What’s puzzling? As anyone from British Columbia will tell you, cougars can and do venture into urban areas. In Victoria they’ve shown up in all sorts of seemingly unlikely places: the underground parking garage beneath the city’s conference center, inside the offices of a plastics manufacturer…one even crashed through a window into a home in the touristy James Bay neighborhood (in the cougar’s defense, it was being chased by dogs at the time).

In Los Angeles there have been recent incidents in Altadena and in Orange County (the latter being the fatal attack on the cyclist in Whiting Ranch Park, which is literally 10 miles from Disneyland).

Other recent incidents have come from such places as:
- Olympia, WA
- downtown Omaha
- Denver
- Kansas City

The point is, if cougars are in the vicinity then you can expect them to show up in the suburbs and even in the city every now and then. Why did this cougar show up in Chicago? The simple and obvious explanation is because there are cougars in Illinois, just as there are cougars in B.C. and Washington and California and Nebraska and Colorado and Missouri. They’re there, and sometimes they wander into town. It’s no more puzzling than that.

You can declare them extinct or extirpated or whatever, but that doesn’t mean the cougars will cooperate.

There was a rumor that the government actually release them into the public to control the deer population many, many years ago, but I really don’t know if there’s any truth to that. It doesn’t seem like an even solution.

At that point, you will succeeded in getting the necessary attention from legislators but not the Governor. A sizable birthday present to one of his children will do the trick. That will cause all of the state legislative wheels to turn.

Of course, none of that matters if Chicago’s Mayor Daley is not happy. This is Illinois where Springfield is the capital but Daley is the King. If your species can provide a lucrative maintenance contract to a Daley relative, you’ll be just fine.

More seriously, I think it is ironic that some of the comments have dismissed as unpursuasive DNA evidence linking the deceased cougar to sitings elsewhere. Isn’t that exactly the kind of evidence cryptozoologists long for but rarely get?

Step back a moment.

From most studies of wild animals in cities, these animals (including large felids) merely experience these “things” placed there by humans as being in the way of their old trackways, or serving as intriguing and interesting new challenges to getting from one greenbelt to the next.

Some of these places full of smelly primates even have chewy treats along the way (e.g. little dogs chained up in backyards), which make nice snacks during their journeys.

ps.

Point Radix… I totally agree with u, its a clever catch 22…
Never mind the fact that they used to live there before they were supposedly completely extirpated… in Michigan its possible that they have existed in small populations since the extirpating effort, not to mention other parts of the Midwest and east coast.

Using that rational, any animal that has suffered near extinction at the hands of man and its population starts to rise again is threatened to be decimated again… its a good thing animals don’t have guns or we would be engaged in all out war… Problem is that they don’t comprehend the assault on there kind… poor animals