Cougar Update

Someone commented on the Cougar story and brought to my attention that he may have been from the wild…and roamed all the way from South Dakota. National Geographic has the full story here.

This is what I found interesting.

A wayward cougar killed Monday on the streets of Chicago was probably hunting for a mate on the wrong side of town, experts said.

The two-year-old male may have quested more than 1,000 miles (1,610 kilometers) from the Black Hills of western South Dakota only to die in a hail of police gunfire after it was cornered in an alleyway.

Other experts think it’s more likely the cougar—also known as a mountain lion or a puma—was a pet that had escaped its owner or been released to fend for itself.

“A mountain lion walking right into the city of makes about as much sense as you and me walking into a den of rattlesnakes,” said Alan Rabinowitz, president of the Panthera Foundation, a conservation group. “Behaviorally, it makes no sense for a big wild cat.”

No matter where the cat came from, police said they had no choice but to gun down the cougar after it appeared in the city’s Roscoe Village neighborhood, and many wildlife officials agreed.

Critics note that residents near where the cougar was shot had been reporting sightings of a big cat in their midst for weeks before the incident. Local authorities could have been better prepared with tranquilizer guns and trained animal-control personnel, they say.

“In our state this would never have happened,” said Sara Carlson of the Wyoming-based Cougar Fund. “That cougar was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Dispersal Urge

Male cougars have an innate urge to set off, often when they are less than a year old. This dispersal instinct guarantees that they leave their home territories before larger males have a chance to kill them as potential competitors. It also ensures they don’t mate with their mothers, aunts, or sisters.

“If you’re a young cougar, you can stay and fight and hope you win, or you can leave,” said John Erb, a Minnesota wildlife official.

What’s more, males require a private range of about 200 square miles (518 square kilometers).

But in South Dakota’s Black Hills “we’re saturated with mountain lions,” Kanta said. “There are no holes for them to fill.”

Female cougars don’t have the same ranging instinct that males do. So once a male cougar sets off from the hills, he is likely to keep moving in a fruitless search for a mate.

In the longest confirmed cougar walkabout, a Black Hills cat wearing a radio collar was struck and killed in 2004 by a freight train in Oklahoma, more than 660 miles (1,062 kilometers) from its birthplace.

Wildlife officials are now performing DNA tests on tissue from the slain Chicago cougar to see if the animal can be definitively linked to the Black Hills.

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