Here’s some interesting research on mountain lion-human interaction. Mountain lions, it seems, aren’t just elusive, they actively avoid contact with humans. It’s almost insulting . . .
“Fraidy cat” isn’t the way most people think of mountain lions, but when it comes to encounters with humans, perhaps they should.
New research into the behavior of these big cats indicates that they don’t like encountering humans any more than we like bumping into them on hiking trails. The findings are particularly valuable as human development encroaches on lion habitat and drives up the number of human-puma encounters.
“We exposed pumas in the Santa Cruz mountains to the sound of human voices to see if they would react with fear and flee, and the results were striking: They were definitely afraid of humans,” said Justine Smith, lead author of the paper “Fear of the human ‘super predator’ reduces feeding time in large carnivores,” published in the June 21 online edition of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.