Cougar(s) in Bloomington?
In recent weeks, several people in Monroe County – including inside the city limits of Bloomington – have reported seeing a cougar. A number of these reports were covered in the Herald-Times. I was initially skeptical: eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable and it’s easy for people to transform the mundane into the extraordinary. The possibility of mass hysteria also needs to be thrown into the mix (for example, see Mass Delusions and Hysterias). An important datum in that regard is that 20-odd years ago in Bloomington there were claims a cat-like creature called the “Knight Ridge Panther” was stalking the suburbs and disturbing people’s sleep with its howls. Whether this was a hoax or hysteria has never been ascertained.
Unlike the mythical Knight Ridge Panther of the early 80’s, it is possible today for a large feline predator to be roaming the countryside. Cougars have had a major resurgence in the U.S. and their range is known to extend into Illinois. There are a number of reasons for the resurgence. An obvious one is the explosion of the deer population. Deer are prey animals and if there is a lot of meat on the hoof, cougar populations are going to explode also. Why the population explosion? In large part it is because our good friends, the eco-fascists, believe that hunting is evil and they have been effective at getting their beliefs enacted into law. Bureaucracies created to “manage” wildlife and “natural resources” then become functional allies of the eco-fascists because the easiest thing for them to regulate (restrict) is hunters and hunting.
In a Tech Central Station article a couple of years ago, Glenn “Too Tall” Reynolds talked about the return of the cougar and how sentimentality and willful ignorance made it possible for cougars to expand their diet to human beings. Not everyone who is sentimental and willfully ignorant is an eco-fascist, but every eco-fascist is both. Eco-fascists also hate their fellow human beings. In their view, there are far too many people on the Earth and the only ones worth having around are those who, like them, have a refined esthetic sense where “Nature” is concerned. So, if the occasional human being is eaten, chalk it up to the cost of protecting Mother Nature. Mark Steyn, in his critical evisceration of the 2003 Disney movie Brother Bear commented on one such person: a “technical advisor” named Timothy Treadwell. Treadwell was a self-proclaimed bear “expert” who believed he could tame their savage nature by singing to them.
. . . . Just as Kenai [ed: the main character, who is transformed into a bear] woke up to find himself trapped inside a bear, so did Mr Treadwell find himself trapped inside a bear, though in his case he was just passing through. In September, a pilot arrived at the great bear expert’s camp near Kaflia Bay in Alaska to fly him out and instead found the bits of him and his girlfriend that hadn’t yet been eaten buried in a bear’s food cache. “He would say it’s the culmination of his life’s work,” said Jewel Palovak, a colleague of Treadwell’s. “He died doing what he lived for.” He always said he wanted to end up in “bear scat”, which seems a very odd thing for a fellow who claims to love bears to say. The one thing you can rely on if you let the bear eat you is that you’re signing his death warrant: once a bear’s known to have a taste for human flesh, Fish and Game officials seek him out and kill him, as happened to the one Mr Treadwell ended up in.
You’d have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter at the fate of the eco-warrior, but it does make Brother Bear somewhat harder to swallow than its technical advisor evidently was.
Given Steyn’s implicit endorsement, it’s a travesty that Treadwell not only hasn’t won a Darwin Award - he hasn’t even been nominated!
But I digress . . .
The point of the foregoing is that it is possible for one or more cougars to have reached this area through the well-documented population explosion that is underway. Moreover, unlike the people who claimed they saw or heard the Knight Ridge Panther, several of the people who have reported cougar sightings are very credible. In fact, one is a local attorney with whom my wife has worked and another is a friend of the family. Both of these people live within roughly a half mile of each other. Other cougar sightings have been several miles away in the Lake Monroe area. Whether this means one well-traveled cougar or several in different parts of the county is hard to say. If there were only one cougar, it makes it somewhat more likely that it escaped from (probably illegal) captivity than that it is the vanguard of the eastward expanding cougar population.
Unlike Treadwell, I don’t romanticize nature nor do I believe in some sort of Gaia “spirit” (James Lovelock has taken strong exception to the mystical connotations given his Gaia Hypothesis by the environmental extremists – the people I call eco-fascists). I don’t yearn to become “bear scat” or cougar scat for that matter. More importantly, I don’t intend for my or anyone else’s children to suffer such a fate. Our friend has two young kids (ages 2 and 4). The cougar she saw disappeared into a stand of trees about 75 yards away. Cougars can kill adults and a little child would have no chance of survival.
Accordingly, I am adopting a shoot-on-sight policy. I neither know nor care if there is law protecting cougars – if I see one and have a clean, safe shot, it’s dead. I normally carry a Glock-21 – not ideal for cougar hunting – but it’ll have to do. At anything under 50 yards, and with 14 rounds, I should get enough hits to ultimately be lethal.
Fortunately, here in Southern Indiana – even in the eco-fascist colony of Bloomington – a lot of people carry. If cougars have decided to make Indiana their home, the smart ones will learn that they’d better stay away from those odd-looking bipeds and their young. The dumb ones will, like Timothy Treadwell, prematurely join the great circle of life.
Update: My wife says she’s thinking of becoming cougar bait.