CORVALLIS — Peter Idema has been running the trails and logging roads of Oregon State University’s Dunn Research Forest near his Soap Creek Valley home for more than 30 years.

But around 10 a.m. on Aug. 31, a routine run took an unexpected twist when he rounded a curve on a lonely stretch of road and saw a cougar about 40 yards ahead.

He did his best to scare it off, yelling and waving his arms, but the cat crept steadily toward him, finally approaching so close that he was able to kick it in the head.

The startled mountain lion vanished into the woods, and Idema, thinking the animal was gone, turned and began running for home. But when he looked over his shoulder, he saw the cat was back — and gaining on him rapidly.

That's when he fell.

Just then, however, two hikers with a dog appeared on the scene, and this time the cougar left the area.

The 68-year-old Idema says he was badly shaken by the experience. If the other two people hadn't arrived when they did, he believes he would have been mauled — or worse.

"I thought I was going to die twice," he said. "I really feel like if they weren't there, I'd have been in deep trouble."

The incident came just over a year after what is generally believed to have been Oregon's first recorded fatal cougar attack, the deadly mauling of a 55-year-old Gresham woman named Diana Bober who had been hiking alone in the Mount Hood National Forest.

Like that case, Idema's cougar encounter immediately set off alarm bells in two distinctly different camps: those who believe people need to be protected from cougars, and those who believe cougars need to be protected from people.

Oregon State University immediately shut off public access to Dunn Forest, about 10 miles north of Corvallis, although neighboring McDonald Forest remained open for recreational use.

The Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife, based on Idema's description of what happened, declared the cougar an aggressive animal. The Oregon State Police and U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services were called in.

Specially trained dogs picked up the cougar's scent, then lost it, then found it again. Four days later, on Sept. 4, the mountain lion was treed by dogs not far from where the encounter with Idema had occurred, and a Wildlife Services employee killed the cat with three blasts from a shotgun.

The recriminations began almost immediately.

ODFW was criticized for overreacting, with some people arguing the cougar could have been relocated rather than killed. Some questioned whether the agency had even killed the right animal.

Idema has been raked over the coals as well. Some people have questioned the details of his story or bashed him for venturing into cougar habitat alone. Others, in social media posts and letters to the editor, have suggested he triggered the attack by running from the cougar, stimulating the predator's hunting instinct, even though he didn't turn his back on the animal until after his kick had sent it scurrying into the forest.

The one that stings the most is an anonymous letter, apparently from a neighbor, hand-delivered to his home.

‘Aggressive encounter’

One of the people involved in making the decision to kill the cougar was Brian Wolfer, ODFW's district manager for the south Willamette watershed.

After hearing Idema describe the animal's actions, Wolfer said, it was not a difficult decision.

"I'd call it unusually aggressive behavior for a cougar," he said. "The cougar didn't jump on him, it didn't bite him, it didn't scratch him, but it was definitely much more aggressive than we would usually see. We called it an aggressive encounter."

Once that determination was made, Wolfer added, ODFW had no choice but to destroy the animal.

"Our policy is we do not relocate cougars that are deemed to be a threat to human health and safety, and by statute, a cougar that's aggressive toward a person is considered a human health and safety threat," he said.

"To take a dangerous animal and place it somewhere it could encounter another recreationist, that's just not something we can risk."

Wolfer said he's "fairly confident" the right cougar was killed.

Because the cougar didn't bite or claw Idema, there was no DNA evidence to test. But Wolfer said tracking dogs picked up the scent of a single mountain lion at the place where the encounter happened, and the cat that was treed and killed was within a mile or so of the site.

"We can't be a hundred percent certain," Wolfer said. "But we do know that cougar was in the area a few days later, and it fits the description."

The dead cougar was taken to the Oregon Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at OSU for a necropsy. The final report is not yet in, but Wolfer said the preliminary results provide some general information.

The animal was a 75-pound female that appears to have been close to 2 years old, Wolfer said — not a full-grown adult, but a juvenile approaching the size of a mature female.

The initial examination showed no signs of rabies, distemper or other ailments, and the animal did not appear to have been injured or starving.

In light of that information, Wolfer said, there's no obvious explanation for the animal's behavior toward Idema — but he added that there's no reason to think the runner's own actions could have provoked an attack.

He points out that Idema didn't turn and run from the cougar until after he thought it had left the area. Instead, he faced the cat, made a lot of noise and made himself look big by raising his arms over his head and waving them around.

All of those actions should have marked him in the cougar's brain as distinctly different from the animal's usual prey, four-legged species such as deer or elk. And when the mountain lion continued to approach him, he fought back by kicking it.

"From what we know, it looks like Peter did a whole lot of things right," Wolfer said. "I have a hard time believing he did anything to instigate that behavior."

Dissenting opinions

Not everyone thinks ODFW's reaction to Idema's experience was justified.

One of them is Brooks Fahy, executive director of the Eugene-based advocacy group Predator Defense.

He accuses the state agency of having "an aggressive cougar-killing program" and sees the Dunn Forest incident as a case in point.

"I think ODFW killing that animal was over the top, but that's what they always do," he said.

"All the hype about cougars, all the panic, is absolute rubbish — they're afraid of us."

Fahy points to the fact that Idema was not harmed by the mountain lion he met in the forest and says the animal may merely have been curious. He notes that Oregon's standards for when to kill a cougar are lower than those in some other states.

"If you look at California and their requirements, they would not have killed that animal," he said. "In my opinion, this was unnecessary — just close the area down for a few days and tell people to be careful."

By any measure, fatal cougar attacks on humans are extremely rare. While estimates vary, available information seems to suggest that there have been between 24 and 27 fatal cougar attacks in all of North America since 1890.

But encounters between humans and cougars appear to be on the rise, in part because there are more cougars in the woods these days — and more people recreating in cougar habitat.

In Oregon, cougars had been all but wiped out by the 1960s, when the population was down to an estimated 200 animals. These days, ODFW estimates there are approximately 6,400 mountain lions in the state.

That's a sore point for some wildlife advocates, who claim the agency is deliberately inflating the numbers by using questionable modeling and counting animals of all age classes, something that isn't done for any other wildlife species.

"That's a misleading number," said John Laundre, a professor of biology at Western Oregon University and a member off the Predator Defense board of directors.

"That 6,400 includes kittens, and that's not right."

Counting kittens in the total creates a false perception in the public mind, he said, which is why other states don't do that.

Using the state's all-ages total and normal mortality rates and age class distributions, Laundre estimates the total number of adult cougars in Oregon at around 3,300, which he calls a healthy cougar population for the state.

So what's the point of putting out the higher number?

Fahy claims ODFW is deliberately trying to stoke fear among the public, in part to sell more hunting licenses. He points out that Oregon issues some 60,000 cougar tags each year.

"The agency is funded in large part through tag revenue," he said.

Predator Defense also disputes the wisdom of trying to control mountain lion populations through sport hunting, pointing to studies that suggest it can actually lead to more cougar attacks on humans by orphaning juvenile animals that have not yet learned to hunt properly or have an underdeveloped fear of people.

"This is where we get into the social disruption aspects of hunting," Laundre said.

"We're beginning to see that managing large predators like cougars with hunting is contributing to the problem that it's trying to solve."

ODFW pushes back

State wildlife officials reject those claims.

Derek Broman, a carnivore biologist with ODFW, said the agency has decades of data to back up its population modeling and is always careful to note that its numbers include all age classes. And he disputes the assertion that ODFW is aggressively promoting hunting or targeting cougars that pose no real threat.

While Oregon does issue 60,000 cougar tags each year, he said, roughly 70% of those are bundled in "sports packs" with licenses for other game animals and are the cheapest tags ODFW sells. Broman also pointed out that, since Oregon voters banned the use of hounds in cougar hunting, the kill rate is quite low — only about 240 mountain lions a year are killed by hunters in the state.

On average, he added, 25 to 30 mountain lions are killed each year in Oregon for human safety reasons, most of them by members of the public rather than the agency (state law allows private individuals to kill a cougar that takes certain actions deemed threatening). Another 120-130 a year are killed because of livestock predation, again mainly by the public.

The notion that ODFW has an aggressive policy of killing cougars simply isn't true, he insists.

"We would have much higher numbers if that were the case."

As for the idea of repealing the ban on hound hunting, he said, the agency takes no position on the matter.

"We're about making sure there are healthy cougar populations and addressing conflict as it arises," Broman said. "That's the big takeaway."

Maintaining perspective

Despite the uproar over the Dunn Forest incident, Wolfer said it's important to keep things in perspective. Yes, he said, there are cougars in the woods of western Oregon, even on the fringes of urban areas such as Corvallis. But that doesn't mean people should be afraid to go there or be worried about infringing on the animals' habitat.

"We need to have a connection to the outdoors and wild areas of Oregon to want to protect those places," he said.

"People are going to enjoy the outdoors and should enjoy the outdoors, but they need to be aware of what to do if they encounter a cougar."

That means doing some of the same things Peter Idema did:

. Face the animal rather than turning your back.

. Make yourself appear large by standing up tall and waving your arms.

. Speak in a loud, firm voice.

. Back away slowly, but don't turn and run.

. If attacked, don't play dead — fight back.

Idema calls his close encounter with a cougar "a life-changing experience" but says it isn't going to deter him from running in the woods near his house.

"I'm not going to let it stop me," he said. "But I am going to be a little more cougar-aware."

He's more likely to run with a group now, and less likely to run in the early morning or evening hours. He's started carrying one of those really loud emergency whistles, and last week he bought a canister of bear spray.

Idema has always known there were cougars in Dunn Forest, but he tries not to worry too much about it. After three decades of running in the area, he points out, he's still had only one cougar encounter.

“I always figure the odds are safer (running in cougar country) than running on the road and getting hit by a car,” he said.

-- Bennett Hall, Corvallis Gazette-Times