by lrrowe » Tue Jul 05, 2016 8:35 pm
Tony,
This exert from a blog about 7 years ago pretty much summaries what I was referring to:
".......This brings us to the second question that I posed earlier, which was why government agencies deny that these thousands of sightings have taken place. In large part, it's the fact that the eastern cougar is still on the federal endangered species list. If DGIF (or any other state's wildlife agency) officially agrees that there are eastern cougars running around, then suddenly they have a whole host of obligations. Conservation groups would descend on them, demanding efforts to nurture and protect this animal and it's habitat. They'd have to pay for studies and find the funds and the strategy for protecting the habitat. Private land owners might suddenly face development restrictions on what they can do with their own land.
Meanwhile, there'd be a whole other backlash from people concerned about the eventual consequences of living with a very large predator that can and does eat human beings on occasion. One group of hunters would be asking to hunt them right away while another group would be asking that they be protected and nurtured in order to produce a large enough population to hunt in small numbers indefinitely.
In a nutshell, officially admitting that there are wild cougars in Virginia invites a political mess that none of these people really wants to deal with. Can you really blame them? So in response to sighting after sighting and article after article, DGIF and other agencies give the same old 'swamp gas and weather balloons' routine, as if we were talking about unicorns or velociraptors hiding out in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Their potential 'out' when some hunter finally shoots one and forces the issue into everyone's lap is the fact that, as I have explained here, odds are that these are not in fact eastern cougars at all but rather exotic pet trade hybrids. Hybrids which have no official status in wildlife regulations and are not considered endangered animals.
At that point, DGIF will almost certainly attempt to calm everyone down by pointing out that these are the product of escaped pets. This is what other states have done in the same situation. That takes care of the legal protection issue, but as for the rest it changes nothing. In terms of either safety or a desire to restore the old ecology of Virginia with a large, top level carnivorous cat, who the heck cares what subspecies it is? The worst part is that people usually swallow this kind of crap. And certainly DGIF will say that we have no reason to think that the escaped animals are breeding, so they don't really count, etc. But you'd have to be a complete idiot to think that there is any reason why these cats wouldn't be doing what comes naturally and breeding in the wild....."
Whether the points are true or not for now can best be described as opinions. But my beliefs run along this line.