Introduction

Lord of the Forest

Cougars, Cougars Everywhere

From 'Endangered' to 'Limbo'

Great Escapes: The Abitibi Cougar

Do Cougars Eat People?

Curiosity About the Cat

What do you Think?

On May 27, 1992, near Abitibi Lake near the Ontario border, a 90-pound male cougar was shot and killed in someone's front yard. The first cougar reported in that

This three-year old, male western cougar is one of four kept at the Shubenacadie Wildlife Park in Nova Scotia (Dept. of Natural Resources Photo].

area in more than 130 years, it was proof that the eastern cougar lived in that province -- or so the papers said.

In his recounting of the story, Gerry Parker says a skeptical curator of
mammals at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa wanted to know why this cougar was so far north. If there were cougars in Quebec, wouldn't they surely be found farther south where temperatures are warmer and deer more abundant?

A sliver of the cougar's flesh was sent to Melanie Culver in Maryland, and the sleuthing began. Culver applied the same genetic fingerprinting
techniques used to explode old ideas about cougar classification to finding the cat's closest genetic relative.

"The results were startling," says Gerry Parker. "The closest genetic match to the panther killed in Quebec was genetic material from pumas in Chile, South America."

Clearly the animal had hitched a ride north with a human, though it's not
known when or how. The skeptics had scored again.

Most wildlife biologists, including Gerry Parker, say escapes and
deliberate introductions explain all the credible cougar sightings in New
Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Mark Elderkin, who helped Fred Scott prepare his COSEWIC report, says during their research he was surprised to learn how lax some U.S. jurisdictions are in controlling cougars in captivity.

Western cougars are kept in captivity here as well. Among those being kept legally are two kittens now living at the Shubenacadie Wildlife Park in Nova Scotia. They were born April 10 at the Two Rivers Wildlife Park in Marion Bridge on Cape Breton Island.

In his 25 years with the Natural Resources in Nova Scotia, Barry Sabean
says he can recollect at least three instances of people keeping cougars without a permit. In one case, a man was caught walking his cougar on a leash.

"Usually our track record on something like that isn't very good, anyway.
If there were three, there were probably more," Sabean says.

The jury is still out on the exact origin of the only other physical evidence -- the Deersdale, N.B., scat collected in 1992. Hair and gut-lining cells from that scat are now undergoing DNA analysis in a lab in California and the results could come back any week now. If this cougar also proves to be South American, skeptics such as Rod Cumberland, who helped track the animal and believes it was an escape, will be right again.

But if it doesn't, what then? Given the taxonomic muddle that DNA sampling has brought to light, no genetic analysis is going to return an answer of "eastern cougar." In other words, if the Deersdale cougar is found to be North American in origin, we will probably never know if it is an eastern cougar or just somebody's pet mountain lion from British Columbia. We can't tell the difference -- at least not yet.

Fred Scott believes science will soon find a way to tell the difference,
and we should start looking for specimens now.

"The crucial thing that this indeterminate status will do, I hope, is
prompt people to really make an effort to go out there and get the data -  we need to know what the situation is," Fred Scott says.

He suggests conducting a systematic survey of animal tracks on dirt logging roads. Areas that consistently produce numerous cougar-like tracks would be targeted for intensive annual surveys and scat collection. Ultimately, dogs would be used to tree a cat in order to dart it and affix a radio collar.

If the search turns up more pet pumas, fine. If it turns up true North
American cougars, their DNA can be saved for the day when biologists
develop a method for distinguishing western from eastern cougars.

Although eastern and western cougars share almost all the same genes, making them practically identical, they are distinguished by a very slight difference in the frequency of some genes, Scott says.

Work is now being done to design a computer program that sorts through that gene data and uses statistical analysis to distinguish eastern from western cougars, he says.

Convincing people of the need for a search will be difficult. Back in the
1980s, Fred Scott attempted to convince the provincial government to hire some people with tracking dogs to follow up on sighting reports. The people in charge weren't interested.

Money was also an issue during the debate about official status, Scott
says. Wildlife managers in some jurisdictions argued against endangered status because it would have obliged them to spend time and money developing a recovery plan. "Indeterminate" may be a reasonable interpretation of data, says Scott, but it's also administratively safe.

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