The first time I saw a mountain lion, you know, my initial reaction was, holy shit. And then it was like, all right, where's my pocket knife? It's like, what am I going to do, fight it with a knife? This is wildlife filmmaker Ben Masters. I'm a wildlife filmmaker, and I specialize in filming wild cats. In particular, I specialize in filming mountain lions. Ben understands why folks are terrified of cougars. The mountain lion taps into that lizard brain fear, not of us as an individual with hopes and dreams, but as a human being that is made out of meat. There are so many unexplained deaths in rural America, and almost none of them make international news. Christopher Whiteley's dead. Do you ever stop and wonder why? Why were so many people eager to believe that Christopher was killed by a mountain lion, and so many others were outraged by the very same suggestion? I don't think it really has all that much to do with Christopher, except that his death landed right in the middle of a much bigger struggle. A struggle that was about to erupt, and this filmmaker, Ben Masters, was about to find himself at the center of the controversy. I just like saying all this crazy stuff about my wife and like, you better watch your kids or they're going to disappear. And I had to like talk to the FBI. From Free Range Productions in association with the Dallas Morning News, this is season four of The Unforgotten, Kill Sight. I'm your host, Wes Ferguson, and this is episode five, The Scapegoat. Ben Masters has spent more time in the wild studying and filming mountain lions than pretty much anybody. You could also argue that he's the public face of mountain lion advocacy in Texas. I find them incredibly fascinating. I find them incredibly tough. And I find them in places that I love to be at. Mountain lions are in wild country. That's where I want to be. Back in 2015, Ben was one of four recent Texas A&M grads who starred in Unbranded, this epic documentary that raised awareness for wild horses. To prove the worth of these Mustangs, we're going to adopt, train, and ride them 3,000 miles from Mexico to Canada through the wildest terrain in the American West. Unbranded was really popular, and it helped launch Ben's career. In 2022, he wrote and directed Deep in the Heart, a Texas nature documentary narrated by Matthew McConaughey. His latest film, The American Southwest, just came out a few months ago. And going back to that first mountain lion Ben ever saw, for the record, he did not try to fight it with a pocket knife. I was around 20 years old, and it was early in the morning. I was walking down this old logging road in Colorado going fishing. and that cat was just down there next to the creek bottom. And I kind of rounded a little bend in the road. There he was. The lion saw me same time I saw the lion. We both kind of stopped and looked at each other. And then he just jumped into the woods and disappeared. Gone. To be very honest, I was scared. I think that that's a very natural and understandable response because it's this deep primordial part of our brain that is fight or flight. Since then, Ben has spent days and days with mountain lions in the wild. But that fear, it never completely goes away. The awe and respect is always there. And that little tinge of fear is always there too. I mean, they are a large carnivore that is, you know, over 100 pounds a lot of times. They can take down prey as large as I am. I almost find it amazing that they don't predate on people nearly as often as they do. I mean, it's incredibly rare for a mountain lion-human conflict compared to other large cats around the world. At one time, cougars ranged across nearly all of North and South America and pretty much all of what is now the United States. Looking at the colonization of the United States, the eastern half of the country, mountain lions, were extirpated with hunting and trapping and poison. A lot of that was government subsidized in the early 1900s, just kind of a general war on all predators, whether that was bears, wolves, mountain lions. You know, the culture was that anything that could theoretically kill another mammal is there for competition with us. It could kill our livestock. Let's just kill all the carnivores. And there was just a multi-decade war against mountain lions that was successful. Ben's introduction to the mountain lions of his home state, Texas, came about 12 years ago when he made a short documentary called Lions of West Texas. He shadowed scientists who were studying cats in one of their only strongholds in the state, way out in the Davis Mountains. What they found was mostly what you'd expect. The lions ate deer, pigs, javelinas. They also ate coyotes and foxes. One of them even ate a buzzard. But there was something else been discovered during that project, something that would change the direction of his life. The thing that absolutely shocked me with that Davis Mountain Lions study was the mountain lion mortality. You know, each year, half their cats were getting killed. And all of them were getting killed from traps. And that corresponds with other studies here in Texas. There was a big study out of Bing Bitter Ranch State Park. They collared 22 mountain lions, and every single one of them got trapped. The exception of one, one of them got shot. And just so we're clear, all these lions being trapped are not getting released somewhere else. They're being killed mostly by ranchers who don't want lions preying on their livestock. Ben also took exception with the way these lions were being trapped. The trapping pressure is very intense. And the way that they trap the mountain lions, Quite frankly I think it just a bunch of horse shit A lot of the trappers will put a trap inside of a mountain lion draw or a pass or a scrape and then they'll leave it and they won't check it. And lion comes through there mid-February, nice cool temps, a little bit of dew on the ground. They get their foot whacked in that trap. It could take them a week, maybe two, before they just die of dehydration or starvation and exposure. I just take real issue with that because it was drilled into me as a hunter. You have respect for your query. You give them an honorable death. And then later in high school, whenever I was trapping, you check your traps every day. and I just hate it that there's traps just sitting out there sometimes for months on end without ever getting checked. And it catches those cats and they just die from dehydration and exposure. And it's not just the cats. I think the mountain lion traps are the number one factor on why bears haven't naturally recolonized Texas as well. After the break, Ben speaks out against this kind of trapping and he pays the cost. Brello is making it easier for you to connect with healthcare providers for provider-guided wellness medications. I signed up for Brello the other day and it was a really simple process. I've been taking GLP-1 medicine for about a year now and I love that Brello is focused on long-term health. It's designed for people who want a more sustainable approach to metabolic wellness support, and it focuses on your habits, education, and structure alongside longevity provider oversight. Go to brellohealth.com to see if you qualify and explore their GLP-1 plans, starting at $133 per month for your first three months, plus access to their app, community, and wellness classes. That's brellohealth.com. 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My Quince cable knit sweater got a lot of use this winter and I'm excited to add a couple of quince pieces for the spring too. Stop waiting to build the wardrobe you actually want because you don't need a closet full of options. You need pieces that work. Right now go to quince.com slash unforgotten for free shipping and 365 day returns. That's a full year to wear it and love it and you will. Now available in Canada too. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last. Go to quince.com slash unforgotten for free shipping and 365 day returns. quince.com slash unforgotten. So several years later, I decided to make a planet Earth type movie here in Texas called Deep in the Heart, a Texas wildlife story that has amazing wildlife spectacles across the state narrated by Matthew McConaughey. I'm immensely, immensely proud of that movie. Then we did mountain lion scene in there, went out to the Davis mountains, into this beautiful canyon that I know well. And we're trying to figure out how to pattern this big old mountain lion that we were calling Chuck Norris. He was the biggest tomcat that I've seen in Texas. I bet this guy with a full belly was like 155 pounds. And here's just this cool, cool old tomcat with this huge head and these big muscular arms. He's just freaking ripped. And he was walking down this canyon once every two weeks or so on our trail camera. So we started setting up blinds down in there and we were waiting for him to pass by and we were staying up all night. And sure enough, we get this cat patterned and figured out and we're just getting the coolest footage. And then he comes by one day, and he's missing all of his toes off of one of his paws. And he'd gotten his foot hung up in a trap and then pulled all of his toes out. So he had, like, you know, his left digit, but the other ones were gone, and he was kind of gimping around the canyon. So lost old Chuck. I don't know what happened to him. I don't know if he died from that injury or if he got hung up in some other trap later on. really ate at me. And then with that film, we kept filming after Chuck. There was a couple other cats that we saw there. And then about six months later, we saw a bear that had also gotten his foot caught in a trap and had bitten his foot off right above his ankle. And he came into our camera trap set and kind of laid down in this water hole and then hobbled off. And I don't know what happened to the bear, but that's one Canyon in West Texas, where in the course of a six month period, we watched the big Tom get trapped and probably one of the only bears in the Davis mountains get trapped. And those are just the ones that got maimed. I don't know how many actually, actually got trapped. so I wanted to do something about it and I felt like it was honest to the viewer for us to show them what we encountered so we included that into the film and that film was released in theaters and it shows a three-legged bear and it shows a mountain lion stepping into a trap And I think for the first time, many Texans realized, like, what are we doing? You know, why are we treating our mountain lions like this? This is like the symbol of wildness in our state. We're just gonna torture them to death. I think that it something that most hunters don like There a lot of trappers that don like it And I think that it needs to change With that experience of seeing that cat lose its foot and then seeing that bear lose its foot I started asking around how to make change in Texas and talked to a couple friends that agreed with me. We formed a little coalition that we called Texans for Mountain Lions, and then submitted a petition to Texas Parks and Wildlife for them to do a handful of things to begin monitoring and managing mountain lions in Texas. What specifically were you asking for? The first thing that our group wanted was to start getting some data. In other states, there's a hunting season, there's a wildlife department that estimates the number of cats that then gives out tags of 20% of that population size. And then if there's any problem cats, they'll go and remove those cats and there's kind of a symbiosis. In Texas, we don't have that. We don't have any type of data monitoring. We don't have harvest reporting. It is a huge unknown how many cats we have. Along with harvest reporting, Ben's group wanted the state to put together a management plan for mountain lions. One of their earliest and most controversial proposals was directed specifically at South Texas, where there aren't as many lions in the wild as there are in West Texas. In South Texas, they wanted to set a limit where no one person could hunt any more than five mountain lions in a given year. People heard they might only be able to kill five lions, and they freaked out. And that was kind of spun out of control into this narrative in some online circles that kind of painted me as this anti-hunting villain who wanted to take away people's ability to manage mountain lions on the property, which is not what we were going for. The most outspoken critic of any new regulations for mountain lions was this outdoors podcaster named Cable Smith, who has a huge following online. His main argument was that any new efforts to manage mountain lions would inevitably lead to a total ban on trapping or hunting them and any other predators. The idea is that Texans are out there relentlessly persecuting mountain lions, hunting them and trapping them, trying to exterminate them. Dude, I've never hunted a mountain lion in Texas. Never seen one. And I hunt all the time. This is unsurprising, I guess, given the state of public discourse these days, but it didn't take long for this podcast guy to start referring to Ben and the others as cockroaches who were trying to infest the hunting community. The cockroaches are coming out and we've got a big ass spotlight. Like clockwork, fans of the hunting podcast started attacking Ben and his family. There was just straight up like threats on me and just like on my family, on my like two-year-old daughter. I'd love to get my hands on her, one person wrote about Ben's daughter. Threats included, remember that I can always find you and your family. Another was, better watch your kid. There was like a very large and prominent account that was just like painting me out to be this anti-hunting person that I am not. Like my kids, we eat venison and pork over everything else. Like I hunt. The idea that I'm an anti-hunter is ridiculous. But it was just really inconvenient and really just indicative of the emotions that start to swirl whenever mountain lion regulations come up. And I find it really unfortunate and really unproductive. Did that take a toll? Yeah, I mean, it took a toll on me for sure. I mean, anytime you see somebody making violent threats publicly, you know, and just like saying all this crazy stuff about my wife and like, you better watch your kids or they're going to disappear. And I had to like talk to the FBI and be like, hey, is this guy legit? Like, is this a person that I need to be concerned about or is this just like some weirdo troll? And yeah, it's not a good use of anybody's time to be worried about your personal safety over you think that mountain lions shouldn't die in a trap for weeks on end. I think most people agree with that. And it was really frustrating. It was really frustrating. And yeah, it was one of those deals where it just makes you realize that if you get involved in controversial topics, don't be surprised if controversy finds you. To Ben's disappointment, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department denied his group's petition. But there was a silver lining. We submitted the petition, and then Texas Parks and Wildlife threw it out and said, we're not going to do those things, but we are going to create a stakeholder advisory group that consisted of 20 individuals from across the state, including myself. and it had trappers, ranchers, biologists, state agency folks, wide opinion, very diverse group. And we had a series of six meetings where we sought to find things that we agreed on, things that we disagreed on, and try to figure out, all right, how are we going to manage lions in Texas? One of the most interesting things to me within that group was that nobody wanted mountain lions to be extirpated from the state. Everybody thought mountain lions were important. We should have some mountain lions. And that was a really great place to start. This was the opposite of that old mentality from decades earlier when we were still trying to kill off all the mountain lions we had. I wonder what had changed and why so many more people want mountain lions around now. We should have mountain lions in Texas and we should conserve mountain lions in Texas because they're really important to our culture and they're important to the landscape you know you look around at all the high school mascots and stuff and four out of the top ten are the lions the cougars the panthers and the wildcats they're just cool critters and mountain lions I feel like give a wildness to a landscape that whenever the mountain lion is removed it's just kind of neutering that landscape a little bit and taking it off one more box to where it's closer to just getting paved with the asphalt. The advisory group created a new set of recommendations that they took back to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission And this time around the commission was a little more receptive The commissioners asked Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to bring them a ruling that they could vote on that prohibited mountain lions from being in traps for more than 36 hours. Therefore, they would have to check their traps every other day. So the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's commissioners received the stakeholder group's findings and decided, one, that Texas needs a mountain lion management plan, and two, that we should have trap tracks on mountain lions. Along with the new rules for trapping lions, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission also banned what is known as canned hunting for mountain lions. If you're not familiar with the term canned hunting, that's just where you keep a wild animal in a pen or a cage, and some rich guy pays you a lot of money to shoot it for sport. It's more common than you might think. It was a historic moment. It's one that I'm very proud of. And it was the first conservation efforts for mountain lions in Texas history. And I'm extremely proud to be a part of that. I'm so fucking proud of that that I named my son Davis after the mountain range that we were a part of. I thought you would have picked Chuck Norris. Those boots are a little bit too big to fill. For the first time in Texas history, Texas had at least a little protection for mountain lions. But protections on paper don't change what people believe. And that brings us back to Hood County. Given Ben's history with mountain lions, I wanted to know what he thought about the Hood County Sheriff's Office blaming a lion for the death of Christopher Whiteley. Ben had some strong opinions on that, but first he pointed out the bigger picture. I think the mountain lions are an easy scapegoat for a lot of unknowns. Why can't I make my ranch profitable? Well, it's got to be those mountain lions. It's damn fair, I'm not sure, because we've been overgrazing it for the last 25 years. Why are the deer numbers down? Well, it's got to be the mountain lions. Not poor fawn survival because of drought. Why can't I keep my ranch together because my brother wants to sell? You know, there's all these challenges that exist within land management. And there is a long history of blaming problems on carnivores in the United States. And I think part of that comes from that fear that I was describing to you earlier and the unknown. And mountain lions are this mysterious creature that is rarely seen. And when you see them, it's often just for a glimpse. All you see is their tracks. they're the perfect escape artist why this fellow thought that it was appropriate to blame the murder or to blame the death of this man on a mountain lion it's probably because he didn't have any other ideas of what to do and mountain lions are an easy scapegoat at any time a mountain lion is seen on a game cam in the dallas area it becomes you know top headlines i think that was part of it too made the front page news or nine o'clock news like mountain lion scene and so people kind of lose their minds yeah mountain lion sightings are contagious and people get a ring camera people get a trail camera and then all of a sudden people start talking about it and it enters conversations people love to talk about mountain lions it's because they're cool. They're awesome animals. And a lot of people are afraid of mountain lions. And a lot of people don't know that mountain lions have never killed a person in Texas ever. There's not a single documented mortality from a mountain lion in Texas history. There's 30 million of us. None of us are getting killed by mountain lions. You know what kills people? cars. Those are dangerous. You're driving a multi-ton steel torpedo loaded with liquid explosives faster than the fastest land mammal can run. But our brains aren't evolved to be afraid of cars. Our brains are evolved for saber-toothed cats that hunted our ancestors 5,000 years ago. And that fear, which isn't backed up by facts or by critical observation, that's what drives a lot of the emotions around mountain lions. And I think that that primal fear probably had something to do with why this sheriff said it was a mountain lion. and I can kind of understand that a little bit. Like, well, I don't have any other good ideas. Hell, it was probably a mountain lion. I mean, it could have been Bigfoot. There's more Bigfoot sightings than there are mountain lion sightings in Texas. It could have been old Squatch. But for that sheriff to double down on it and not admit wrong, It's like, man, you're really casting a lot of shade at mountain lions. There's not even any cats up there. There's not a viable population up there. You're blaming something on an animal that doesn't even exist. It just makes you look like a fool. Ben Masters and his crew at Fin and Fur Films are now working on a documentary about his favorite critter, the mountain lion. Thank you for listening to The Unforgotten. To dig deeper into the story and see photos, case files, and more, check out our newsletter at unforgottenpod.com. The Unforgotten is a Free Range production. Season 4, Killsight, was produced here at Free Range in association with the Dallas Morning News, editing by Aislinn Gaddis, sound design and audio engineering from Austin Sisler with Eastside Studios. Charlie Scudder and I are executive producers. Special thanks to Morgan O'Hanlon. Don't forget, on ForgottenPod.com, see you soon.
