Do you say Cougar/Puma/Mountain Lion or ?

Don't really know. If I were to meet one would more than likely call it "SIR CAT". :worship:

I sure don't want him / her calling me for lunch. :no:

here in MA we call em puma or cougar, there has been one report of them being in this state.

Around here they are called Cougar. Short story. A few years ago, actually about 30 years ago when I was living in Portland, Oregon, I went to visit a friend that lived north of Vancouver, Wash, we went to a local tavern to have a beer. There was a banquet like set up in the bar and the lady said we could fix ourselves a sandwich if we wanted to. You guessed it, the meat was smoked cougar. If memory serves me correctly, it tasted a lot like ham, only better. Seems a patron that frequents the tavern went on a cougar hunt in Idaho and got one and shared it. Rod in Appleton, WA

[QUOTE=Little Quacker in OR] Don't you find it interesting that in all of these years since the camera has been in existance and that wildlife experts and rangers have been in the field, that not one.. I repeat, not one, photo or sighting has ever been made of a cougar that is anything but just what it's name implies? Felis concolor.."cat of one color". [QUOTE]

Very well said. Much better than my attempt.

Back in the 70's, the state of Florida deliberately released several cougars that were captured in Texas. It was an attempt to augment the gene pool of the Florida subspecies of cougar. Apparently the transplanted cats are much more bold and aggressive towards human-kind than the smaller Florida cats. They did interbreed and the populations did rise, for a while. Biologists in South Alabama released a pair of Texas cats about that same time and they were never seen again. I believe that several of the "more Northern" states did similar things.

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Here in east tx we usually see the black ones...those we call panthers.

The tan ones I usally call mountain lion.

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Big country:

You're welcome to the one in my yard that has so far made lunch of 7 chicks, 1 hen, 2 roosters, 2 large geese and a bunny (in a cage, lashed to saw horses which was in turn lashed to the porch column. ....we found the cage minus the door about 4o feet away and only the bunny's tail was left). The dog weighs between 40 and 50 pounds and hasn't walked much since the last panther visit. Her legs tend to slide around when she tries to walk. If it is medium sized we call it a Florida panther. If it is humongous we call it a cougar or mountain lion. This one also just about did in the neighbor's german shepherd and is making another neighbor's horse nervous. My kids don't want to go outside anymore. It strikes as soon as we leave the property ...in broad daylight. We have yet to actually see it.

In Colorado where I grew up they call them mountain lions. And the guys that killed them for bounty were lion hunters.

Now I think they don't have the bounty but have a hunting season for them instead. Not a lot of people hunt for them though because you need to go with someone with the right kind of dogs. I think they use coonhounds or crossbred coonhounds of some kind. My dad's cousin got one but I know it cost him a good amount of money to hire the dogs.

I wish we had some lions here in PA there are too many deer. I know a dairy farmer who stays up nights in his corn and shoots them and tosses the carcasses in the woods. Last year he lost half his corn. Every time I almost hit one while I'm driving I have to remind myself that at least its not as bad here as in New Jersey.

I won't argue that the black cats in East Texas are cougars, but I will argue with anyone that says that there aren't any big black cats here.


THE BLACK PANTHERS OF THE LOUISIANA-TEXAS BORDERLANDS: ARE THEY EXTINCT?
By W. T. Block

When the writer was a youngster in Port Neches, Texas during the 1920's, there were still alive a few of the old-timers of Texas' "Big Thicket" or Louisiana's "Neutral Strip," who could tell hair-raising tales about the big black cats, that screamed in the jungles at night while they searched for their food. If one looks up the word 'panther' in a dictionary today, the latter defines it as being a "cougar," "puma," or "mountain lion," or the black mutations of the spotted leopards, jaguars, and cougars of Africa and America.

The writer's grandmother, Ellen Sweeney, formerly of Grand Chenier, Louisiana, often repeated stories of Civil War days when she was a teenager, and all the men were away in the Confederate Army. She noted that as darkness approached, the frontier settlers of Grand Chenier and Cameron barred their window shutters every night (there were no glass windows there then) to keep the panthers out. After dark, they could hear the screams of the big black cats as they left the sea cane marshes for higher ground in search of easy prey - that is, goats, sheep, hogs, or even on occasion, a human.

Before 1880, black panthers roamed in relatively large numbers everywhere between the piney forests of East Texas to Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp and Florida's Everglades. Apparently, Texas had at intervals three species of the big cats, the panther in the east, the tawny cougar in the Pecos region, and on extremely rare occasions, there were reports of a spotted "Mexican lion" (el tigre), presumably a smaller species of spotted jaguar, that sometimes roamed across the Rio Grande River into Texas.

http://www.wtblock.com/wtblockjr/black.htm

We call them cougars here....and there are way too many of them! My mil's best friend was killed by a cougar after the cat attacked her son. She pulled the cougar off her son and told her kids to run. They found my uncle and he went back and shot the cougar. The mom died just after my uncle arrived. This was in the Tulameen area. Another story; a friend of mine named Colby, was walking back to his family's cabin with two younger boys. They were in single file, with one younger boy in front, Colby and the other young boy in the back. They heard some noises behind them and saw the cougar. They started running towards the cabin. Colby looked back and saw the cougar dragging the young boy by the throat, into the trees. Luckily, help was nearby, and the boy survived. This happened in the Nakusp area. In both cases the cougars tracked their human prey over long distances. Very scary.

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