I recently heard that there have been sightings of Cougars throughout IL and in the Shawnee National Forest. Recently, I read that a cougar was hit by a train and examined in Randolph County IL.
Here is the Urban Legend that I heard:
The government has stockpiles of weapons and facilities throughout the Shawnee national forest. In order to keep people away from them and out of the area, they brought and released cougars and bears in the area.
Come someone clear any of this up? How did the cougars get here? Can they survive in this environment? Any other info?
I doubt that releasing wild animals would effectively keep people away from an area, since most truly wild animals would be inclined to flee from humans.
As for the rumor that the gummint uses cougars to protect keep people away from weapons dumps (a rumor also mentioned in this news article), that’s just silly. First of all, the lack of any confirmed or probable sightings argues against the existance of hundreds of cougars out in the forest. Second of all, I can’t believe cougars (or bears!) would be very effective as guard dogs; large predator mammals, in general, have large territories, so the population concentration would be low, and it’s not as though cougars attack humans willy-nilly. After all, how common are cougar attacks in the places where there are naturally occuring cougar populations? That’s a rhetorical question; in fact, there’s fewer than six cougar attacks per year in all of the US and Canada.
However, John Cougar Mellancamp is from nearby Indiana. There were times back in the 80’s when you would hear a story at least once a week about him jumping out of a tree and mauling some jogger.
I’ve seen cougars in just about every state I’ve been in. They usually prowl around in crappy bars. Their distinctive mating call is a gravelly “Ya wanna play some pool?”
The trouble is, people hear the word “forest” and they immediately visualize an impenetrable jungle, where you could conceivably hide large stockpiles of weapons and mysterious facilities.
However, especially compared to some of the “forests” they have out West, Shawnee NF is a small, crowded, busy place. I’ve been there, camping and stuff, and I just can’t visualize where the government would put anything they wanted to keep secret. During most of the year the place is wall-to-wall with coon hunters, fishermen, backpackers, hikers, campers, you name it. Not to mention all the people who actually still live there, with garages and driveways and pink flamingos in their front yards and little homemade plywood bus stops for their kids to wait in.
It’s hardly an isolated spot, and if I were a government wanting to hide munitions, I’d put ‘em in a warehouse in Decatur, not in the middle of Shawnee NF, where sure as shootin’ some Boy Scout troop or gang of birdwatchers or college kids from SIU out on a weekend jaunt to Garden of the Gods would stumble over them.
And a mysterious “facility” could also be easily hidden by putting it in the middle of Decatur’s Pershing Road “strip”, marked “Ace Trophies”. You ever see anybody go in there?
A cougar was killed by an auto on Rt 3 between Columbia and Waterloo Il (South of St. Louis) this past summer. We have seen cat paws as big as the palm of my husband’s hand in our backyard. :eek:
I used to live next to the head of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. I heard of this sort of rumor being spread once before a while back and a man creating some sort of crazy story to liven up the towns people, but ultimately none of it turned out to be true. I’m sure that mountain lions, or something close in the family, probably migrated from the mountainous regions or Kentucky or Tennesse, but I could be totally wrong. I can say that I live around the heart of Illinois and I have heard stories of bobcats and such around the area where I live, so I do believe that there are some mountain lions and cougars around these parts, but at a very scarce population level.