Video: Study Finds Voices of Rachel Maddow and Rush Limbaugh Terrify Mountain Lions
OutdoorHub Reporters 06.22.17
New studies being done by the University of California Santa Cruz discovered that mountain lions are indeed afraid of human voices, including those of a few fairly prominent broadcasters.
The study involved using recordings of Rush Limbaugh and Rachel Maddow to determine if mountain lions are in fact afraid of humans.
For the experiments, a camera was placed in the woods along with sound equipment that played recordings of Limbaugh and Maddow talking politics, as well as recordings of croaking tree frogs.
A total of 29 experiments were ran, which featured 17 different mountain lions.
Researchers discovered that mountain lions ran away from the political jibber-jabber 83 percent of the time, and fled only once from the tree frog sounds.
According to UPI, UC Santa Cruz environmental studies professor Chris Wilmers said, “When people go out hiking, some have a fear that mountain lions are going to attack them. But it turns out that mountain lions are quite afraid of people.”
To be fair, researchers said they chose the voices of Limbaugh and Maddow strictly because the quality of the recordings, and the lions ran away regardless of who was talking, but it’s fair to assume the big cats were also trying to dodge people talking politics . . . who wouldn’t run from that?
“Pumas are nonpartisan in their hatred of American politics,” researcher Justine Smith said.
