- Joined
- Mar 23, 2019
A full grown mountain lion is about 3 feet tall at the shoulder. They can jump 18 feet vertically and 45 feet in distance with a running start. Speaking of running, their top speed is 40 miles per hour. And while they can't sustain that speed for long, they're ambush predators and extremely stealthy - they don't NEED to be able to run for a long time because they're going to hide and wait for you to get close enough to pounce on from behind.
Regarding manlets, while most fatal attacks HAVE been children, notable adult deaths include a trail runner, 5'8" tall and 130lbs who was killed by a 3 year old 80lb female mountain lion with cubs. The runner actually fought back and got away for a bit, but it attacked again and killed her. In 2018, two "men" were riding their bicycles and a mountain lion attacked them both; one got away and the other, 5'8" and 200lbs, was killed by the 4 year old, 100lb male cougar. And speaking of cyclists, a trail biker, 6" and 175lbs, was killed by 2 year old, 110lb male.
Mountain lions usually prey on things larger than they are; they mainly eat white-tail deer, mulies, and elk.
Deer are slightly taller at the shoulder than a cougar and weigh 150 to 300lbs.
Elk are over 5 feet at the shoulder and weigh between 600 and 1000lbs.
They'll also take down a bull moose, which is 7 feet at the shoulder and weighs 1500lbs.
(Note for our Euro friends: What you call an "elk" is what we call a "moose". You don't have elk there anymore, so just imagine a big fucking deer.)
In comparison, an alpaca is about 3 feet at the shoulder and weighs 150lbs.
As for feral pigs, this data from 2017 is interesting:
In the 2016 – 2017 hunting season, tag sales decreased 2.2 percent from the 53,430 tags sold in 2015. Furthermore, 4,637 wild pigs were reported taken, representing a 8.9 percent increase in the number of successful tags returned from the 2015 season of 4,223. A total of 52,256 wild pig tags were issued making overall successful tag return 8.9 percent. The top six counties for pig harvest were: Monterey (24.0%), Mendocino (9.1%), San Luis Obispo (9.0%), Sonoma (8.0%), Kern (7.7%) and Tehama (7.5%). These six counties accounted for about 65 percent of reported take.
Feral pigs are generally found in the edges of the Central Valley and coastal regions, specifically they like oak savannahs, woodlands, and chaparral. They don't live in mountainous/alpine regions (they don't like snow) or deserts or places where there aren't a lot of trees/shrubs for cover. They also tend to live on private land (since much of California's public lands consist of habitats they don't like) which can make access for hunting difficult. There's no point in free access to BLM land for hunting when your quarry isn't there.
Again, 52,256 boar tags were issued and only 4,223 were filled. There are plenty of people who want to hunt boar, they're just difficult to bag; tree huggers have nothing to do with it. You can even use dogs to hunt boar in CA.
And the forest service has better fucking things to do than chase a bunch of pigs around the forest. If you hadn't noticed, massive parts of California tend to catch on fire yearly.
