Since voters’ 1990 passage of the California Wildlife Protection Act, mountain lions have been a protected species in the state, off-limits to hunters.
For instances in which cougars are determined by state agents to be a threat to human life and property, wildlife authorities issue permits allowing the animals to be killed.
The nonlethal hazing measures, in turn, can include bringing in a trapper “with trained lion dogs to go chase those animals” — not to harm the big cats, Tira said, “but to give it a very negative experience, and let the lion know this is not a good place to hang out.”
When the trapper did bring his tracking dogs, days later, “they couldn’t pick up the scent,” said Barr.
The evening after that first attack, at her request, her neighbor Jesse Cude posted up outside the alpaca enclosure. An experienced hunter, Cude brought a shotgun. He knew there were big cats in the area. Two years earlier, a game camera on his ranch captured an image of four mountain lions, together. In January, one of his sheep was killed by a mountain lion.
Suddenly, in the half light of dusk, a pair of big cats sprinted past him, followed quickly by the distinctive, high-pitched “screaming,” as he put it, of alpacas being attacked. After opening the gate and entering the pen, “I see this shadow coming toward me,” recalled Cude, who thought it was an alpaca.
“But it was one of the cats, and it saw me about the time I identified it.”
Cude fired his shotgun, but missed, he believes. “I’ve been shooting a shotgun since I was 12,” he said. “I’m pretty good with it.” But it was dark, and the lion was going about 30 mph. “And it was close, so your pattern isn’t very big.”
As he reloaded, a second big cat raced past.
Two more alpacas died that night.
Because the lions were attacking Barr’s animals, Cude noted, he was justified in firing his weapon. Also, he added, “they were running at me. I was in fear for my own safety at that point.”
Following the second attack, on Aug. 18, Fish and Wildlife issued Barr a lethal depredation permit to kill one adult lion. The trapper who had visited the previous day, returned.
After keeping a vigil outside the alpaca enclosure from dusk until midnight or so, he left.
Around 4 a.m., Barr recalled, she heard the dogs “barking” and “carrying on.”
When she ventured out to investigate, “I had two more dead.”
Martins, the mountain lion expert and managing partner of True Wild, a company devoted to connecting people with nature by various means, including wildlife research projects and safaris, expressed sorrow upon learning about the attacks on Barr’s alpacas.
“The trauma for the surviving animals and the livestock owner must be incredible,” he said. “I’m very sorry to hear about it.”
Martins, who is also principal investigator for Audubon Canyon Ranch’s “Living With Lions” project, then pointed out that unless a specific mountain lion “is known to be a regular and repeated killer of livestock, killing the lion does not solve the underlying issue that the livestock needs to be protected.
“After you kill that animal, and do nothing, it is just a matter of time before another one does the same thing.”
While he questions the long-term usefulness of the noise and light deterrents Barr was racing to put in place Wednesday, Martins was encouraged that she’d taken protective steps before the attacks, and is now in the process of taking additional measures. Guardian dogs, if properly trained and managed, he said, “can be a great solution for people on bigger properties with more animals.”
If raising a fence is prohibitively expensive, he suggests that property owners consider the use of “shade cloth, 6 to 8 feet high, or similar, dense, non-see-though material around a corral.”
Mountain lions are “incredibly visually stimulated predators,” he said. “By blocking off the visual cue, they generally lose interest and won’t venture to jump in.”
In addition to providing landowners free advice on how best to protect their livestock, Martin and Living with Lions work with local veterinarians to humanely capture lions, rather than having them killed.
While sedated, the lions are equipped with GPS tracking collars. Since 2016, said Martins, 35 lions have been collared, providing data on their movement, breeding, diet and hunting behavior.
While the sheep killed on his property this winter was “half-eaten,” Cude said, none of Barr’s alpacas were consumed by the lions, which he described as killing “for sport.”
Tira, the Fish and Wildlife official, disagreed, noting that “wildlife animals don’t kill for sport. That’s a human concept we project on them.”
It’s not uncommon, he said, when mountain lions get into a pen with livestock, “that they will keep killing until everything stops moving in that enclosure.”
Based on what she’s heard from acquaintances and now seen with her own eyes, Barr is of the opinion that mountain lions around her are getting bolder. She’s reacting accordingly.
“I’ve never had a gun or a lawyer,” she said, “I’ve just lived in harmony.” But these days, she’s taking suggestions from neighbors on what kind of firearm she might be most comfortable with.
“I’ve known the lions were there, but they’ve never come down the hill,” she said.
“Until last Sunday night.”
You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.