Big Cats in Small Numbers: The Mythmaker That is The Eastern Cougar
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The Eastern Cougar, it seems, has become the new Bigfoot. In 2018, this storied carnivore was officially dubbed extinct in North Carolina by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, following “years of deliberation.” Prior to this, there had been no verified encounters since one was shot in Maine in 1938. On its face, it seems a simple tragedy, but the fate of the Eastern cougar remains mired in controversy. First, many contend that there wasn’t ever such a thing as an “Eastern” cougar, that all cougars in North America are of a single subspecies. Secondly, despite wildlife authorities stating unequivocally that all cougars have been “extirpated” from areas east of the Mississippi, there is a surplus of often harrowing stories from locals (the harrowingness of these encounters and their credibility often being inversely related), that suggest that he possibility of big cats remaining in the Smokies is at least worth examining closely.
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It’s very possible that the Eastern Cougar never even existed in the first place. The designation of cougars in the eastern US as being taxonomically distinct from those in the west is not universally accepted; the basis for this designation was that eastern individuals were found to have marginally smaller heads than their western counterparts. In 2015, a research group was formed at Pennsylvania State University to sequence the DNA of this extinct species, taking samples from preserved Eastern Cougar skins. The researchers found that the samples (of which there were five) were not more similar to each other than to individuals from the Western U.S. and Florida, lending support to the argument that all North American cougars are of a single subspecies. This carries the rather amusing implication that the Eastern Cougar might have been the first ever nonexistent creature to go extinct.
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But flying in the face of these reports of extinction and extirpation are the vast number of reported sightings in the Eastern US every year. According to the NC Wildlife Resources Commission, in most of these cases, people are mistaking standard house cats or bobcats (or even dogs or bears) for cougars. The longer one thinks about this explanation, though, the more dubious it seems: house cats, for example, weigh ten pounds soaking wet, while cougars usually weigh well over 80 pounds, and are at least six times longer–that’s like mistaking a dinghy for a megayacht. Surely not all of us easterners are suffering from these grievous lapses in perception? The WRC has an answer. They maintain that yes, cougars might occasionally be seen in the east, but these are “western” individuals that have likely escaped from zoos, or otherwise crossed the Mississippi (competent leapers, they). But the WRC still holds that no breeding population of cougars exists east of the Mississippi.
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Be that as it may, as one strays away from “official” information regarding cougars in the Blue Ridge, and instead visits sites like Youtube and Reddit (where there appears to be a surfeit of wildlife experts), one can find many accounts of cougar sightings in the appalachians, and it’s hard not to find these stories–usually rendered with great enthusiasm and little regard for grammar–more compelling than the austere pages of official wildlife sites. There’s even a video of a mountain lion, captured on a trail camera in Tennessee–the big cat, heavy with muscle, wanders into the frame, sniffs around a bit, then slinks off into the inky night. The comment section of that video is spilling over with comments by people who insist that they’re still around, from the rather hazy “people say there are no big cats in tennessee but i have seen them” to the more substantial “I saw one near my house, 6 miles from downtown Asheville. I went out the next day and made plaster casts of its footprints. Yep, they’re all over these mountains, many folks around here have seen and heard them.” But even these internet circles have their share of skeptics. One commenter points out that it’s pretty much impossible to verify that the footage is actually from Tennessee. Just below this, another commenter, somebody named Vanilla Gorilla, lets rip with a devastating indictment against the Smokies: “Cougars don’t like North Carolina, it’s a dump.”
There’s yet another possibility to explain the nebulous and often contradictory fate of the (Eastern?) cougar, and that is that the Fish and Wildlife Service are well aware of a breeding population of big cats present in Eastern North America, but are being intentionally coy about it in an effort to preserve this population. One gets the impression that if big cats were officially acknowledged as existing in the east, everyone and their brother would be out trying to bag one, and the already struggling population, if it does exist, would quickly meet a much less equivocal fate.
It’s refreshing, in this age of hard knowledge and dogma, for something not to be settled, for a mystery to endure, even if the mystery itself–the possibility of a devastated population of animals still existing–was created by man’s own capacity for destruction. Fortunately for us, our other great talent is storytelling. As Wordsworth said, “We murder to dissect.” If the question of big cats in the east were to be definitively answered, all the stories about them, all the tales, either written online, or issued from a mountain man so heavily bearded it’s impossible to tell out of which orifice his speech is emanating–would suddenly flatline. And good stories are endangered, too.
