From vancouverisland.com:
Mammals and Birds of British Columbia: Land Mammals
- Badger – Taxidea taxus
- Bats – Order Chiroptera
- Bear : Black Bear – Ursus americanus
- Bear : Grizzly Bear – Ursus arctos horribilis
- Bobcat – Lynx rufus
- Caribou – Rangifer tarandus
- Cougar – Felis concolor
- Coyote – Canis latrans
- Deer : Black-tailed Deer – Odocoileus hemionus
- Elk : North American Elk – Cervus elaphus
- Fisher – Martes pennanti
- Fox : Red Fox – Vulpes vulpes
- Hare : Snowshoe Hare – Lepus americanus
- Lynx : Canada Lynx – Lynx canadensis
- Marmot : Hoary Marmot – Marmota caligata
- Marmot: Vancouver Island Marmot – Marmota vancouverensis
- Marten – Martes americana
- Mink – Mustela vison
- Moose – Alces alces
- Pika – Ochotona princeps
- Porcupine – Erethizon dorsatum
- Raccoon – Procyon lotor
- Sheep : Bighorn Sheep – Ovus canadensis
- Sheep : Thinhorn Sheep – Ovus dalli
- Sheep : Mountain Sheep – Oreamnos americanus
- Squirrels – Genus Sciurus
- Wolf : Gray Wolf – Canis lupus
- Wolverine – Gulo gulo
- Sasquatch – Bigfoot hidingfromus
Cool….now where is the type specimen..;-)
Area 51.
If Dallas wins tonight, that will be two good news in one day.
Btw, BC has highest concentration of Grizzlies, Black Bears, Cougars, and Wolves anywhere in the world. It may look very interesting, but I will not like to be close to any of those animals.
Given most wolves, bears and cougars here are wary of human presence due to the fact we’re (British Columbia) one of the few places where they could be hunted legally, I would be more afraid of cougars in Oregon and California based on population ratio. Plus people runs coonhounds on bears and cougars all the time up here.
Bigfoot… on the other hand is scary, not because he’s dangerous since he’s probably vegetarian, but because of the mass hysteria involved. ;)
Coonhounds in BC? Wow I never knew about that. I did know that the best anecdotal research on Livestock Guardian Dogs has come out of livestock owners on silvicultured ranges in BC.
Yes. Here’s a B.C.-based site about hunting toms with hounds: http://houndpoundn.com/
Of course, with hounds running all over the continent, you would think a pack would had picked up on a hot scent, or even cold, of humanoid apes.
Cougars occasionally kill or attack people in California.
Of course, people in California are stupid enough to go jogging by themselves out in the wilderness.
Cougars are dangerous and getting more so–it is usually the human-fearing ones that tree when hunted by hounds and get shot, while the brazen cats turn on the dogs and then flee again in many cases to escape. This causes bad trouble, especially in closed populations like Vancouver Island. Meanwhile, no idea if it was ever true but I have been told that enough reports of Sasquatch have come from Snohomish County, Washington (where I have frequently lived in the past) that Bigfoot is an official part of the county’s endangered species list.
If I were living in Cougar or bear areas, I would be keeping a pack of ‘fighter’ dogs capabale of defending themselves as a team. IN BC silviculture teams, the shepherds routinely keep a mix of Great Pyrs (not the softies of dog shows, but the real working type), Kuvaszok, Maremmas, Komondorok, and increasingly Anatolian Shepherds / Kangals. I am sure a cougar or bear is more than a match for a single dog, they can be up against a challenge if I have a pack of 3-4 of those dogs.
Wow. You are wrong on so many levels here. Not surprising because the hippies in Seattle have never been on any of the hunts; so they have conjectures based on what they hear.
The reality is most houndsmen don’t shoot the cats right away; otherwise, it’s not an efficient use of dogs. A good team of dogs must run all season long.
Now that being said, it is true some do take a tom, but they wait until the end of the season to do their take, but not of them use their tags either because sometimes they want to wait until fall.
Where I live, we have both coyotes and black bears, but we have virtually no problems with them. A bear has never attacked anyone, and coyotes only occasionally cause problems with livestock. That’s because both are intensively hunted, and dogs are used against both.
Large predators have to learn that people and dogs are not on the menu. They are not born with it. The reason why the ones in Vancouver Island are hunting people is because it has one of the highest densities of cougars in the world. And it is an island– young cougars can’t disperse to new territory like they can on the mainland. So they wind up in cities and towns, hunting dogs and cats and occasionally people.
It’s been shown that where cougars are hunting with dogs, they are far less likely to cause problems. California banned it, and they do have issues with cougars in some areas. Mostly, it’s dog killing.
Historically, cougars played a distant second fiddle to wolves, and they had a deep fear of all things that looked or smelled like a dog. It was said that a toy poodle could tree a cougar. In Yellowstone, the cougars have all but been driven out by the newly recovered wolf population.
Why does hunting cougars with hound reduce these conflicts?
It’s really simple: You have to train hounds to hunt. So there are many encounters between cougars and hounds in which the cougar learns that dogs are dangerous and not something to eat. Cougars generally take to killing people after they have become proficient at taking dogs from yards.
If they learn that dogs aren’t something they should mess with, they avoid any place that has dogs.
Hunting greatly affects the behavior of predators:
It is now thought that the reason why the Sundarbans tigers now hunt people is because that region was never hunted intensively during the days of the Raj . Wolves in Russia are much more likely to kill people than in North America, because Russians were– and still often are– denied the right to carry firearms, whereas in both the US and Canada firearms have always been readily available.
Most people don’t keep a pack of dogs. It’s too expensive. One would need a truck, a kennel run, tracking collars. The whole shebang.
There are more people with big-game rifles and compound bows hunting cougars than there are running dogs.