That Wall Doesn’t Exist

By Liz Ryan, 9-12-07

I try not to get caught up in online forum debates, but sometimes it is a challenge. The big to-do in Boulder about a bear up a tree, earlier this week—and another brouhaha about a mountain lion eating a miniature horse in Nederland, last week - generated lots of traffic on the Boulder Daily Camera’s comment pages. I stooped to weigh in - couldn’t help myself. My handle on the Camera’s website is lizryan, so I’m pretty much out in the open with my not-as-fond-of-mountain-lions-as-some remarks. The black bear imo was just silly—all parties were working hard to get the bear back to the woods safely, yet the humans-suck crowd had to remind us that, well, humans suck. I posted a response to Clint Talbott’s preach-o-matic editorial about victimized bears, reminding Clint that not all bears come down to town to eat garbage....some of them eat apples from the trees. My bad! Another poster was quick to remind me that people planted those trees..right, wasn’t that, like, one hundred years ago? Yup. We have a lot of wrongs to undo, evidently, and not just where the indigenous inhabitants are concerned. We’ve wronged the bears by emulating Johnny Appleseed. No telling how our crops and wells and outbuildings and hiking trails and retention ponds and log cabins goofed up the animal ecosystem. Maybe we should never have come. Yet, here we are. Railing at us for being a lesser species might not save a lot of bears or lions or win a lot of converts at this late date.

The polarized conversation over animals in Boulder cracks me up, given our citizens’ vehemence about the rights of dogs to wander off the trails. Soon we’ll have to wear clothing or colored emblems on our cars to identify our sympathies. “Green” isn’t enough, nor is “nature-loving” or even “tree-hugging.” If you let your dog run free, deers get chased and prairie dogs get eaten. Then you’re a dog-firster. If you love snakes and rescue them from the wild when they’re hurt, sooner or later a rodent is getting eaten by your snake, and most likely not without your help. What to do then? Are you a reptiles-over-mammals person then? Do you still care about bears and mountain lions? Do you have to sacrifice your dog or your little horse to prove how much you love our native predators? Do the dog and the little horse not count because they’re too much like humans? Maybe they are so human-dominated that they also suck.

If you have a miniature horse and it gets eaten, get ready to get trashed for thoughtlessly luring a hungry mountain lion who might be tagged and badly treated at the hands of DOW. Not sure what you did wrong if you’re that family whose son was mauled at Flagstaff Road by a cougar last Easter. I’ll hit on it eventually. Nobody who gets attacked, harassed, or intimidated by an animal in Boulder is blameless. There’s a missed opportunity in every so-called animal attack, even if we can’t spot it immediately. If you got hurt, you screwed up somewhere - in a previous lifetime, even - and even if the pattern isn’t clear now, there’s no question that you brought the attack on yourself. Remember that when you’re stanching the blood from your first-grader’s wound in the Boulder County Hospital ER.

I am glad the bear went unscathed and the mountain lion dodged a bullet. Needless killing is silly. It is equally silly to demonize people like poor Ms. Theresa Beck, who made the mistake of not only calling 911 when she spotted a cougar in her (and my) neighborhood while walking her kid to the bus stop, but telling the reporter from the Camera that she did so. D’oh! Sure enough, Theresa caught the big flackola on the Camera’s comments page, such that at least one ranter’s post was removed by staff. If I see a mountain lion and I make the call, trust me, I’m keeping it to myself. I don’t need to be tarred and feathered for protecting my 36-lb. son and my 12-lb. dog from being eaten. Wouldn’t be prudent.

Point being, the personal and the professional are all in the mix together. If you want to know where I stand on networking, job searches, mountain lions, preachy journalists or bears in trees, your curiosity can be satisfied in a click. No Chinese walls for me!