's very very rare. So rare that it does not warrant hysterically freaking out about it, like, say, the way you should if Cujo suddenly appears in your neighborhood. Meanwhile, there are real dangers outside that are around us all the time. For example, the number of people killed in car accidents annually in the U.S. is over 40,000 http://www.unitedjustice.com/death-statistics.html. An average of 114 people are killed in car accidents every day in the U.S. Does that mean that California should set up an automated telephone system to call and warn you to stay inside every time a car passes through your neighborhood? I thought so.

oh-- did I even mention how incredibly unreliable lion sightings are? That's another post all together...

I'm not buyin it

I hope that the Senate doesn't pass the additional $2 billion up for vote this week for the Cash for Clunkers program. Despite the "incentives" provided for trading in your old car for one that gets better gas mileage, this program is not designed to benefit either the consumer nor the environment. Cash for Clunkers, or CARS, is designed to benefit the automobile industry at the consumers' expense.

When I first heard about the program, I was genuinely excited. I couldn't wait to get in line to trade in my clunker and receive a $3500 -$4500 voucher for use toward purchasing a new vehicle. Then I did a little homework. I discovered that in order to qualify for the voucher, one has to buy a brand new car, not just a newer model. Unless you have a cool $20k laying around, that means saddling yourself with tens of thousands of dollars of debt. How is that benefiting the consumer? Its not. As a nation of persons facing massive unemployment rates and debts and mortgages we can't keep up with, I think we've learned first hand the dangers of overextending our credit.

And get this- no matter what condition your older gas-guzzling vehicle is in, it's going straight to the crusher. A condition of the program is that you agree that your vehicle will be scrapped. Even if you trade in a relatively new car in decent condition, shebang. How does this benefit the environment? It doesn't. One could argue that by getting that old gas guzzler off the road, we are effectively using less gas and thereby saving the planet. But crushing a perfectly good car is a waste of resources when you think of all the materials that went into making all of the components for both of those cars, inside and out. Not to mention the amount of fossil fuels used to ship all of the various components from around the world to the manufacturers.... Cars don't grow on trees, you know.

So if this program is not benefiting either consumers or the environment, what is it good for? Its good for pouring billions of dollars directly into the automobile industry- while funneling more money that way in the form of naive consumers who think they are doing their part to save the planet, reduce reliance on foreign oil, and help out their pocket books. I would rather see us funnel billions of dollars into better public transportation that could reduce traffic, emissions, and our reliance on oil. Cash for Clunkers is just another big industry bailout, and I'm not buyin' it.