Anyone who keeps domesticated felids knows what it's like to be awakened in the middle of the night by a paw to the face or small feet running over the bed, but Jacquie and Mack Anderson were surprised to find a much larger cat in their house. According to an AP report they had left the french doors to their home open during the night, allowing a cougar (Puma concolor) to sneak inside their bedroom and nab their Labrador retriever. Neither the lab nor the other dog in the room barked and the Andersons didn't even know what had happened until the cougar had their dog. All they saw was the cougar's tail as it left, the predator leaving the dog's body outside. Using the body of the dog as bait, wildlife officials later trapped and killed what was presumed to be the same cougar.
This story reminds me of the book The Beast in the Garden, an account of the interactions between people and mountain lions in suburban Colorado in the early 1990's. Even though the return of big predators is welcomed in some areas many people still don't know how to live with them; killing them and allowing them to roam suburbia can be equally controversial. There have been similar problems here in New Jersey with black bears, and even though many predatory species are vanishing others have managed to make a living in our backyards.
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This is the kind of thing that makes me so angry--there was no reason to kill the cougar.
To make it fair, every time a driver kills a cougar, the officials should hunt down and kill a scapegoat driver. Sounds right to me.
I agree that it wasn't necessary to kill this cat (and offered the same opinion about a cougar that was hunted down and killed in Tucson a few years ago just for being seen near a school), but you've got to do something about a large predator who comes inside a human home to hunt.
If the hunting fraternity is correct that such attacks are less common where cougars are legal game, then non-lethal harassment should be at least equally effective, if not more so (after all, a dead cougar can't act on anything it learned from the experience). Using the poor dog's carcass as bait to lure the cat back to be shot at with beanbags/rubber bullets and blasted with lights and sirens could have trained that particular cat to give people a wide berth. Instead, they took it out and left a territory open for another naive cougar who might eventually try the same thing.
Of course, the public agencies involved would have been subject to big-time liability had they taken a more humane and conservative course and the cat turned out to be a slow learner. The need to CYA in our litigious culture is the primary reason that execution is the first and only choice in most such cases.
I've just finished reading the Jim Corbett omnibus and I'm kind of glad to read this and realise that in the 80 years since the events described therein the world hasn't been sanitised to the extent that we still have big cats to teach people the importance of shutting doors at night.
"Wildlife Officials." The Department of Fish and Wildlife, famous for such wildlife-lovin' stunts as executing a beloved free-flying pet raven in Alaska, because he was a pet. That, and their revenge-killing of a wild creature convicted of doing what wild creatures do (which may well NOT have been the same cougar!) form a nice set of bookends. Between these bookends you may read volume after volume about these duly deputized yahoos who kill any animal hated enough by superstitious, ignorant, and (usually unscientifically and WRONG) profit-motivated hicks. The bit about "protecting" certain species from "captivity" is a rotten dodge, belied by such things as farmers and random rednecks' liberty to shoot crows.
Idiots. Too many idiots, not enough cougars. And the vile Department of Fish and Wildlife should get what it dishes out, perfectly served JUSTICE by the species they murder.