In my community it is almost impossible to keep cats outside anymore unless you also have large dogs. When the coyotes find a place where there are cats living outside they come back again and again. The only thing that seems to deter the coyotes is the presence of dogs.

I know several hunters, as well as scores of fishermen, and am well aware that they do play an important role in securing legislation to protect wildlife, and I certainly am not about to say that there’s anything wrong in what they do, but I will always be more concerned about anyone with a gun wandering through the woods than I will anything armed with tooth and claw. Always, if only for the fact that humans are the deadliest of all animals.

A year or two after that, one of my co-workers claimed that there had been a sighting of one on his farm along the Kentucky River in Jessamine County.

My grandmother says that her father never went into the hills without his ax, in case he encountered a panther. I have no doubt that there have always been pumas here, although their numbers in for the past hundred years or so have been low.

There are some photos that circulated a couple of years ago, showing a puma stalking a large whitetail buck on a reclaimed strip mine site at Wolf Creek in Martin County, KY. They supposedly were shot at night from a game camera set up on the site. To me they did not really look genuine; the puma was apparently walking sedately right behind the deer, and pumas usually stalk prey until they are several yards away and then pounce. I have not seen those photos again and I do not remember now who showed them to me. I did not pay too much attention to them because they did not look genuine.

I have a friend who is with the KY Department of Mines and Minerals who says that he saw a puma on a Martin County mine site, though, and I do believe that. (This was several years before the photos appeared.) About 15 years ago he told me that he was walking back to his truck on a dirt road on the site early one morning, and a puma walked across the road about 50 yards in front of him. I have no reason to doubt his identification of the animal as a puma. He saw its tracks in the dry dirt and said that they were about as big as a big dog’s tracks. He did not report it because, he said, every good ole boy with a shotgun would be after it. Sadly, that is probably just exactly what would happen.

I’ve talked with several people who have seen pumas in the wild in Kentucky, West Virginia, or Virginia, or at least think they have. Some of those sightings were undoubtedly misidentifications, but some clearly were not. I think that the pumas that live in Appalachia, at least in this part of Appalachia, inhabit some of the rocky outcrops on the mountaintops. It’s only a matter of time before their existence is confirmed.

The question is where did they come from, are they making little cougars and when do we have to worry if we are on the menu.

I think that Eastern cats will never be a real threat, too many hunters and good ol’ boys will keep them skittish of people, unless hunting gets banned. In the West, the opposite has occured, they have lost their fear of man, who has over the last fifty years become less of a predator in the woods and more of a recreator. Prior to the 1960’s, every human that a cat encountered was probably armed and dangerous, now were a possible snack.