I heard a great clip from Mayor Daley today defending the killing of the cougar.
From here: WBEZ / Chi NPR link
Which is just the way it would go down.
I read a comment somewhere that shooting it was dangerous because a child might’ve been hit by accident. Just another idiot hiding behind children.
Based on your certainty, I’m sure you’ll produce a cite shortly.
You’re not from around here, are you?
<laughs to think of a Chicago cop catching and relocating anything bigger than a Krispy Kreme>
You want me to produce a cite saying that a city would or wouldn’t have tranqs and ways of carrying off large animals on hand?
You’re kidding, right?
Go down to your local zoo or vet office and see if they have ways of sedating/transporting animals, I’m sure you’ll be pleasantly surprised. :rolleyes:
And to re-locate? Haul it off in a truck way out into some wild area and plop it down. Problem solved.
Plus, if people think that cougars couldn’t possibly be in the wilds around that area and aren’t part of the biological system I can say that they were once in the eastern areas as well.
Oh, people would want a cite for that too, I’m guessing. I’ll bite.
So I don’t exactly find it hard to believe that there could be still some roaming around up there somewhere in the middle-eastern areas.
And that’ll be my last say on the matter.
I and the 300 other people tuned to MSNBC heard Mika Brzezinski say, “A 150 lb cougar…this is a human we’re talking about…was shot in Chicago.”
Mika’s kinda a cougar herself! 
I can’t imagine why any mountain lion would end up in the city of Chicago. Mountain lions usually avoid people. Sometimes they’ll attack a human who is in their natural hunting area and who looks vulnerable, if they’re desperate, but that’s very rare. It seems very unlikely to me that a mountain lion would go into an urban environment voluntarily. Usually they stay on the fringes of urban development.
Nope, trust us locals, the CPD has zero contingency plans for dealing with a large preditory cat. Seriously. It’s true that the Lincoln Park Zoo is less than two miles away from Roscoe Village, but with traffic those two miles could be a half hour easy to get someone from the zoo over with a tranq gun, which is going to be a difficult and dicey shot to begin with. This situation was IMHO best handled by shooting the cougar. I don’t love the idea either, but it was the best choice.
Are you familiar with Northern Illinois? There isn’t anywhere within a hundred miles that would be cool with someone releasing a woozy cougar (band name) in their local. There aren’t great expanses of wilderness until you get up into waaay northern Wisconsin.
Ok, but so were cave bears. If one showed up in the city of Chicago I’d expect that they would shoot that too. Cougars are so long departed from the area that this no longer constitutes it’s natural range anymore. I can suss out that based on your user name that you have an affinity for large cats, which is cool, but large dangerous wild animal + heavily populated urban area = shoot the animal almost every single time.
That is not a cite.
Perhaps you’ll read my second post. I quote an expert who says that it isn’t quite as simple or as cut-and-dried as you (presumably a non-expert) seem to think. If you attempted it, I think it’d be you who would be surprised. And possibly not pleasantly.
Meant to say:
I and the 300 other people tuned to MSNBC heard Mika Brzezinski say, “A 150 lb cougar…this is an animal we’re talking about…was shot in Chicago.”
:smack: :smack: :smack:
Beware of Doug, don’t be so hasty–Cougars, as a species, vary quite a bit in weight. Mika was showing the journalistic integrity and attention to detail that we all expect from a highly respected institution.
The only time I ever saw a mountain lion in the wild, it was about the size of a really big dog–a great dane, for instance. Not quite 150 pounds, but close, maybe.
Those cougars, alsways stalking boy toys. At 150, she would be a little chunky.
What?
Never mind, wrong cougar.