Wildlife Management

Not in 18 years has a sport hunter legally shot and killed a California mountain lion--a secretive, nocturnal predator that inhabits terrain as disparate as the eastern desert, the Sierra Nevada's snowy slopes and the coastal oak woodlands of Los Angeles and Orange counties. In 1987, the state Department of Fish and Game tried to reintroduce limited hunting of the animals, whose population statewide was estimated to have grown to about 5,100.

After meeting with animal welfare advocates over the killing of a mountain lion last month, the Santa Monica Police Department said it would consider changing procedures for handling wildlife incidents. In a statement released last week, the department said it was committed to training first responders and to developing a list of local consulting experts. It said it would also seek appropriate equipment and tools and support ongoing efforts to reduce the likelihood that wildlife would enter densely populated urban areas.

As preparations continue to move the last ailing elephant from the city's zoo, officials say it will be years before visitors see another. The elephant exhibit is scheduled to close once Lulu, a 38-year-old African pachyderm with chronic health problems, is moved to a sanctuary run by the Performing Animal Welfare Society in the Sierra foothills. She is the fourth elephant to die or move this year from the antiquated half-acre exhibit.

Coyotes howling into the night are as much a part of Calabasas as the aspiring screenwriters, retired moguls and stay-at-home mothers who crowd the coffee shops in the city's well-manicured mall. But that doesn't mean residents are at ease with the predators that roam this community nestled in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. Debbi Gillman remembers the afternoon her daughter came home to find the remains of the family's retriever-mix strewn across the backyard.

The Hunt Saboteurs think as Thoreau: "In wildness is the preservation of the world." Thoreau left no gray areas. Neither do the Hunt Sabbers. "We just don't believe in man managing animals," says Jonathan Paul, an organizer of Hunt Saboteurs CA. "We believe in animals doing it themselves. "Fish and Game really wants to annihilate all the mountain lions, and there you are destroying a whole ecosystem by getting rid of all the predators.

Skies off Cape Cod are clouded with gulls; ponds around the country teem with troublesome carp, and trees in Florida bustle with Tarzan's monkeys. And it's all humanity's fault. Just as neglect and excessive hunting have wiped out or endangered some species, putting animals into predator-free environments or giving them unlimited food supplies has resulted in animal population explosions.

A man reported being attacked by a coyote in Griffith Park last week, wildlife officials said. The man, who was lying down near the Travel Town area Wednesday night, reported waking up to find a coyote biting his foot, but he was not seriously injured, said Kevin Brennan, a wildlife biologist for the California Department of Fish and Game. The attack was the second reported in less than a month in the 4,210-acre, chaparral-covered park. Wildlife authorities learned from Los Angeles County health officials last week that another person had been bitten in the park in late August.

Your support of Prop. 117 seems to be based on the emotional premise of "stop the big bad hunter," despite the monetary problems with this proposition. The real problem with Prop. 117 is that it takes wildlife management out of the hands of professionals. Wildlife management cannot be left to Mother Nature any more; people must manage wildlife for the proper balance. Nobody is proposing extinction, just management. ED MORTENSON Reseda

The bloodthirsty enemy had gathered on the city's perimeter, but this time the locals were ready. They had formed armed committees similar to the "Sons of Iraq" forces fighting off Al Qaeda in Iraq militants in western Iraq. They were gearing up for a fight. Their foes had been attacking them with increasing abandon on the outskirts of this river city 145 miles southeast of Baghdad. They struck along the harsh desert plain leading to Saudi Arabia. They came day or night.

A wildlife management area in the mountains of western Montana was closed after authorities discovered the body of a hunter apparently killed by a grizzly bear. Bill Thomas, spokesman for the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, said that the area will remain closed indefinitely while authorities attempt to locate and kill the bear believed responsible.

The news had scarcely gotten out that a western Colorado rancher suspected he had wolves on his land when the phone started ringing at state wildlife offices. "Get rid of them, and do it quietly," one caller said. "You need to make sure no one is trying to shoot these wolves," another offered. No one has confirmed yet whether a pack of wolves has taken up residence at the High Lonesome Ranch in De Beque, nearly 200 miles west of Denver, but even the prospect has created a stir in a state that hasn't seen a regular wolf population in 70 years.

The facial cancers that are devastating populations of Tasmanian devils in Australia are a nerve tumor that escaped its original host and became a parasite of the cultural icon, passing from one devil to the next by bites when the animals are fighting or mating, researchers reported Thursday. A genetic analysis of tumors from Tasmanian devils widely separated geographically shows that all the tumors are virtually identical and distinct from the animals' own genomes, researchers in the United States and Australia reported in the journal Science.

A controversial roundup of 2,500 wild horses from public and private lands in Nevada began on Monday amid protests from activists who call it needless and inhumane. Contractors in helicopters and on horseback herded some of the mustangs into corrals in the Black Rock Range, a chain of mountains 100 miles north of Reno, according to a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Land Management. Heather Emmons said she did not know how many horses were captured on the first day of the roundup, which will take two months and stretch across 1,750 square miles in the Calico Mountains Complex.

In March, a couple of plump, 900-pound California sea lions showed up at the Bonneville Dam, which spans the Columbia River between Washington and Oregon, 146 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean. Their mission: to gorge themselves on a feast of endangered chinook salmon laboring to get over the dam's fish ladder. The two had been caught before and branded as recidivist malefactors by wildlife officials, who have spent decades and billions of dollars trying to protect the salmon.

The wild bull elephant stood menacingly in the clearing, trumpeting in annoyance and anger, its brain racing with a chemical that unleashes a throbbing and unceasing headache. It was the heart of mating season, and the bull was desperately seeking a mate. Was this really a good moment to be sitting on top of another elephant just a few hundred feet away? But Syamsuardi, a native of the wild Sumatran forest, had his strategy ready: He would pit his own elephant against the amorous stranger.

Half a dozen men with walkie-talkies and cattle prods set out on foot at sunrise Thursday to coax a herd of 10 feral bison into a corral a mile away at the bottom of a Santa Catalina Island valley. It wasn't easy. In the final days of the mating season, a massive bull kept one beady eye on his cows, all of them pregnant, and the other on his human pursuers, who followed close behind shouting and waving their arms as the animals lumbered up steep slopes and into plunging ravines.

They roam freely over the grassy hills, American royalty in a most unusual setting. Nearby, young Marines are being tutored in the controlled application of violence, but the 147 bison of Camp Pendleton, shaggy, rust-colored and majestic, are protected by federal law. Their piercing dark eyes, powerful appearance and sharp horns seem to warn intruders to their realm to stand clear. If they sense a threat to their young, they will charge.

A mountain lion has taken up residence in Griffith Park, one of the nation's biggest and busiest urban parks eight miles from downtown Los Angeles, park officials said Wednesday, prompting them to begin posting signs that warn visitors of dangerous animals living in the area. After receiving several reports of lion sightings by hikers and horseback riders in the last month, rangers say they found evidence of a lion bedding down in the higher reaches of the park.

For years, the water stored by the Savage Rapids Dam has nurtured the green bean fields and grazing pastures of southern Oregon, turning them into a lush region of bounty. But there has been a price -- the death of thousands of fish, which slammed themselves into the concrete wall of the dam in a futile effort to head upstream. Scenes from years past now resemble a faded sepia-tone photograph. Many of the big farms have turned into 10-acre hobby ranches; the salmon are in danger of disappearing; and even the federal Bureau of Reclamation, the agency that harnessed rivers and irrigated the West, began saying a few years ago it would be better to just tear down the dam once and for all. So they did. On Friday, a platoon of bulldozers and earthmovers tore away at the last of the temporary earthen berms holding water behind the dam. The Rogue River rushed free, flowing through its historic channel for the first time since 1921.

Thousands of mustangs that roam the West would be moved to preserves in the Midwest and East to protect the wild horses and the rangelands that support them, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Wednesday. The plan would not require killing any wild horses, he said. Interior Department officials had warned in recent months that slaughtering some wild horses and burros might be necessary to combat the rising cost of maintaining them. "We have a huge problem -- out-of-control populations of wild horses and burros on our public lands," Salazar said in a conference call with reporters.