The Colorado Daily

Dec. 2003

The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature

By David Baron
W. W. Norton

Has the city of Boulder walled itself off from the evils of the rest of the world, or locked the door to its own prison - with the maniacs still inside?

It's a fair question, one that David Baron poses in his riveting book, "The Beast in the Garden." The concept is pretty simple, really: Baron tells how Boulder's mollycoddling of local wildlife may have led to a situation in which hikers, skiers, college students and soccer moms are now on the menu for some of the biggest, most ferocious predators ever to stalk the mountainside.

"The Beast in the Garden" reads like a script from the television show "Law and Order: Criminal Intent." The reader pretty much knows who dunnit, with what and where, but the why is a little more elusive. Baron's mystery, the story of how 18-year-old Scott Lancaster came to be mauled and eaten by a mountain lion on a sunny day in 1991, starts long before the man was born, right about the time Europeans arrived in North America. Baron makes the case (and a compelling one it is) that a series of poor decisions in wildlife management have given rise to an ever-growing cougar population, one that not only disregards humans as a source of danger, but lists it among its menu options.

Overhunting in the 19th century decimated the cougar population in the United States. No one cared, Baron points out, not even conservationists, who believed along with everyone else that the best thing anyone could do for the "good" wildlife was to kill all the big predators. The mountain lion, along with the wolf, was driven to near-extinction. It was only then that people started to notice that huge herds of deer, their numbers unchecked by natural predators, were running amok, leaving decimated forests in their wake.
And so, cougars gained protection. But environmentally-friendly locales like Boulder would soon find that loving big, mean animals is not without its risks.

Today cougars have plenty to eat. Anyone who has ever driven more than five miles on an interstate highway knows deer populations in the United States, from Pennsylvania to Missouri, Colorado to California, are booming. At the same time, the things that were keeping cougar populations in check before man stepped in have disappeared. The cougar's only natural enemy, the wolf, has been depleted to such a large scale in this county as to make it a non-threat to the big cats.

Humans, it turns out, have also become less of a threat to cougars. "Beast in the Garden" shows how the lions that started showing up in Boulder in the late 1980s not only disregarded humans, but treated them like just another prey animal. To recast a bumper sticker seen frequently in Boulder, mean people suck, but everybody tastes pretty much the same to a 170-pound cat.

Canines, too, Baron points out, seem to have lost the punch they once had in fending off the big cats. Though some hunters once believed even poodles could be trained to hunt cougars, residents of the foothills found in the early '90s that even big dogs had become unthreatening, scrumptious you might say, to lions.

What makes the whole situation more than just a little disturbing is that the live-and-let-live attitude of the good people of Boulder probably contributed to Lancaster's death.

Boulder's steady acquisition of open space and refusal to allow hunting, Baron contends, was tantamount to an invitation to mountain lions. With nothing to lose and everything to gain, cougars have reestablished themselves in Boulder and the surrounding area, and they are hungry.

Baron also addresses an issue that is at the heart of what many Boulderites believe their fair city to be about: living among the wilds, hand in hand with nature, while still enjoying the relative sterility of modern life. Boulder's attempt to rebuild a place that is really nothing like it once was may have proved a sign of weakness to the very things its citizens hoped to save.

"American pioneers ... subjected the cats to a crude form of aversive conditioning," writes Baron. "In the same way cougar hunters train their hounds to ignore deer by brutalizing dogs that chase the 'wrong' quarry, settlers taught mountain lions to avoid people by punishing cats that exhibited the moxie to perceive humans as food.

"Whatever the truth of events from twelve millennia ago," he later continues, "this much is clear: the people of Boulder, in their attempt to re-create a mythic past - a time when man and beast lived in harmony, before the corrupting influence of white invaders - had actually created something new. They had declared a unilateral cease-fire in the long struggle with cougars. They had withdrawn the aversive conditioning."

What helps make Baron's books such a gripping read, aside from the sheer drama of the situation facing Boulder residents in the end of the last century, is the way the author presents the facts of the case. The story is balanced well with compelling testimony from all sides of the cougar issue. It's hard to pick a favorite. One minute you're rooting for the cougar, moments later it's the environmentalists or the Division of Wildlife.

Baron's ability as a storyteller, too, contributes much to the success of "The Beast in the Garden." He carefully mixes the contemporary storyline with whimsical and shocking historical material, linking it all back to an eerie, third-person account of an anonymous every-cougar that stalks the foothills above Boulder. Baron has organized anecdote, probable fact and interviews into a thought-provoking real-life mystery.