However, there were a few side effects of that visit that have proven somewhat educational. One of these was an underlying sentiment that the plot in my fantasy was just too "unbelievable". I'm not talking fantasy world/flying cats/mysterious portals unbelievable. This had to do with the real, modern world, and a possible conflict that, apparently, most people don't think could ever happen:
The possibility that we will exterminate mountain lions (again).
I have a sneaky suspicion (based on some mentor Twitter clues) that this could be the reason my manuscript wasn't picked for PitchWars. It could also be the reason I'm not getting an agent.** Maybe the reason isn't so much the unlikelihood of such an event, but the controversy of it - if so, that's more understandable, since controversial/message-y fiction is risky to publish in this market. But if it is the "unlikelihood", then, well, that pisses me off a lot.
I even had someone on the forum tell me straight-up that I must not have done my research.
So, excuse the brief own-horn-tooting, but let me be clear: I am a professional wildlife biologist. In ten years in this field (five of which were focused on North American mammalian predators), I have studied current wildlife populations, historical case studies, the works of conservationists like Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and Teddy Roosevelt (who were among the first to realize that something horrible was happening to our ecosystems), and the impacts of current human population trends on North American wildlife habitats. I have worked in the field with over a dozen species of mammals, birds, and amphibians. I got into this career because of a childhood love of wolves which, I hope I don't need to remind anyone, were completely extirpated from the western United States shortly after the arrival of Europeans. Oh, and we almost did the same thing to cougars. Bounties governments placed on their heads caused such a decline that until about the 1970s, hardly any were left in Colorado. And when they came back, they had a whole lot more people to deal with.
And in 2010, I worked with mountain lions in the exact setting in which my novel takes place.
My fictional story begins with the killing of a mountain lion by a Division of Wildlife biologist. This happened because the lion, dubbed "Mister Rogers", was killing deer in a heavily-populated Boulder neighborhood, posing a risk to residents (who didn't want to give up the aesthetic appeal of herds of deer wandering around). The name Mister Rogers was actually taken from a bobcat project I worked on, and a male bobcat who was given the nickname because he hung out almost exclusively in a Southern California neighborhood.
But Mister Rogers the Cougar was actually based on this female:
That's me after her capture. We didn't have to kill her - it was her first offense (and the lions are typically given three). But basically everything in that scene in the novel was taken from this experience. You can't tell from the picture, but that cat and I are sitting in the backyard of a lovely house just outside of town, in a neighborhood full of one-acre ranchettes and mansions. This cat actually killed a deer in the front yard, dragged it through the garage, and down into the backyard. She was so bold, all my boss had to do to capture her was walk up to her with a dart gun.
Then there was this cat:
He was just a yearling, again captured in somebody's backyard near Lookout Mountain (just outside Golden/Denver). Unfortunately, this cat was hit by a car on I-70 a week after his capture.
Then the story of Flizzy (another star of my novel) was based on real events as well, which I documented here on my other blog. Basically, this was a female who came into Golden all the time to kill people's house cats. She usually left right afterward, until one day a homeowner filmed this lion and her two kittens in the backyard - and this was Golden, where backyards are small, fenced, and close together like you might expect in any suburban neighborhood in the U.S. We captured the whole family (and my boss actually did dart the mother cat in a small culvert off a hike-and-bike trail, just like in the novel) and relocated them outside of town. Unfortunately, she came back, and we had to do it all over again, and I got to watch this mother cat leaping over backyard fences from my vantage point on the hike-and-bike trail. It was an unforgettable experience.
Here's the NBC news video about them:
Fortunately, no tragedies like those which occur in the novel actually happened during my time on the project (about 7 months). But all one need do is read The Beast in the Garden by David Baron for a thorough background on the cougars vs. humans conflict in Colorado. In 1991 an 18-year-old athlete was killed and partially eaten by a lion near his high school in Idaho Springs. Other attacks have been documented in Colorado since then, though I believe none were fatal. However, elsewhere in the United States, especially in California, mountain lions are occasionally responsible for the deaths of both adults and children.
Lions are predators. They are dangerous. They've evolved to look for and prey upon vulnerable, easy prey - like suburban deer, dogs and cats, and unsupervised children. It's not really their fault. It's how they've survived for eons. And when their world is being overrun by homes and streets and apartment buildings, and all the good habitats deeper in the wilderness are already occupied by other cats, well, what choice do they have?
After decades of absence from their former geographic range, lions are making a comeback all over the country. When I worked in Missouri, I got a chance to help the Department of Conservation confirm mountain lion sightings by genotyping hair and fecal samples collected at the scene. Yes, there are lions there now. Recently lions have been sighted as far east as Connecticut. Some people think this is a good thing, while others consider it the return of a predator that no longer has a place in the human-dominated landscape.
My novel is built around the idea that, out of concern for public safety, Colorado will again exterminate the species, leaving them to exist solely in places like Yellowstone and Canada and Alaska where there aren't enough people to be threatened by them. It also discusses the idea that smart living in Colorado - like keeping pets indoors, dissuading deer from coming into suburban neighborhoods, and keeping an eye on young children in the wilderness - can prevent unfortunate human-lion interactions. If you go live in the wilderness - or along its boundary - you have to realize that the wilderness is not, nor is it ever supposed to be, "safe". And that's part of why so many people love it.
I believe relative peace can be found - and for the moment, Colorado does, too. But how many naive people will it take - how many attacks, how many pets killed, how many deer dragged through yards and garages - until we revoke the lions' right to coexist with us?
Is it really so hard to believe?
Here are a few facts to leave you with:
- Wolves used to live all over the western United States, and so far, we have only allowed them to return to a tiny fraction of their former range. They used to live in Colorado, too, but the general consensus from the public and the feds is that there is no longer enough unfragmented habitat for them to safely exist there. Until a few years ago, any wolves which dispersed from Idaho (where they were reintroduced) into neighboring Oregon were captured and removed. Incidentally, of all the United States' predators, wolves are probably the least likely to kill you. I could get into the centuries-old, deep-seated hatred humans feel toward wolves, but I won't.
- Grizzly bears, too, used to live in Colorado (and Arizona, California, and New Mexico...in fact, they're California's official state mammal, and appear on their state flag). You think we'll ever let them come back? Highly unlikely.
- And then there are the Mexican wolves. Fewer than 100 remain in the wild after more than a decade of reintroduction efforts. And the citizens of Catron County, New Mexico built bus stop shelters for their children out of fear they will be brutally killed by Mexican wolves (which weigh, on average, about 70 pounds).
- We are currently living through one of the largest mass extinctions of flora and fauna this planet has ever known. Some argue that more species have gone extinct due to human activity than the number that died out in the event that killed the dinosaurs.
I hate to leave you with a big, sappy cliche, but the persistence of wildlife species on this planet depends on you. And yes, my novel deals with the conflict (though I've tried to keep it subtle and more character-focused, and the bigger plot in my story has almost nothing to do with cougars). I've done this because it's a topic near and dear to my heart. I fear every day that, by the time I am old, there will be no predators left in this country.
And that's not a future I want to see.
**And maybe I'm not getting an agent because the book/my writing is no good. That is also a possibility. :-)
