I'm sorry but you statement is inaccurate.
Without even trying I can find 10 confirmed deaths after 1991, in the same breath 9 confirmed from 1890 to 1989 and only one confirmed death from that time period happened before 1909 so it still makes your "in the past century" statement false
Oh, gee, I was off by 2. Whoop-de-freaking-do! Surely this invalidates by point, by raising the number of people killed by cougars this century to something like the several hundred thousand killed in automobile accidents!
Oh, wait, it only raises it to less than 1 death every 5 years (most concentrated in recent timed due to the swelling human population). Gee, that's still an awful threat! It's not like bees kill more people in a year.
You have to filter out the agendas and do your own research. I was only looking for news paper accounts and I'm positive that if I started calling DNR's and DHR's I could find even higher numbers.
http://www.dfg.ca.gov/news/issues/lion/attacks.html
16 in CA in the past century. Such a huge number! Care to apply your great research skills to find out how many people domestic dogs killed this year? Quite a different perspective, eh?
Then consider the people that inexplicably went missing in high cougar population habitat, you can safly attribute 2% of adult stature to the mountain lion and 6% of child stature to them as well.
I find it ironic that you lecture me about sources, then proceed to simply make up numbers without any sort of basis.
IMHO a healthy cougar, in the state of Montana, SHOULD BE quite uninterested in approaching ppl's houses. exceptions are eastern Montana where there are few hound hunters due to low cougar densities and on the edges of cities where the private property prevents hounds me from doing their trade...........................................a cat such as the above in MT is a dead cat................
Two things:
1) You said these pics were taken in SD
2) Any learned behavior takes time to learn. In any population, there will therefore be individuals who have not yet learned it, especially younger animals. This doesn't make them dangerous, just inexperienced.
Seriously, are these the best defenses you can make for blowing an animal away just because it showed up on your porch? It's pathetic. *This* is why the DNR doesn't leave things in the hands of individuals.
Mokele