GILROY
Police received a report of a mountain lion from the staff at Las Animas Elementary School about 11 a.m. today. Police responded to the scene with at least three cars and have treated it as a confirmed sighting, but wonder if it isn’t another case of people in the Las Animas area mistaking a large house cat for its more dangerous cousin.
Officers scoured the area around the school – situated on the edge of a large undeveloped field abutting Christmas Hill Park in southwest Gilroy – but did not find any tracks or other evidence that a mountain lion had been nearby, Sgt. Wes Stanford said. Officers caught a glimpse of an animal when they first arrived and one officer captured video of the animal through the camera that each police cruiser is equipped with, but both the sightings and the video evidence were inconclusive.
“It could go either way,” Stanford said. “It could be a house cat with a long tail. If it is the one that we saw, it’s really small – definitely a juvenile, under 15 pounds.”
In this latest call, police specifically made sure the teacher who spotted the lion had not mistaken it for a house cat. She responded she was sure it was not. Either way – baby mountain lion or house cat – the children are safe, Stanford said.
“It doesn’t appear to be any danger to the school at this point,” he said.
The sighting is part of a string of at least six inconclusive or mistaken sightings in the area, police said. In at least one instance, the reporting party mistook a house cat for mountain lion.
“Very recently one of our corporals was out there after one of these sightings,” Sgt. Jim Gillio said. “He was able to capture some video of what they were seeing and it was definitely a house cat – the size and the shape of it, the shape of the head and the proportion of it to the body.”
An adult male mountain lion is typically between 2 and 2.5 feet tall and between 5 and 9 feet long. Males typically weigh between 115 and 160 pounds, but have been known to grow to 260 pounds in prey-rich areas during flush times. Females are typically smaller.
Juveniles, while starting out small, are still noticeably different from house cats, Gillio said.
“It’s got real big paws it hasn’t grown into,” he said. It is the same as “when you see a puppy – you know it’s going to be huge.”
Gilroy has had its share of confirmed mountain lion sightings and interactions. In mid-2007, sheriff’s deputies shot and killed an aggressive 70-pound mountain lion that had killed six goats and been seen near people’s houses in unincorporated Gilroy. Later that year, police trapped and removed a 50- to 60-pound juvenile mountain lion from a home in a north Gilroy housing complex, where it had been found after a night of munching on dog food left on the back patio.
More than half of California is mountain lion habitat, according to the Department of Fish and Game, but the cats are usually harmless: Fewer than 3 percent of sightings end in attacks. If confronted by a lion, wardens recommend that people puff up, make a lot of noise and avoid running, which prompts cats to chase them.
Police emphasized that, despite lack of conclusive evidence of a lion in the recent calls from Las Animas, they were treating the calls seriously.
The reporting parties “could be seeing (a lion) and it could be gone,” Gillio said. “We’ve been responding two, three, four officers to all these calls.”
