Beautiful creature. What a shame that cougars and other animals, especially large predators, are losing their habitat. What's even more of a shame is that so many people can't keep it in their pants so we can stop our ridiculous population growth!
Before you read through this whole poorly-written rant, I would like to say that I am merely expressing my opinion and it is not my intention to accuse or offend anyone. I simply feel that I have to say these things.
Seriously, yes we have the right to have a family and protect that family with whatever means necessary, but with rights come responsibilities. We had a fairly stable, slow growing population until the early 20th century, and then it started exploding! What is wrong with people? Are 10 kids really any better than 2? If we could just be responsible our problems, while still present, would at least be smaller. Think about it! If people thought before they dropped trow, we wouldn't have this huge debate about abortion and our population wouldn't be threatening to consume all other life on Earth! Surprisingly, to me at least, the U.S. isn't even the worst for population growth or pollution or other environmental damage (anymore), but other nations have taken our earlier examples to extremes and we are just learning (late, as always) to attempt to correct some of our mistakes.
We've developed this subconscious idea that humans are not part of nature, and then we freak out when it suddenly barges in on "our" world, like this cougar. Not to sound too hippie-dippy or tree-hugger-ish, but people really need to realize that we are a part of nature and are subject to its laws. When a pack of wolves in Idaho attacks a cow or sheep, that's nature at work. We've moved in and driven out the natural prey of predators like wolves and courgars and replaced them with slow, dumb, inbred livestock. That is exactly what predators target, the slow and the weak, which helps to remove inferior genes from the pool and allowing the species to become stronger. Even when an animal attacks a person, it's just predator verses prey, animal against animal. Yes, it's sad and it shouldn't have happened, but it did, it does, and it will. If people don't want to deal with nature, we had better start working on expanding that space station! What we need to do is realize that we can't escape the animal kingdom because we are a part of it.
We should protect ourselves and our family, it's only natural, but we can't isolate ourselves from nature and we can't force animals out of their habitats. We can't expect them to obey our artificial boundaries and leave us alone. They are only trying to adapt and survive in a world we are shaping to fit our own wants and, less often, our needs.
Sorry for this little rant and thanks for bearing with me, even if you don't agree with me. As gardeners, I think that we generally have a better "awareness" of nature and our place in it, but we can still loose perspective and become biased against all "dangerous" animals when one isolated situation threatens us or our families (or in my case my plants, when the deer massacre them
).
I would have freaked. I love wildlife but that one was too close for comfort. 
They inhabits also the Llanos from Venezuela, where temps hardly goes below 25ºC (that's actually the place where I saw the one I mentioned before)
Hybrid Mode
