The Beast in the Garden: The True Story of a Predator's Deadly Return to Suburban America

Baron's book lays out the tale of the gradual return of cougars to the wildland-urban interface in the Colorado Front Range region, describing the beasts' increasing boldness around humans, their snatching of domestic pets, and finally incidents of predation on human beings; and also the changed social context that made this phenomenon possible, and the various human and institutional reactions to it, some complacent, some shrill, some prescient.

I had a curiously mixed reaction to the book. On the one hand, it's interesting raw material, and Baron creates an entertaining narrative. On the other hand there are some irritating things about the book, particularly when he strives to put it all into a larger social context. Whether you will like this book or not really depends on how tolerant you are of the axes which Baron chooses to grind.

Baron shapes his narrative as if the "lion problem" emanated from Boulder and was caused by the Boulder cultural context. It didn't, and it wasn't. The first fatal lion attack occurred in Idaho Springs, near I-70, and closer to the Denver suburb of Lakewood than to Boulder; the second occurred in Rocky Mtn National Park, where one might as well blame the gateway town of Estes Park, or National Park service policies; the first of the non-fatal attacks he relates occurred in the foothills southwest of Denver; only the second (non-fatal attack) could reasonably be said to have occurred "in Boulder", or more exactly a couple of miles out of town up one of the canyons that debouches in boulder. Why does he turn this account of Front Range lions into an account of "Boulder lions"? Partly, one imagines because Boulder contained a few prescient people who saw the phenomenon building and documented it. But also because Boulder contains some of the more florid cultural elements which enable him to turn this into a narrative of naïve eloi nature-worshippers being eaten by lions. It's in fact a much wider phenomenon and doesn't really have a whole lot to do with Boulder animal rights activists.

It's pretty clear that reduced, or eliminated hunting pressure on lions, bears meso-predators (e.g., coyotes, bobcats, raccoons) is one part of the story, and that changing cultural attitudes about nature have helped to bring about that reduction in hunting or trapping pressure. But economic forces are also part of the explanation. When ranching was a principal industry across much of the mountain west and the rockies foothills, mountain lions were shot on sight as a matter of course, because they killed calves. Now that working ranches are disappearing from much of the mountain west, and have effectively disappeared from the Front Range, the economic incentive to kill the beasts has declined accordingly, quite independently of whether they are "protected" or not. And as for fur trapping, how many people make money trapping bobcats or beavers anymore? Such grueling occupations pay next to nothing; financially speaking one would be better off flipping burgers.

It's also clear that new exurban living patterns--ultra-low-density far-flung suburbs--are part of the explanation, since they put people and houses into good wildlife habitat, and also offer trophic resources such as succulent non-native plants, garbage, and domestic pets, which are not present in real wildlands, and which wild animals learn to take advantage of. Baron says some accurate things about this new exurban living pattern--that it is part of a "grand unintended experiment", that people are moving out to more natural environments as the beasts are simultaneously moving into humanized environments, and that problems will result. But in sophistical style he uses these problems (e.g., being attacked by lions) as a sufficient reason to declare that the idea of wilderness is a myth, that people are affecting everything, and a preservationist leave-it-alone approach is untenable, etc, etc. He brings up the old hoary conservation-vs-preservation debate dating back to Gifford Pinchot vs John Muir.

He also suggests that nature lovers approve of this new residence pattern and its attendant human-nature mixing. "America is becoming one vast ecotone where civilization and nature intermingle. To some this suggests a utopian state of affairs. Peregrine falcons nest atop skyscrapers..." The thing is, no conservationist or naturalist I know, however much they enjoy peregrines nesting on skyscrapers, has anything but dislike for the exurban living pattern. It is wildland-destroying, gluttonous of resources, and unsustainable. If Baron payed any attention to e.g., voting patterns, demography, or the distribution of mega-churches, he would understand that low-density exurbs are by many measures culturally conservative spaces, as much a latter day "white flight" as they are an expression of affinity for nature. No doubt many of those "eco-tards" living in Boulder understand that perfectly well, which is why they live in the city of Boulder at urban densities rather than up some canyon with a half-mile driveway on a 15-acre private kingdom and a giant sport ute.

Baron also busily sets up, and knocks down preservationist straw men who advocate for leaving "pristine" nature alone in all circumstances, when in fact, he argues,there is no "pristine" nature left, and so everything needs to be "managed". Once again, I have no idea who Baron is talking about here. Every conservationist I know understands that human beings are affecting every square inch of the planet these days. Anyone who knows anything about conservation biology understands that "pristine" spaces are not large enough, and not connected enough, and not representative enough of all earth's biomes, to be able to preserve earth's biodiversity. One has to pay attention to more human-affected parts of the landscape as well. It is also pretty clear to every intelligent naturalist and conservationist that in the lower 48 there is no escape from some form of management for large wide-ranging carnivores like wolverines, grizzly bears, and yes, cougars, and that managing humans and human residence patterns is also necessary to minimize conflicts. The remaining wild areas simply aren't big enough, or connected enough, and the potential for conflict with humans is too great. Even the 4.5-million acre greater Yellowstone ecosystem is a bit small to sustain grizzly bears indefinitely without genetic interchange with other populations, which might need to be done artificially. Fishers were recently returned to Olympic National Park via an artifical reintroduction, after an absence of some decades. There was nothing controversial about it. Everybody understood that fishers were very unlikely to recolonize the area on their own from remaining source populations in Montana and Idaho.

Exceptions of this sort notwithstanding, there in fact are still vast areas of the mountain west for which the best long-term "management" strategy is to leave them alone. Nature is resilient, and can recover from disturbance of human or natural origin in interesting and complex ways. Conversely it is absolutely incorrect to think that the traditional resource extraction agenda is dead or defeated on our public lands. Federal land management agencies and their allies (with the honorable exception of the National Park Service) have learned to disguise retrograde resource-extraction agendas under the guise of "restoration", that is all.

On the specific subject of cougars, I personally think Baron makes a bit too much of the notion that cougars are doing this stuff only because humans, for the first time ever, have stopped their "aversive conditioning", i.e., hunting and killing the beasts. Cougars are at the best of times idiosyncratic and unpredictable, and my guess is that they have been sneaking up on people, and following them, and occasionally preying on them, for as long as humans and cougars have shared this continent. I have seen cougars on the ground only four times. By far the spookiest of these encounters--the cougar approached me stealthily in the dark to within about five meters, where I noticed it by its eyeshine-- was in an area of Baja California where ranchers still shoot cougars on sight, and where cougars have next to no opportunity to get habituated to human beings.

The "problem" illustrated by this 278-page non-fiction book is the increasing contact between humans and mountain lions (cougar, puma, whatever...) in the Western United States.

Baron focuses on the encroachment of the big cats into urban Boulder, CO in the 1990s with a consequent tragic result for both cougars and people. The lion/human interactions escalate from the occasional urban sighting - at first denied by wildlife authorities - to cougars killing deer within city boundaries to killing pets to killing farm animals to stalking and threatening humans to, finally, an incident in which a lion kills a high school student athlete as he runs in broad daylight on a hillside above his school.

This tale, with lots of footnoted references, also tracks the efforts of a Boulder parks department employee who, from his experience with people being killed by wildlife in Yellowstone NP, recognizes the growing potential for a deadly cougar/human encounter. But he can't convince state game officials to take the problem seriously, partly because game department officials believe Boulder brought the problem on themselves by allowing deer, the cougar's favorite food, to proliferate far beyond normal population density by the city's anti-hunting bias. Apart from the dead high school student, there are cautionary tales about a college-age woman who is treed (yes!) by cougars while running in a suburban area and an adult male attacked and injured on a popular day hike.

But other than recoding and mapping the locations of cougar/human encounters - which Washington state just passed a law requiring - what can be done to avoid cougars becoming habituated to (i.e., not fearful of) people with the eventual conclusion on their part that humans are valid prey? Nobody knows.

Baron's book is well written, entertaining and educational. My only complaints are about the author's occasional rambles into non-relevant aspects of some of the characters' lives and the lack of photographs. There's one photo of a cougar track in the snow (good to memorize if you live in or visit cat country!) and one of a cougar shot by Boulder police. But in a book which goes into depth about several characters I'd like to see pictures of them as well as some of the locations where incidents occurred.

Recommended for anyone interested in North American wildlife or anyone living in "cougar country", which currently is most any place in the Western United States.

I wanted to like this book. I really did. I live in the Black Hills of South Dakota where cougars are thriving and have become quite controversial. I got this book because it was said to be a good middle road book on this subject. Although Baron's book is quite a page turner, it suffers from narrative bias, a common problem in journalism where one then filters out out any information that does not fit the already known storyline. He's trying to write a cougar version of "Jaws."

Now don't get me wrong. He gets a number of things right. I agree that cougars need to be managed. I am all for well-managed cougar hunting. Cougars evolved to deal with the age old antagonism of an old rival: the wolf. Hunting cougars can help keep the balance in an ecosystem that is not playing cards with a complete deck.

My problem with this book is the way it uses fear to hook the reader. I live in prime cougar country, and I must say this: cougar attacks are rare. Very, very, rare. This is not to mean cougars are not dangerous, but by focusing mostly on the attacks the author seems to degenerate into rather unbalanced fear-mongering. The parts on Boulder are also quite bizarre. The lion attack he mentioned did not even happen in Boulder. It happened near Idaho Springs, which is a blue-collar town closer to Denver, and Denver and Boulder do not even compare. The author seems to be going for this oblivious hippy vs. unpredictable nature dichotomy, and it doesn't work because he's simply being dishonest. He's also disturbingly dismissive of scientists.

Let me tell you what its REALLY like to live in lion country. Occasionally, one finds tracks and scat. Sometimes your dog drags home a well-trimmed deer haunch from a lion cache. But when you finally see the resident shadow cat, it runs and hides. You are cautious for your pets. But so far your loving, but dum-as-a-rock dog and your 20 year old half-blind house cat are apparently too wily for the mighty catamount. Even your neighbor's many oh so delicious chickens seem to be a bit too exotic for the resident tom.

Now I'm not saying cougars are harmless. They are powerful predators and deserve respectful fear. But the author needs to give the cats some credit. Cougars seem pretty good at giving US respectful fear. Even in prime cougar country, the odds of seeing one of these animals is minuscule, let alone being attacked. Overall, what I wanted as a reader was a balanced, sane, treatment of a very real and complex issue. Instead I got a mixed bag selective evidence and very annoying city-slicker anxieties towards lions and hippies.

A fitness freak teenager, Scott Lancaster, skips his lunch period to run - his track a mountain trail just upslope from his Idaho Springs, Colorado, high school. The track lies within a few hundred yards of I-70, not far from Colorado's gambling towns, Central City and Black Hawk, about 40 miles west of Denver. Not unusual behavior for a youngster who often cut classes to go running.

But Scott Lancaster did not come back to school or to home. Two days later, a search team including many of Scott's fellow students, about ready to give up looking, found his brutally assaulted body in heavy underbrush, just off his trail.

A Beast in the Garden killed Scott.

The book tells the tale in a readable way. How the Garden came to be. How the wilderness areas at the edge of human development along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains were set aside as nature preserves in which the Beasts could live undisturbed. How the Beasts' natural predators were driven off. How the Beasts adapted to co-existence with the humans at the edges of the Garden. How the Beasts were seen moving further and further into developed areas like Boulder and Idaho Springs. How the Beasts showed their killer instinct with dogs and cats and sheep and other smaller animals. How the Beasts changed their ways, hunting in broad daylight, killing animals people said it feared. How the Beasts repeatedly attacked humans, even though it was said they would not. How a Beast treed Lynda Walters. How Andy Peterson saved himself by gouging out another Beast's eye. How a Beast killed Scott.

The Beasts in the Garden were mountain lions.

The book is the story of a killing and the hunt for the killer. It is also a story of a young naturalist, Michael Sanders, then of the Boulder County Parks and Open Space District, helping humans learn to live with the raccoons and other small invaders from the Garden. Mountain lion sightings piqued Sanders' fascination for big animals. Sanders and others began to build a systematic knowledge base of verified mountain lion sightings. They showed how the population of mountain lions appeared to be growing. How the sightings were of behaviors that proved more and more dangerous to domestic animals, even to humans. How Sanders warned that mountain lions posed significant danger - and was often ignored.

Finally, the book is a study in eco-sociology. Of the forces that created and still maintain the Garden as a preserve for wilderness creatures. Of the conflicting values of those living on the edge of the Garden, those who would remove mountain lions from the Garden, those whose saw humans as the intruders onto the mountain lions' natural home. It is a story that pits neighbor against neighbor. More instructively, it pits Sanders and his friends against the State and Federal park and wilderness managers. It pits emerging reality against common wisdom.

David Baron is a reporter on science and the environment for National Public Radio who first became interested in the behavior of mountain lions in developed areas while doing a 1996 story on a hiker who was killed by a mountain lion near Auburn, CA. His interest took him to the Garden that is the wilderness near Boulder and to Scott Lancaster's and Michael Sanders' stories. Beast in the Garden is a very good read, a well-written mystery that would be thoroughly satisfying were it not for the macabre reality.

The reality is not unique to Colorado's Front Range. My local newspaper has reported many sightings in the town north of my community, sightings and attacks on sheep, goats, and other small animals. A cashier at the local supermarket lost her dog to a mountain lion that is a frequent visitor in the community 15 miles south of mine. A nearby vineyard owner reports a female that has given birth to twin kits annually for several years. The regional paper has reported mountain lion sightings in urban areas, one just a few blocks from the county's community college. On a recent ten-day swing through the Pacific Northwest, there were reports of mountain lion sightings in developed areas in the Tacoma News Tribune, the Vancouver Sun, the Lewiston, Idaho, Tribune, and the Portland Oregonian.

So reality reminds us that my community, a former sheep ranch of about 3000 acres that has been developed with 2300 properties and more than 1500 acres of common land - forests and meadows - is a Garden, too. We, too, are seeing mountain lions. Not just in the forests, but in our meadows, close to the trails along the ocean bluff. Deer kills are reported routinely. We, too, have lost some of the sheep we keep to reduce fire risk, and there are musings about pets that have gone missing. No attacks on humans - yet.

The lessons in Beast in the Garden do not stop at the Front Range; they are applicable in my community - and maybe yours.

This book does a superb job of helping the reader see nature as it is, as opposed to how many of us would prefer to imagine it to be. Although the book suggests some solutions to the macro sources of conflict between people and mountain lions, it doesn't provide much practical advice for surviving an aggressive encounter. Such advice can be found in the book Mountain Lion Alert by Stephen Torres.

One disconcerting detail that Baron provides in the description of the victim's remains is the damage done to the victim's face. Those familiar with the descriptions of other lion attacks in the past 15 years will recognize a pattern that is worth bearing in mind for anyone wishing to survive an attack. With a 65 - 150 lb animal attached to your head or face, you had better hope you have a suitably long knife located where you're conditioned to quickly find it if you want to have a chance of breaking off the attack. A hiking staff, pistol, can of mace, rock, backpack or any other weapon you might consider carrying in lion country will do you very little good once physical contact has been made.

If Baron decides to write a follow up book, I'd love to hear about the specific steps wildlife managers and citizens can take to help prevent cougars from becoming habituated to people. Some wildlife officers have attempted to reinstill or reinforce the natural fear cougars have of people by shooting them with rubber bullets or bean bags when they wander into residential areas. Frequent non-lethal hunts in areas where problems have begun to occur might be one of the most acceptable ways to stem habituation without killing any of these magnificent animals.

The story builds to a climax, culminating in the death of a 19-year-old jogger near Idaho Spring, Colorado in January, 1991. But that mountain lion attack had nothing to do with lion habituation in Boulder. Since 1991, there have been no further fatal lion attacks in Colorado. Only three people have been killed by lions since 2000 in all of the US and Canada.

For an evaluation by a knowledgeable Coloradan, Google MOUNTAIN LIONS, MYTHS, AND MEDIA: A CRITICAL REEVALUATION OF THE BEAST IN THE GARDEN

This book is sensationalist fabrication based on unwarranted extrapolation from one fatal mountain lion attack in Idaho Springs, Colorado. For some reason the author spends most of the book talking about Boulder, Colorado. I have lived in Boulder since 1967. The author is right about the liberal, nature loving culture in Boulder. However, that has nothing whatsoever to do with the fatal mountain lion attack in Idaho Springs. I have been hiking, climbing, back country skiing, and snowshoeing in the mountains around Boulder, and along the continental divide, for almost 50 years. During this time I have been fortunate enough to see a mountain lion one time. They do live in the mountains, but the risk of attack is negligible. The risk of being killed by domestic dogs is about 10 times higher, and the risk of being killed in a car accident is about 2000 times greater. It is easy to find statistics on the number of fatal mountain lion attacks, fatal attacks by domestic dogs, and car fatalities on line.
There is an excellent detailed review of this book written by Wendy Keefover-Ring, currently the Native Carnivore Protection Manager at The Humane Society of the United States, located in Boulder. The title is "Mountain Lions, Myths, And Media: A Critical Reevaluation of the Beast in the Garden". A pdf copy can be found with a Google search. Tom Chester has also compiled a realistic list of the risks of mountain lion attacks and various other outdoor hazards at [...]

This is a masterful analysis of the true events surrounding the "wildification" of Colorado's front range. I found it prophetic concerning my "neck of the woods," a small city 50 miles from the tallest mountain in Northern California. My house is 6 miles from the center of this city of 100,000, and I have had 4 cougar sightings on my property. I found Mr. Baron's depiction of what I see as the inexorable progression of cougar predation of deer, to cats and dogs, and finally to humans, as personally bone-chilling. 5 STARS!!!!

I am and always have been both interested and fascinated by mountain lions, and this book has only reinforced this. This book reads unlike any others - it is extremely informative regarding the region and its ecology. I really appreciate how it addresses how exactly the problem came to existence, and how trying to change nature causes tragedies like this. I highly recommend this book to anybody with even a remote interest in the outdoors or mountain lions.

This book reads like it could be a work of fiction but it is a true story of the increase in Mountain Lion populations and how the people in Boulder unintentionally helped bring this about--with unexpected and tragic results. You get to know about the boy who became the wild cats dinner--an average teenager,neither all good nor all bad. You get to know how the population in Boulder county helped increase the mountain lion population by purposely allowing the deer population to increase and even enjoying the first sightings of the mountain lions. These battles are still raging in areas where the mountain lion survives--Colorado and California to mention the two biggest areas. Wonderful book about unintended consequences from people's actions.