Decision to kill cougar brings slew of complaints

The decision to kill a mountain lion after it was caught roaming neighborhoods in the northern part of the valley Wednesday spurred a stream of complaints.

The cougar was first spotted scrounging for food and water about 9:30 a.m. near Grand Teton Drive and Jones Boulevard.

Katie Richards, 14, peered out a window of her home in the 7800 block of Spiced Strawberry Street and saw a "huge cat just ramming itself" against the family's front door. Home alone, the ninth-grader feared the cat would break through the glass of the French doors.

"I was scared," she said. "I didn't know if it could break the glass on the door or not, and I was scared it was going to get inside."

As she waited for help, the teen kept a careful eye on the animal.

The mountain lion moved around the yard, came back to the door, and paced back and forth, the teen said. At times it lowered its head and pounced into the door, using its shoulders to try to break the glass. At one point, the cat lifted its front paws onto a nearby windowsill and stared inside, she said.

After moving about for a while, the cougar finally "settled down and laid on the doormat," she said.

"It was aggressively trying to get in the house. That's scary," said her father, Daren Richards, who has mixed feelings about the animal's death.

"That's a dangerous kitty, a dangerous cat," he said.

Hours later, when the cougar turned up in a residential community near Silverstone Golf Club just over a mile away, Clark County Animal Control officers shot the 65-pound cat with a tranquilizer gun, said supervisor David March.

The agency then turned the mountain lion over to the Nevada Department of Wildlife, which decided to euthanize it. The female cat, estimated to be just over a year old, was transported to Lied Animal Shelter, where around 5 p.m. it was sedated and then given a lethal injection.

No necropsy was done on the animal, and there was no indication that it had preyed on smaller animals in the neighborhood or tried to attack a human, but officials wanted to eliminate those possibilities.

Mountain lions kill larger animals such as deer, elk and wild horses for food. The cat usually stalks or ambushes its prey, often attacking from behind, killing with a neck-breaking bite below the base of the skull.

"The bottom line was public safety," said Doug Nielsen, spokesman for the Nevada Department of Wildlife.

"She (the cat) exhibited all the signs of something that was not normal. She was extremely comfortable in a human environment, and that's indicative of a problem."

Mountain lions normally are secretive, elusive creatures. Usually when confronted by humans, the animals will retreat to their home habitat, said Nielsen, who writes an outdoors column for the Review-Journal.

But on Wednesday, the cat was not scared off by three hours of swarming helicopters and the heavy presence of Las Vegas and Clark County School District police, state game wardens, and state wildlife, city and county animal control officers, some of whom were using loudspeakers to warn residents in the area.

The team had even left portions of the police-patrolled perimeter open so that the cat could go back to the mountains from which it had come.

The efforts were to no avail.

After media reported the cat was to be euthanized, the public responded.

"E-mails stacked up, and phone calls have been coming in like crazy," Nielsen said Thursday.

Between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., the Review-Journal received 10 phone calls and three e-mails from people critical of the decision to euthanize the animal.

"We can't just keep taking these animals and slaughtering them because we want to move in," said Debi Clough of Henderson, who is opposed to Nevada's rapid development.

Kevin Shambarger said he figured "somebody was too lazy to put it in a truck and take it out in the open space to let it go."

Keeping the animal alive is not as easy as it sounds, Nielsen said.

Laws prohibit the Wildlife Department from donating the animal to a private facility, and reintroducing it can cause disruption in the ecosystem.

Mountain lions are very territorial, and a female mountain lion, such as the one found Wednesday, will roam 25 to 30 square miles and attack any other lions in its area.

"We would be basically stirring up a fight, adding something that wasn't there before," Nielsen said.

Exposure to domesticated animals puts wild animals at significant risk of disease, and animals that have spent time in an urban area probably will associate humans with food sources and return.

The mountain lion found Wednesday was small for its age and was most likely starving and trying to get food.

People feed starving wild animals, but they don't understand that such actions contribute to the problem, Nielsen said.

"If the (mountain lion) came back into the human environment and did something unthinkable, then what?" he said. "If we look at the grand picture, this was the best thing for the mountain lion population as a whole and the public safety."