Attacked on the Trail by a Mountain Lion (2)

Here is Travis Kauffman, who recently fought off and killed a mountain lion that attacked him while trail-running in the foothills west of Fort Collins, Colorado.

The size of the lion, once announced as 80 pounds, has now shrunk to 40–50 pounds. A yearling, probably.

Gossip abounds. For instance, one source pretty well plugged into the state's mountain lion network (of humans, that is), claimed that he actually was shooting a video of the lion when it attacked him. That is why the attack came from the front, she said.

True, when hunting deer, lions generally attack from the side or year and bite the prey's windpipe. This lion, probably young and inexperienced, fastened onto Kauffman's wrist.

But given that he outweighed it by 100 pounds and was angry to boot, you can see how he could subdue and kill it, although he got some significant lacerations that will leave him with some scars.

(Unrelated: Travis is purely American name, as Nigel is British/West Indian. Do all Travises have Texas roots, a memory of the ill-fated William B. Travis at the Alamo?)

Middle-schoolers in Shooting Spree! (Safely)

Students from Craver Middle School in Pueblo County get a supervised trip to the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Range out at the reservoir (with video).

There is an Project Appleseed tie-in, not well explained—but what do you expect from local television.

The kids liked it. 

"My favorite part is shooting guns. When I was little we used to go to the shooting range," said another student, Danielle Cooper.

These students have been on field trips before. But not one quite like this.
Guns in school can be a touchy subject.

"Often firearms and schools don't mix. There's a big fear there. So we are pushing the safety aspect and hopefully ease some people’s fears," said Timothy Baird, with the Craver Middle School.

The school's website lists Mr. Baird as a music teacher, so you may insert the "song of my people" meme here.

Bad News from Mountain Gazette

If you have been picking up free copies of  Mountain Gazette at your favorite high country coffee house, store, etc, or if like me you subscribed, those days are apparently over.

A recent letter from from MG speaks of a "pause" in publishing and a "next iteration of Mountain Gazette."

None of this sounds too encouraging.

Subscribers are being offered T-shirts and/or bumper stickers.

Medical Marijuana's Claimed Contribution to Climate Change

An article in the San Francisco Business Journal links medical marijuana to climate change, via the energy costs of the crops.

People growing marijuana indoors use 1 percent of the U.S. electricity supply, and they create 17 million metric tons of carbon dioxide every year (not counting the smoke exhaled) according to a report by Evan Mills, an energy analyst at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

After medical pot use was made legal in California in 1996, Mills says, per-person residential electricity use in Humboldt County jumped 50 percent compared to other parts of the state.

In order to produce some 17,000 metric tons of marijuana this year, Mills estimates authorized growers will use $5 billion worth of energy. That works out to the output of seven big electric power plants.

Seven? 

But since Colorado also permits medical marijuana, I am waiting for one of the many clinics advertising in the Colorado Springs Independent, for example, to trumpet their "solar-powered MMJ."

(Via Ann Althouse.)

A Very Scary Thing in the West

High County News, the environmental news magazine, was started by an environmentally concerned Wyoming rancher. I myself have been a subscriber off and on since those Wyoming days.

In the 1980s, Eastern transplants Ed and Betsy Marston took over. It is sort of telling that I once heard Betsy admit that prior to moving to Colorado's Western Slope as a middle-aged woman, she had never driven on a gravel road.

HCN continued to provide a kind of environmental coverage that you do not find in any Western newspaper--not The Denver Post or any of the other big one.

But there were some holes in the Marstons' editorial viewpoints. For one thing, they just did not "get" wildlife-related stories unless they were presented in simplistic ways with Good Guys and Bad Guys. You know: endangered species good, all ranchers bad.

I sold a few stories to HCN in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but I never felt like I could produce the Good Guys/Bad Guys writing that they wanted.

Now HCN is trying to be cultural. In a recent issue, writer Ray Ring Viewed With Alarm the fact that (news flash) Westerners own guns. (Then why are some of the best gun bloggers in Tennessee?)

To support his view that this is a Very Scary Thing, Ring talks to few gun owners. That would be too obvious. He might learn that Americans (not just Westerners) own firearms for several reasons (in no particular order):

1. For self defense, a natural human right
2. For hunting
3. For target shooting, a test of mind and body
4. For collecting interesting human artifacts with historical associations of one kind or another.

For instance, he turns to experts whose ideology supports the thesis of Scariness:

In a phone interview, Professor Burbick says the gun-rights movement began not only in reaction to gun laws, but also as a reflection of white men’s anxiety about the civil rights movement

Had he wanted to do actual historical research, he might have turned, for example, to the work of Stephen P. Halbrook, a black legal scholar who points out in his book That Every Man Be Armed an interesting fact: Many early gun-control laws were directed at freed slaves, lest they defend themselves in the post-Civil War South.

But Halbrook's book was published by the University of New Mexico Press, located in Albuquerque, hence Westerners, and hence in Ring's view probably Fascinated With Firearms.

As someone who teaches 19th-century American literature, Joan Burbick's historical horizon ought to extend to the 1870s, but maybe not.

Being a longtime HCN reader, I hate to see it turn into an anemic imitation of The New York Times Magazine with all that publication's ideological blinders. That is probably not what Tom Bell had in mind.

If Ring's article is HCN's take on cultural reporting, you are better off with Mountain Gazette.

I got The Goat

Added to the blogroll under "Southwesterners" -- The Goat, news blog of High Country News.

Based in Paonia, Colorado, HCN is really an indispensible news source for the entire Mountain West.