Dan Chemoze got the shock of his life the night of Sept. 6 when he pulled into his driveway here and saw what appeared to be a cougar.
“He was wild; he was loose; he was just passing through the village, I guess,” Chemoze said in an interview early this week. “My dog looked shocked.”
Chemoze said the cat was a smallish one, but far too big to be a house cat. Its body was two feet long, and its tail was an equal length, making it impossible to be a lynx or bobcat. They have no tails, or very small stubs. Further, it had the tan colours of the cougar, or puma, as it is sometimes called, and it had a very large head, with small ears.
Chemoze is not the only person to have seen a big cat in the Eden Mills area, and he noted that a neighbour has seen one. Chemoze said he was telling people about what he saw when his neighbour told him of a cougar crossing Highway 7 between Rockway and Guelph last year.
And it is not only in Wellington County that they are being sighted. The London Free Press on Sept. 12 reported a sighting in Lambton County, and Simcoe.com reported several sightings in the Hockley Valley.
Chemoze said he lives in a quiet area, abutting the Edgewood Camp, which has a lot of bush, and it is nothing for him to see wildlife near his some, including deer and fox.
“I was kind of in disbelief,” he remembered. “It was too big to be a cat, and almost as big as my dog,” he said, noting that his dog had no desire to investigate that night, but wanted to go straight into the house. The dog weighs 80 pounds, and Chemoze said the next day it was sniffing all around the yard to check the cat’s odour. He added that he checked in the bush for tracks, but it rained overnight, and he found nothing.
Chemoze said he went onto the web site of the Ontario Puma Foundation to report the sighting, and that was when he saw a map that showed how many cougar sightings there are in southern Ontario.
The cat’s common name is Eastern cougar and its Latin name is Puma concolor cougar
In 1978, the eastern subspecies was declared endangered by the committee on the status of endangered wildlife in Canada. That was re-examined in 1998, and the animal was designated “data deficient” because there is not enough information to evaluate the status of the animal or its classification as a subspecies.
Its range is Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia. Male cougars can reach two metres in length and weigh over 220 pounds. Females are slightly smaller.
Fatal cougar attacks are extremely rare: a total of 18 human deaths have been documented in the past 500 years. In comparison, dogs kill 18 to 20 humans every year.
Proof needed
Ministry of Natural Resources officials remain skeptical about any eastern cougars being in Ontario – simply because there is absolutely no proof of it.
Brad Gerrie, the Regional Operations Manager for the Enforcement Branch said in an interview on Saturday morning that such sightings cross all kinds of lines. Some are cases of mistaken identity, and some are simply misidentified.
Gerrie added that people are not necessarily seeing things or being incorrect when they say they saw a cougar. He said often those cats, though, “have escaped or are unlawfully released pets.”
But Gerrie said there is absolutely no physical evidence available that there are eastern cougars living in this area.
“We’re not saying they’re not naturally occurring; we’re just saying we just haven’t confirmed it.”
He noted that there never seems to be a photograph, or hair that could confirm a sighting.
Dufferin County Conservation Officer Rick Williams agrees.
He was once called about a cougar that was struck and killed at an intersection, and when he arrived, he found the carcass of a coyote.
He said that in the 1980s, there were a lot of people who had cougars for pets, but perhaps “Kitty got a little big” and several were released by owners who no longer wanted them.
Gerrie and Williams said finding cougar scat, or cougar hair, or anything that could be checked for genetics would be helpful, but to date, despite all the sightings, there has been nothing to check.
Chemoze can provide several reasons for that. He noted that the web site he visited explained female cougars have a range of 500 square kilometres, and males can range up to 1,500, crossing the ranges of several females. Further, the cats are nocturnal, which means they hunt at night and are unlikely to be wandering during the day. Very few people carry cameras and take pictures at night.
And, on top of everything else, cougars are generally shy creatures who want little to do with humans.
It seems that humans simply want to know if they are back in the area after an absence of close to 80 years. They once roamed freely across Ontario, but disappeared as man moved in to settle.
