And they killed the cougar…wtf… you’re in it’s territory.

If a wild animal attacks a human, we typically kill it, if for no other reason than to keep it from doing so again. We also need to know what caused it to do so, like if it had an infection that made it particularly aggressive or something.

We’re animals too, and vastly more dangerous. It’s silly to think we won’t defend ourselves.

Cougars are known to attack anything. They’re literally top of the food chain. They already had it pinned, all they had to do was sedate it, and cage it, check it out at a vet and then release it. We need predators big time in NA, there is a reason the deer population has gone chaotic and they now have tons of diseases. There was 0 need to euthanize this animal.

It literally just tried to kill a person on a bike trail. Being known to attack anything isn’t a reason for us not to defend ourselves.

I’m aware we need predators, but we also need to not get ambushed by big cats. It might be too of the food chain, but we’re higher.
Next time it might attack someone who can’t fight it off, like a child or a smaller group.

A cougar is not worth a human life, no matter how good they are for deer conservation.

Interesting question arises from that - is a cougars life worth humans not venturing freely in forests (basically ‘the sacrifice of not being able to use that bike trail’, intentionally, for the good of the wildlife)?

And attacking a group of not that slow humans sounds a bit like distress. I don’t know anything about that situation, don’t claim to, just saying that disease and perhaps demeanour aren’t the only two things that can result in an attack like that - an attack which does sound like an attack-to-kill-for-food situation (the part where it didn’t let go of the face for 15 minutes) and not just for the sake of attack.

In general, we advise people not to go to places where it might upset or endanger animals or risk an encounter than might cause the animal to need to be killed.

If and when humans go there anyway, we still prioritize human life over the animal.

It just doesn’t track to say “if you go into the woods, we’ll let you get eaten by cougars”.
This woman didn’t deserve to die for riding a bike in a nature trail.

The animals motivation for the attack is only relevant for conservation efforts. Is there a disease we need to be aware of? A behavior shift, or a famine?
For the purposes of protecting people, we can’t let an animal that has actively attacked survive, but depending on why it attacked we might be able to intervene to prevent other attacks and help other animals.

Oh, yeah, I understand that, I was thinking more like prohibition, for conservation.