Cougars

[Lallans]

Do they get that big there?!
(I'm picturing an old Sci-Fi B-movie )

{snip}

I should have put a smiley face after that but upon reflection decided it was more true without.

I know full well what a minority I am here on X Marks. Perhaps all the more reason for me to voice my opinion from within the fray. Two quotes immediately sprang to mind while reading through this thread, both from the gadfly and defender of the American West, Edward Abbey.

"The rancher strings barbed wire across the range, drills wells and bulldozes stock ponds everywhere, drives off the elk and antelope and bighorn sheep, poisons coyotes and prairie dogs, shoots eagle and bear and cougar on sight, supplants the native bluestem and grama grass with tumbleweed, cow ****, cheat grass, snakeweed, anthills, poverty weed, mud and dust and flies--and then leans back and smiles broadly at the Tee Vee cameras and tells us how much he loves the West."

"We need coyotes more than we need, let us say, more people, of whom we already have an extravagant surplus, or more domesticated dogs, which in all fairness could and should be ground up into hamburger and used as emergency coyote food, to raise their spirits and perhaps improve the tenor of their predawn howling."

Perhaps the same could and should be said of cougars...

Hey, I'm a Buddhist and on highest principle am against killing anything- but I'm also a country boy and am even more against things killing and eating my fellow humans. This "let's leave the countryside to the animals" idea perhaps looks well and even beautiful from inside city limits but it might be a good idea to, as the saying goes, consider where your food comes from. And there is no reason people and predators can't co-exist in the same area, but I've decided that the sad truth of the matter is that if they go unmenaced, the predators that once learned to avoid humans start exploring the idea of eating us, and eventually do so. There was no such animal problem as is seen at present when I was a kid and anything considered dangerous was shot on sight by a part of the population... the woman whose daughter was too good to fight back and was killed by coyotes in Nova Scotia asked that the same coyotes just be left alone to continue their "normal behaviour" (as she thought) but if her wishes were put into practice she was a greater danger to humanity than 1000 coyotes. Nature has rules, and standing still to get eaten is not one of them- not even the Buddha would have said that.