Another mountain lion confirmed in Missouri

We have been seeing one in northern Fulton county around the London Mills Spoon River area. I was one of the skeptics until I saw one and so will you.The thing I find suspicious is the DNRs refusal to admit to there existence here.

The Illinois DNR refuses to acknowledge the presence of cougars in our state, because then they would have to formulate policy and management practices, institute tracking a data logging management, and a whole plethora of other logistacal tasks that they just can’t fund or administrate.
They can’t even staff recreational areas properly, let alone “manage” a large predator in our state.
Good ole Illannoy politics are the reason that our DNR is woefully behind contemporary departments in other states.
Our politicians are a despicable parasitic burden on the people, that deserve nothing less than persecution, and prosecution.
Remember all of the feel-good rhetoric and bluster coming from Pat Quinn and Marc Miller, when Blago was being taken down?
Where are we now? We’ve gone backwards.
More politics as usual.
The whole damn lot of them should be run out of the state, and politics -WITHOUT their pensions.

Right on Raptor! were stuck though as long as were in the same state as Chicago ,they just added a huge problem to our state by electing Rahm Emmanual!

Yeah… bye bye Northerly Island, hello Meigs Field version 2.0

Not to get off subject or any thing but I had no idea that the teachers unions is what caused the whole world economy to crash.Dam teachers are just making too much money.

I agree for the most part with you guys, Illinois government has been doing a huge disservice to the people of the state, for probably most of our lifetimes.  The DNR is included in that- and for the people of Illinois, it’s a real shame.

On the mountain lion/cougar/what-have-you subject, I personally think that it’s real cool.  Anytime a once-native species like the alligator gar, can be reintroduced (I assume the big cat was native at one point, or at least had occasional occurance),  I think it’s a victory for the wildlife and the people.

According to the book, a big mountain lion will make about one deer kill per week.  That would be about 50 deer/mountain lion per year.  So, why not stock lions in the Forest Preserve Districts to take care of the deer overpopulation problem instead of paying the “sharp shooters.”  Sure, they may take an occasional pet out of someone’s back yard, but mostly, they like the taste of deer.  That could take care of the CWD problem as well.  So what are we waiting for?  It brings back a native species and manages the deer overpopulation at the same time….and costs the tax-payers nothing, what could be better in this economy?

I saw with my own eyes the proposal and graph posted in the Illinois DNRs web site where they had intended to reintroduce Gray Wolves and Cougars back into Illinois. That graph has since been taken down.That decision was just one of the many many new laws and proposals that come out of that office yearly. I wonder who comes up with these ideas. My favorites is the law against picking up road kill and shining lights on wildlife as “harassing wildlife” (I guess you have to drive with your headlights off at night)and the “what was I thinking” idea to reintroduce cougars back into the state.I’ll bet that one went over like a pay toilet in a diarrhea ward. I can see why it could be possible to deny that plan ever existed after a cougar killed the first child.

They don’t necessarily need to acknowledge there existence, if by existence you mean a sustainable population.  There is not a sustainable population in the midwest.  Young rogue males are pushed out of their home territories by mature dominant toms.  These males travel the river bottoms in search of food.  Females don’t have this problem and are left to breed out west with the mature toms.  The young males that we see on cameras, in sightings, and sometimes dead, are merely here by chance.