Re: Ohio Now Has Mountain Lions
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: ArcticLight</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Donttrytorun</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Cougars in the East are like Bigfoots in the West. If they are around, somebody would have hit them with their car by now and we wund have a carcass to prove it.
There are a few Drug gangsters, usually in NYC or Philadelphia, who think exotic pets like alligators and cougars and tigers are cool, and buy little ones in states that don't have laws against their propogation and sale and bring them home to the Gjetto Palace. When they grow up they release them. We have had several alligators and camen in the creeks around Philadelphia over the years, and even a couple exotic cats, still with collars, released into "The Wild' of pennsyvania, where they got run over or shot in somebody's back yard.
They are not there by migration, or natural reproduction.
But we sure do have coyotes everywhere now, the big ones with Wolf genes, right into Philadelphia. </div></div>
I agree with you about that being "The most likely".
but you cannot say with any certainty there is no migration, unless you are a wildlife biologist that studies cougars for a living I'd have a hard time buying that one.
MonsterQuest did a lot of research, and in fact th ese cats existed in the 1800's, and were hunted to near extinction. That some survived or migrated is not unreal.
As for bigfoot, they just had a sighting, some kids filming themselves, they never even saw it until they got home and looked at the vid...my daughter lives in bigfoot territory - firmly believe based on all of the local sightings.. </div></div>
Grizzly Bears were easily wiped out in California. Plains and Woods Bison, and Wolves, were extincted in the lower 48. Same with jaguars in the southwest. And nobody, ever, managed to shoot one and get a picture or a skin or drag it to a settlement?
No single cougar snuck from the Rocky Mountains across the Great Plains, The Missouri, Ohio, Mississippi, or St Lawrence Rivers, through a dozen states, to end up in PA or Ohio. Neither did one come from the Everglades to Ohio. Breeding populations of Coyotes are easily documented how they got to the Northeast. They were seen, encountered, shot, and run over all the way there. One animal would only indicate that a guy from Chicago, or Brooklyn tossed one out of his trunk when it got too big for the apartment. One, or two, or 4 doesn't make a successful population. They are doomed.
With a hundred years of often more that 1,000,000 hunters in the woods for deer season in Pa we would have gotten some Cougars on the lodgepole by now. Hasn't happened for over 100 years.
There are no surviving or naturally ocuring Cougars, or Wolves in the East. Period.
And there are no Bigfoots in the West or Northwest either. Period.