Welcome the Cougars Colleen Stevens Cougars are powerful predators that roam the Western United States and Southern Canada. They once roamed the Eastern hemisphere as well, but they were chased out and hunted to extinction. Now there is a petition to bring the cougars back, and reintroduce them into their Eastern territory once again. Some people claim bringing cougars back would just create predator versus human conflicts. However, cougars would, in fact, improve the state of our ecosystem while simultaneously affecting ecological factors that could save humans’ lives. The biggest cause for concern in reintroducing cougars is the potential that they will attack hikers or pedestrians. People worry about having an apex predator prowling the forests near their homes and families. They also fear for their pets’ lives; cougars are known to occasionally prey on our domestic companions if the opportunity arises. Furthermore, cougars out West have wreaked havoc on livestock, costing many farmers valuable revenue. Although these are possible repercussions of bringing a top predator to our area, they are easily outweighed by the positive aspects which accompany the presence of cougars. Due to the rise in deer population, much of the Eastern U.S ecosystem has become unbalanced. Deer are known as “keystone” herbivores. A keystone species is a species that significantly alters the habitat around them, thus affecting large numbers of other organisms. One impact increased deer populations have on humans is that it puts them at a higher risk of contracting Lyme disease. Lyme disease is carried by deer ticks, which pass the disease on to humans through their bite. Lyme disease has become the “single
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greatest vector-borne disease in the United States,” according to Danielle Buttke, an epidemiologist with the National Park Service. Although deer don’t carry the Lyme-causing bacterium, they encourage its transmission. Reintroducing cougars would significantly lower the deer population. Lowering the deer population would effectively reduce the number of ticks because they would have less to feed on. Even though deer are not the only food source for ticks, cougars could indirectly influence the populations of other tick carrying species as well. In theory, cougars could create a domino effect, causing a decrease in species such as chipmunks and rats that also transport infected ticks. Much like the trickle down economics theory, the predator theory posits that adding an apex predator would help balance out the ecosystem by stimulating a period of growth in certain areas of the food web, thereby restabilizing the ecological community. The massive population of deer in the East has depleted the ground cover, limiting the recovery of some small predators from the weasel family. These small predators hunt rodents, which would further decrease the population of Lyme disease bearing ticks. Cougars would lower the deer population which would allow the regrowth of the understory. This would promote an increase of the small predators effectively lowering the number of rodents. Lyme disease is just one of the many illnesses that animals can transfer to people. Predation effects on animal-borne illnesses have already been proven to work. One example of this is on California’s Channel Islands. Scientists found that “the islands with the greatest number of predator species had the lowest prevalence of
