Not to be confused with the Chicago Cougar As if they’d ever get up to 150 lbs!
So people start calling police about it, and instead of them calling someone in to capture it somehow and return it to the wild, they up and kill the endangered cat.
And of course they use the excuse of, basically, “Well even though they’re an endangered species, they’re not a part of the ecosystem here (even though they obviously are because it’s there, and I’m pretty sure cougars are in more than just the Rockies), so yeah, we shot and killed it.”
Good job indeed. :rolleyes:
If by “endangered”, you mean Near Threatened. Still, though, it’s a shame it had to be killed. 150 lbs is a big one!
Um, They aren’t an endangered species.
It apparently moved into a threatening position triggering a volley of shots. I’m not sure that the CPD has the resources to dope and relocate such an animal and it was located in a densely urban area with many families nearby. It’s not like it was in a wooded area near a suburb. The danger was imminent.
Besides what the others said about it trying to attack the cops, it’s also not found anywhere near Illinois naturally. Check the map via the Wiki link. The local police do their best to relocate animals when possible, including native coyotes that manage to find their way downtown, like this famous coyote that ended up in a Quizno’s in downtown Chicago’s Loop area.
I just wanted a toasty sandwich!
They have a pepper bar!
You mean a “TOASTed Flatbread Sammie for only two dollahs”?
I assumed the sub-headline would be “Ladies’ Night Out Takes Bad Turn For Frisky Divorcee…”
Damnit, beaten to the punch again! For some reason Nicolette Sheridan came to mind.
Endangered, threatened, it’s still not exactly a plentiful species and numbers are still dwindling. Point is, it’s not exactly a species we want to be shooting at, and I’m sure that if they had time to call cops in, I’m sure whoever the dispatcher was could have called in animal control.
And yes, I’m sure such a city has ways of catching and re-locating.
He’s coming right for us!
Um, sure, for squirrels and dogs and such. Not cougars. They officially don’t exist here, nobody in the Animal Control department is going to have the training or the equiptment to handle such a creature. 99/100 times that something like this happens, the animal is going to get shot, and that’s probably the correct response too. I don’t want three cops in the ER because they tried to subdue a 150 cat, or a lawsuit coming against the city because they didn’t shoot it and it killed a kid while panicked and running.
And where exactly are we going to relocate a cougar? Berwyn?
From the news reports I saw, Animal Control had been called, but as other posters said, dealing with something that huge isn’t common - at worst we get the rare stray coyote or perhaps deer.
The police were trying to keep the animal confined as best as possible because either this area has more than one cougar on the loose, or the animal traveled about 15 miles south into the city since its sightings in northern suburbs over the weekend. They were worried it would get away as they’d also seen it vault over a 6’+ fence with no effort, and there were a lot of people still outside. When it tried to attack them, they killed it in self-defense.
The Cougar was probably somebody’s “pet”. When will folks learn these are not domesticated animals?
I agree. Poor thing. It probably was scared. Wild animals should remain in the wild.
Most of what I know about mountain lions I’ve learned from the trackers and guides I’ve talked to here in Colorado. The only hunting I know of here is of animals that already are causing problems with people or livestock. There may be a “season” for cougars, but I don’t know about it.
What I have learned is that you don’t screw around with the big cat. A mountain lion will move away from you until it is cornered, then it will attack, and it takes a very short time for the cat to decide to attack. One simply doesn’t keep a mountain lion hemmed in until the animal control people get there. Even here in Colorado, a mountain lion roaming the streets of a city is a dead cat. Tranquilizer guns are just too risky – the range is too close, the chance of a bad shot is too high. I don’t remember the last time a mountain lion was killed in a Colorado urban area, but I’m willing to bet the phrase “hail of bullets” was used to describe it.
They’re having problems with mountain lions up around Boulder – mayhaps **MouseMaven ** or one of our other Front Range denizens can enlighten.
According to the news today, it was not a pet - it was wild. It had its claws and teeth and wasn’t chipped.
Here . They’re going to do a DNA test to find out if its the one that was spotted in Wisconsin. They think he was vacationing from the Dakotas.
First, Favre retires and now THIS! What the hell is going ON in Wisconsin?? Did someone put something in the water or something? 
Someone putting something in Wisconsin’s water? That’d be quite the turn around, eh? 
I’m not surprised that this wasn’t a pet, despite the DNR’s consistant refusal to admit that there have been cougar sightings in Illinois for quite some time when one shows up in the city of Chicago there’s bound to be a few more lurking around somewhere.
I was living a few miles from Belew’s Lake in NC, when I was told of about a big cat running around by a couple I know. I figured it was a lynx or a bobcat they had seen; I’d seen a beautiful specimen in Johnson County, TN (it ran when it saw me at 10 yards–which was good, really good–the sucker looked like it could do some serious damage to myself with very little effort). As an afterthought, I then asked about its tail. Surprise! It had a nice long one, almost as long as its body. And nice brown fur.
Which may have explained the two times that my dog’s hackles going to the maximum, getting between me and the woods, and barking and whining like a wild dog. Because it was night time, I figured whatever it was–that was not the time to find out (rabies–another problem around here). I knew that chasing deer, cats (except our own), and squirrels (my favorite to watch) were his most excellent adventures. Big birds such as wild turkeys, blue herons, egrets–he always ran behind the house and barked (snicker). Cattle he was terrified of because they were just plain big. Foxes were just something else to chase. And he would do his warning bark at people who walked by the house. But his barking was pretty unnerving.
As to what the big cat would eat, in case you asked? We’ve got plenty of white tail deer.
As for my opinion about big cats? If they don’t bother anybody, leave alone. From what I’ve read, different groupings interact with humans from avoiding them at all costs to tracking them down (Vancouver Island comes to mind). But my philosophy is the second they start picking off the pet’s, relocate them, or failing that, shoot 'em. Having lived in an area of San Diego, where someone had been killed by one, has tempered my view about these creatures. When living near Hemet, CA, I was warned about a Cougar sighting in the area. It was pretty rural, but had a lot of rich-folk homes. At the local bus stop, the kids noticed a cougar under a tree about a 100 yard’s away staring at them. Some of the neighbors thought this was really cute. I thought to myself, “Good for you, why don’t you try to take it home as a oversized stray?” From then on I kept vigilant eye out for them every time I went outside (rattlesnakes were another challenge in the Hemet area). I heard a rumor that a few neighbors were going to take the cat out themselves since the Ca’s DFW wasn’t really interested in dealing with the problem (and, of course, cougars are especially protected). I don’t know how it was resolved because I moved out a short time later.