Night manager David Woodward‘s best guess was that the parking attendant had been spooked by a stray dog. The man was saying a cougar had just walked into the underground garage.

Woodward’s disbelief was understandable. He wasn’t running a wilderness retreat. He was manning the desk at downtown Victoria, B.C.’s posh Empress Hotel, where the bellmen dress in livery and the best room fetches $1500 Canadian.

Woodward dispatched staff to seal the garage and went to investigate. Two floors down, he and his driver found a guest putting a bag in a car. The man laughed at Woodward’s warning. A cougar among the Cadillacs? It sounded funny to Woodward, too.

Moments later, Woodward leaned out to warn a woman rummaging in her trunk. He didn’t get much past “cougar” before she slammed the lid and ran for the elevator. Woodward and the driver were still chuckling when something big glided through the van’s headlights.

Fire? Woodward knew what to do. Earthquake? It was right there in the emergency procedures manual. Predator in your three-hundred-car garage?

Versions of David Woodward’s bemused question that night in 1992 still echo, mostly unanswered, across North America. Yet the answer is right under our noses.

The idea of conservation was born in the late 1800s after centuries of unchecked killing. It came barely in time. By 1890, it was estimated that only 300,000 whitetail deer remained in the entire country. In some eastern and midwestern states, whitetails were believed extinct. Branta canadensis maxima, the massive Western subspecies of migratory Canada geese, was thought to be nearly exterminated. Most of the east’s primeval forest had been logged. Species like the bison and the passenger pigeon no longer existed in the wild.

So the age of waste gave way to the age of conservation, advocated by the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and Aldo Leopold. Two things distinguished this revolutionary new age: a premise that wildlife was scarce and therefore precious, and a powerful, unexamined belief that the human world and the “natural” one were separate.

Market hunting’s industrial slaughter was replaced by recreational hunting, with its no-waste, fair-chase ethic. Deer and other species were reintroduced into areas from which they’d been eradicated. Parklands were set aside to be home to wildlife. At first, predators were killed in even greater numbers, partly to support deer and elk recovery. But by the 1950s, conservation ethics had spread even to our competitors, and bounties were removed from predators’ heads.

For many species, conservation succeeded. Somewhere between 15 and 25 million deer inhabit this country today, perhaps as many as ever did. The offspring of captive goose breeding programs aimed at saving Canada geese now number 4 million. They don’t know how to migrate. Disgusted home owners call them lawn carp. Several large predators recovered as well, particularly coyotes, black bears, alligators and cougars.

In recent decades, such species have begun to claim humanscapes as their own. They have to: as they were recovering, suburbanization spread humans rapidly across the land - western cities like Los Angeles add land up to six times faster than they do population.

And so the age of conservation becomes something new. Call it the age of coexistence. In this new age, humans are the dominant, inescapable fact for all other species. We are the weather. For some - perhaps the grizzly bear, the wolverine and the Snake River salmon - we’re the next ice age, a catastrophic event they are not equipped to survive. Others, more able to adapt, thrive amongst our impacts, at least for now.

And as they do, the inescapable fact for humans emerges, if only we will see it: we are not separate from nature. Humanscapes are potential homes for any species that can adapt. And some of those species will change the weather for us.

Take cougars. Once thought to be cryptic denizens of remote wilderness, cougars now drag deer kills under suburban porches and kill pets in backyards. Bike riders have reached their destinations only to be told that they were chased for a hundred yards by a bounding cat. Cougars have been killed under pool tables, in motor homes and cabins, chased out of schoolyards and even classrooms. One report from Colorado described a cougar sitting on the roof of a house, batting at a weathervane.

Attacks on humans are rare, but not nearly as rare as in the past. Only one attack was reported throughout the U.S. and Canada in the 1940s. Fifty-three were reported in the 1990s. Cougars have attacked people in every state and Canadian province with appreciable cougar populations except Oregon.

Yet even though scarcity and separation clearly can no longer define our relationships with species like cougars, most human inhabitants of the new age don’t yet realize the wind has shifted.

Remember the Empress cougar? What the perplexed David Woodward did that night was call game warden Bob Smirl, who engineered a conservation age ending for the crowd and cameras. The cat was darted and carried out, unconscious and handcuffed, to their cheers.

Smirl displayed the animal on his tailgate, showed the crowd its claws and teeth. He answered questions about how the cat would be returned to its world. Then he placed a towel over its head to make sure it stayed unaware and fifty people filed by to touch it. One woman snuggled her face into its belly fur.

“Thank you,” she told Smirl. “This is the most wonderful experience I’ve ever had.”

Conservation age sentiment conflicts with current reality: this cat was not the first or the last to make it into downtown Victoria, and it wasn’t being “returned to its place.” For the cougar, the upshot of this woman’s wonderful experience was probably death. As is typical for relocated cougars, it would be killed by its unfamiliarity with the country in which it woke up, or because the release site belonged to somebody else, a larger cougar or a wolf pack. There was a reason that cat first ventured into Victoria.

On California’s Angel Island live a population of deer once tormented by the sentimentality that helped save deer when they were scarce. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and much of the 1980s, the island’s unhunted deer alternately burgeoned and then “crashed” when the too numerous animals overbrowsed the island. Pressured by animal rights activists, game managers tried relocation to the mainland (nearly all the relocated animals died within a year), sterilization (not enough does could be captured) and simply wishing the problem away. Proposals to reintroduce the animals’ traditional predators, either four-legged or two, were met with horror. Meanwhile, again and again, the deer became so numerous and hungry that they pestered picnickers for candy bars. Again and again, by the hundreds, they starved.

Finally, the activists gave in. Regular culling hunts now keep Angel Island deer populations healthy and stable.

Painful lessons like this have taught game managers and scientists that species can only be effectively managed by managing their habitat and by understanding the limits of their adaptability. Deer cannot adapt to life without predators. Left in “peace,” they degrade their habitat and starve.

However, the lesson is not always applied. Cougars were eradicated from the eastern United States about the same time as were deer, their main food. Almost certainly, cougars disappeared because they could not survive without deer. But they adapt readily to life side-by-side with humans now that deer again exist in plenty. And history shows that they can tolerate high levels of human predation: they survived centuries of harsh bounty pressure.

And yet, the response to rising public concern about cougars has almost universally been to kill more cougars. It would probably be more effective to kill more deer.

Wildlife conflicts are escalating in and near humanscapes. A perspective shift, from conservation to coexistence, offers a real answer. It’s simple but hard: we must apply our painful lesson to the cities and towns we have such trouble seeing as habitat. If we want deer among us, we must supply predation among us or they will overpopulate. If we don’t want cougars among us, we need to find the limits of the cougar’s adaptability and then alter human habitat accordingly, perhaps, for one thing, eliminating deer. If we aren’t willing to make humanscapes inhospitable for cougars, we need to accept a less hospitable, riskier world.

In Washington state, Donny Martorello seeks a coexistence age response to cougar conflict. Martorello is in charge of figuring out why Washington had eight attacks in the 1990s and what to do about it.

“It’s very frustrating to have to make decisions without good data. Are the cats that live in suburbia adults? Do they live there for more than two months, or are they just passing through? If I had answers to those questions, that’d be ten times more than I know now,” he says.
Martorello lacks information largely because, in the age of conservation, researchers, too, were guided by the idea of separate worlds. So they seldom examined how species like cougars interacted with humans and humanscapes. In fact, researchers usually chose study areas where human impacts were minimized, so they could learn about the animal in its “natural” world.

The questions Martorello needs answered are things like, do suburban cats hunt and feed differently than cats in less human-impacted areas? How much of individual cats’ territories fall inside cities? Do they use those parts differently? At different times of day? How do humans use the same areas? Do humans in areas with frequent encounters use the habitat they share with cougars in ways that contribute to those conflicts?

Washington’s Department of Fish and Game, a predator research group called the Hornocker Wildlife Institute, and state educators are banding together to conduct a study, called Project Cat, that asks these questions. This is its first year.

If Martorello and his state succeed, a Washington version of the Empress cougar story will someday sound different. Perhaps there will simply be no cougar, because the cities of Washington will have deliberately altered themselves beyond the adaptability of cougars.

Or, understanding their cities to be habitat but unwilling to make changes that would also be unattractive to humans, the state’s game managers would have studied the cougar as one of the coinhabitants of their ecosystem, and there would damn well be a whole page on uninvited wildlife in hotel emergency procedures manuals.

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