Mountain lions are eating California wild donkeys. Why scientists say this is a good thing »
A California wild donkey named Juana had been living on a family farm in the Sierra Nevada foothills for nearly two decades. But she became an endangered species when a mountain lion killed her and tore into her body, leaving her in a terrible state.
After an investigation, officials discovered that the feral cat had been eating the donkeys for two years, killing 50 of them. One hundred and nine more had died since then, and all were suffering from malnutrition or malnutrition-related injuries.
“They had a whole herd of wild donkeys in the yard, and now they had one animal in their yard. They didn’t have the means to do it for the past two years,” said Jeff McElligot, a conservationist from the United Wild Donkey Foundation, in a Facebook post.
“Now, they couldn’t save it.”
McElligot said the donkeys were suffering because the mountain lion had been destroying their crops and killing the fruit in their bellies. With the mountain lion no longer feeding on the animals, he said, it is now just left to die of starvation.
While this is sad news for the donkey’s family and for everyone who sees the donkey every day, the situation is particularly dire in the case of Juana and, to a lesser extent, the donkeys of the American West.
Wild donkeys are rare as their numbers are thought to be declining at an alarming rate. In California, there are an estimated 600 wild donkeys, compared to thousands of domesticated ones, which are thought to be on the rise.
Their numbers are on the rise in the Rocky Mountain states because of the expansion of the range of mountain lions, said Amy Kowalski, the executive director of the Western Association of Wild Donkey Association, a conservation group based in Durango, Colorado.
The same has been true in parts of the American West where the landscape is so diverse. “What we’re seeing there is that there is a lot of new development; there is a lot of ranching; there are a lot of new populations