Editor:
Humans have managed to kill 30,000 cougars on this continent in a little more than the past decade.
As cats such as cougars become hungrier, they appear to take higher risks to fill their stomachs. Near starving, some cats will try things they have never tried before.
But humans don’t really fit the prey profile of puma concolor. Despite the fact that there are daily encounters between people and cougars (mostly they see us, but remain hidden from our untrained eyes), only one single person has been killed by one in this area in more than 100 years.
So, while it is highly unlikely that either one of the two recently killed cougars would have ever attacked a human being, conservation officers are under big pressure to “keep the public safe.”
One common contributing factor that seems to create conflicts between men and wild cats is our propensity to rob wildlife increasingly of more habitat. We are certainly guilty of that in the Bow Valley, in particular in Canmore. Once the wild land has been tamed by us, we have little tolerance nor respect if the critters show up in “their own backyard.”
Not only that, but we exacerbate this behaviour by attracting predators such as cougars to come close by letting our dear pets run off leash.
So thank you to all dog owners in the Bow Valley who regularly let their dogs wander off leash and who, in the process, helped to habituate and therefore destroy the two unlucky cougars last week.
We are now at 30,002 dead pumas. To conservation officers; it would be relatively easy to elevate this problem by adopting a zero-tolerance-policy in combination with stiff fines and the possible withdrawal of dog permits.
In mourning,
Reno Sommerhalder,
Banf
