Big cat attack on cow brings out crackpotsBy Jim Lundstrom
A big cat at the top of the food chain let the world know its species was back in Wisconsin after a 100-year absence by attacking a one-year-old heifer in the Town of Wonewoc in Juneau County on May 15.
cougarA turkey hunter watched as a large male cougar with a three-foot-long tail mauled the 400-pound cow?s face and hauled it into the woods. The turkey hunter fired a shot in the hope of scaring the cat away. It must have worked because the cow survived the attack, but was so severely injured it had to be put down.
While there have been several confirmed and many unconfirmed sightings of male cougar in Wisconsin in the past few years, breeding populations have not called Wisconsin home in more than a century.
Cougar are one of three wild cats that once lived in Wisconsin. Bobcat and Canada lynx are the other two. Several thousand bobcats are believed to still live in the state, mostly in northern areas, but cougar and Canada lynx were killed and driven out of the state by encroaching civilization in the late 1800s and into the very early 1900s. The last reported cougar kill was near Turtle Lake, Wis., in 1905.
But there is a well developed cougar population in western states. ?There may now be more mountain lions in the West than there were before European settlement,? a scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society has said.
A growing cougar population in South Dakota ? which has a cougar hunting season ? is believed to be the source of roaming young males looking for their own territory.
?That?s what we?re assuming because the closest population is the South Dakota population,? said Adrian Wydeven, a DNR mammalian ecologist/conservation biologist. ?They?re starting to spread into North Dakota as well. The current estimates are about 250 in western South Dakota and about 150 or so in western North Dakota, and I think there?s a small breeding population in the Pine Ridge region of western Nebraska as well. Those would be the nearest populations, so we?re assuming those would be the likeliest sources for the ones appearing here.?
Wydeven said the best evidence for that assumption came from a cougar that was killed by Chicago police on April 16, 2008. The cougar made it through the most populated parts of Wisconsin and all the way into Chicago, and was only spotted once on its southeastern journey when it was trapped in a barn near Milton, Wis., in January 2008.
It was the first confirmed cougar sighting in Wisconsin in 100 years.
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