Below are excerpts from the November, 1998 Field & Stream Magazine:
THE STORY THE MAP TOLD WAS PLAIN TO SEE: WHERE THE BIG CATS THRIVED, DEER DID NOT
By John Barsness

Recently I sat through an all-day meeting where a series of speakers explained the wonders they'd discovered in the wild world. After lunch we were all nodding off when a senior biologist from the game department of a Western state woke us up. "Here's a map of deer distribution, according to our latest surveys." A slide on the screen behind him showed dense red dots in areas with lots of deer. "Here's a map of mountain lion distribution." The same map, but the red dots now formed a negative of the first map. "Let me show you that a few more times." He clicked the controls and the two maps alternated on the screen: Where lots of lions lived, deer did not. "Now I went to high school, and college, and graduate school. In the scientific community, these maps don't prove anything. But I can figure them out." Later, in a private conversation, he said more. "Don't ever mention my name in print, because I'm three years from retirement and I want that pension. Many of my state's high-population lion areas are where lots of cattle graze public land. Lions rally like to eat calves, so lions can get by in cattle country even when deer populations drop. Normally, when deer go downhill, lion populations follow in a couple of years. But with cattle to fall back on, lion numbers don't drop much, so some are always there to whack away at the few deer that are left." I nodded. "But you've never said this, and never will."

"Oh, hell, no. If I did, I'd get shot at from four directions at once: ranchers, hunters, lion lovers, and my own boss.".... Let me suggest a simple explanation for why so many wildlife biologists refuse to believe that coyotes, mountain lions, and wolves eat lots of deer: The biologists were educated when predators were almost extinct...

Until very recently, the predator-prey studies taught in wildlife biology departments were done between World War I and 1970. By 1920 all but a few wolves had been eradicated from the lower 48. From the early days of the

century into the early 1970's, government trappers constantly hammered coyotes. Mountain lions had bounties on their hides.

So "modern" wildlife biology, the child of Aldo Leupold, studied predators and prey when the predators had almost disappeared. Many reports covered only one field season; a "long -term" study lasted as long as it took a doctoral candidate to graduate. The logical conclusion was that predators don't affect game populations much. And that is still the bias-and these days, the politically correct line-that most state game departments support. Jack Atcheson Sr., the well-known Butte, Montana hunter, says predator math is easy for anybody but game department biologists. "1 ask if a mountain lion kills a deer a week. The biologist says, 'Yeah, right around there.' So, I say, the average lion kills about fifty deer a year. The biologist agrees. Then I ask how many mountain lions we have in Montana. The biologist says, 'Oh, several thousand.' "So I say, let's make the arithmetic easy and call it 2,000 lions. At 50 deer per lion, 2,000 lions eat 100,000 deer a year. And the biologist says, 'Oh, no, it can't be that many!'"

For the origins of the politically correct view of predators, let us look backward 30 years to the end of the predator-whacking era. Many biologists and most of the American public believed that "benevolent" carnivores only killed as much prey as they could eat-the old, sick, and genetically defective, leaving lots of young, vigorous animals to reproduce. ... Within the next decade several things happened. In 1972 President Nixon banned the poisoning of predators on public lands and in 1973 signed the Endangered Species Act. Coyote, wolf, and mountain lion populations started to rise.

By the late 1970's, when I was a wildlife biology student at the University of Montana, other views of predators began to emerge. One of my fellow students found that mountain lions, still mostly

limited to the high Rockies, didn't eat the old and sick in most winters, but instead preyed on mature elk and mule deer. Why? Because big bull elk and buck deer stayed in the high country while cow elk and doe deer migrated to the valleys. Another student found that yes, coyotes mostly ate mice-except during periodic crashes in the mouse population. Then they turned to mature, healthy whitetail deer, and did quite well, running them in relays until fresh coyotes dragged down the exhausted deer.

In California, where mountain lion hunting has been banned for years, lions are killing off desert bighorns so fast that the rare wild sheep are disappearing in some areas-after decades of efforts by hunting and conservation groups to reestablish desert bighorns in their historical range...

Several recent studies in the West and Alaska show that hunters take only a small fraction of the game killed by "natural" predators...