HUFFINGTON
09.30.12
WILD KINGDOM
people whose pets or livestock are
killed by cougars. It’s a fallacy to
think that humans and wildlife,
in the broad perspective, co-exist. We live — we take — wildlife
habitat. I live in a house on about
one acre, and because I live there,
it’s not suitable habitat for certain
wild animals. So do you.”
Ottmann says that’s precisely
why he’s made it a mission to
spread the word.
“One of my concerns was, I
started hearing stories about
mountain lions in people’s yards
with kids,” Ottmann tells me that
night at the campfire. “I thought,
‘Oh shit, my sister is here with
two kids, and we’ve got woods in
our backyard, too,’” he continues. “So, I’m like, if I can prevent
somebody from getting attacked
by educating the public, that
would be a good thing. And
that’s how it started.”
The Milford Mystery
To be sure, the roadside death of
the Milford cat, while sad, was a
milestone event for everyone with
an interest in American wildlife,
professional or otherwise. Rego,
a veteran wildlife biologist with
Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection
(DEEP) — and a man of otherwise
sober, even pensive demeanor —
calls it a “holy shit moment” during a recent visit to the state’s
Sessions Woods Wildlife Division
office in Burlington, where the remains of the cat are kept.
“It really was, like, holy shit,”
Rego says. “We’ve had these unverified and numerous known
false reports for decades, and
here indeed was an animal that
was a mountain lion. But on top
of that, this was an impressive
animal. It was 140 pounds. The
largest animals we deal with regularly, excluding bears, aren’t that
big. The largest bobcat we’ve ever
handled was 39 pounds. Coyotes,
you know, 40 or 45 pounds is a
big coyote. So your size reference
is like this,” Rego says, his hands
measuring out a couple of feet of
air. “And then suddenly you have
an animal that, without the tail, is
like this,” he explains, moving his
hands broadly apart, “and it’s like,
holy crap, look at that thing.”
At the point of European contact with the new world, big cats
like this one could be found from
coast to coast and from Canada to
South America. Early taxonomies
parsed these cougar populations
into dozens of regional subspe-