Cops kill cougar on N Side

- Neighborhood stunned as animal cornered, shot in back alley
By Jeremy Manier and Tina Shah | Tribune reporters
April 15, 2008
A cougar ran loose in Chicago on Monday for the first time since the city's founding in the 19th Century. But by day's end, the animal lay dead in a back alley on the North Side, shot by police who said they feared it was turning to attack.

No one knew where the 150-pound cat came from, though on Saturday Wilmette police had received four reports of a cougar roaming that suburb, roughly 15 miles from the site of Monday's shooting.

Whatever its origin, the 5-foot-long cougar's unlikely journey ended in the Roscoe Village neighborhood, where residents reported sightings throughout the day to the Chicago Commission on Animal Care and Control. Resident Ben Greene said police cornered the cougar shortly before 6 p.m. in his side yard on the 3400 block of North Hoyne Avenue.

Greene said he heard a volley of gunfire as he was bathing his 10-month-old son. His wife, Kate, ran upstairs screaming with their 3-year-old son, and they all took cover in a back room.
"At first, I'm thinking there's a gun battle in the street," said Greene, who owns a trucking company.

As the shots stopped, Greene heard the police yelling, "We got him! We got him!" He ventured downstairs and moved on his knees to the front door, where he saw police on his lawn. The officers had shot holes in an air conditioning unit on the side of Greene's house while aiming for the tan cougar, which died in the alley near Greene's garage.

Chicago Police Capt. Mike Ryan said the cougar tried to attack the officers when they tried to contain it. Police said they could not tranquilize the animal because police officers typically do not carry tranquilizer guns. Police said no one, including officers, was hurt and they did not know the cougar's gender.

"It was turning on the officers," Ryan said. "There was no way to take it into custody."

Normally reclusive creatures, most cougars retreated to habitats in the Rocky Mountains and Black Hills early in American history. But some researchers believe overcrowding in recent years has driven the animals back east.

Two cougars have been killed in Illinois in the last decade. In 2000, a train struck and killed one in Randolph County in southern Illinois, and in 2004 a bow hunter killed a cougar in Mercer County in western Illinois.

But in the previous century, there had been no confirmed sightings in Illinois of a cougar, which is also known as a puma, mountain lion or panther. The last known appearance of the animal was in 1864 at the southern end of the state.

The Wilmette and Chicago sightings capped a flurry of recent cougar activity in the area, though no one knows if that was all the same animal. Several people reported seeing a cougar at the end of March in North Chicago, about 20 miles north of Wilmette. A Wisconsin trapper came face to face with a cougar in January, about 25 miles from the Illinois border.

That trapper said the cat bounded away 12 feet at a leap.

Starting early Monday, frightened Roscoe Village residents began calling police with reports of a cougar which was bounding over high fences in the neighborhood. Greene said his wife got an e-mail alert about the animal Monday morning through a neighborhood watch list.

Frank Hirschmann, 50, of the 3500 block of North Seeley Avenue saw the animal pass by his home.

"I was sitting on the porch, and all of a sudden he crossed the street, and hurdled a 6-foot fence like nothing," Hirschmann said. He said he then ran into his house and watched police chase the cougar on foot.

Animal control officials were not sure if the cougar was wild or an escaped pet, though they noted that it is illegal to keep the animals as pets. It's unclear how a cougar could have traveled south into Chicago from Wilmette, but the areas are connected by a Metra train route, on which the cougar could have walked, and a waterway.

Ben Greene's neighbor, Romeo Dorazio, had just gotten home from dinner when he heard about 10 gunshots.

"I knew it was really nearby. I walked to the window and saw a cougar," Dorazio said. "It was the freakiest thing I ever saw."

James Reynolds was sitting in his living room when he heard what seemed like "fireworks popping."

The 45-year-old went out in his back yard and saw a cougar attempting to jump from his neighbor's fence to his. He knew it was a cougar because he had seen it on the Discovery Channel, he said.

Officers shouted for him to go inside his house, and he saw them kill the cougar in about 10 shots.

A spokesman for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources said Monday that the state's current wildlife code does not protect cougars because they are not considered a normal part of the ecosystem here. The official said the only state regulations that might come into play would be gun ordinances, but because police did the shooting that issue is moot. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists the Eastern cougar as endangered. But police could not confirm whether the cougar shot Monday was an Eastern cougar.

Greene said he agreed with the police decision to kill the cougar.

"As far as I witnessed, they did a pretty good job," Greene said. "Hypothetically, if there were kids in the yard and the cougar jumps in, what would the cougar have done?"

Tribune reporter Jeremy Gorner contributed to this report.

jmanier@tribune.com

tshah@tribune.com
Cougar killed on North Side may have wandered from Black Hills
By Rob Mitchum and Jeremy Manier
Tribune reporters
8:23 PM CDT, April 15, 2008
The voyage may sound improbable, but wildlife officials say that a DNA test should reveal whether a cougar killed Monday in Chicago took a 1,000-mile trip from the Black Hills of South Dakota through Wisconsin before being shot by police in the Roscoe Village neighborhood.

On Tuesday, veterinarians performed a necropsy, an autopsy for animals, on the cougar at the Cook County Animal and Rabies Control facility in Bridgeview. Early evidence indicated that the cougar was of wild origin, rather than an escaped captive, and samples were taken for comparison to blood that a cougar left in January in Milton, Wis.

DNA analysis suggested that the Wisconsin animal was most similar to those which live in South Dakota, and experts say it may be the same specimen that eventually strayed into the city.

"It's intriguing to think it may end up being the one that was here in Wisconsin," said Doug Fendry, an area wildlife supervisor for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

The unexpected visit fascinated researchers and put police officers in the unusual dilemma of balancing public safety with the beauty of an animal not seen in Chicago since the city's founding in the 19th Century.

Most wildlife experts who have dealt with the potentially dangerous animal, also known as a mountain lion, said it's difficult to criticize the Chicago Police Department's decision to shoot the cougar Monday evening, saying that such animals pose a threat to humans and are difficult to effectively tranquilize. "Determining what you have to do for public safety can be a gray area," said Steve Martarano, a spokesman for California's Department of Fish and Game. "Mountain lions can be very difficult to tranquilize and then move."

Police defended the shooting Tuesday, saying that the decision to shoot the animal protected bystanders and was not out of line with their usual response to threatening animals.

"There's no time to waste when you have a predator, an animal like this," police spokeswoman Monique Bond said. "We shoot pit bulls who charge [at officers], so [would it make sense] to let the cougar charge?"

Mayor Richard Daley supported the police use of lethal force in a news conference Tuesday morning.

"Now, I just want to tell you, if the cougar attacked a child, they'd sue the city because the police officer didn't do their job," Daley said"I didn't see a neighbor run out and grab it and say, 'Oh I love you' and bring it in the house."

Although humans and cougars must live together in many parts of the country, it's extremely rare for them to meet in a densely populated urban area like Chicago, said biologist Alan Rabinowitz, a former researcher at the Bronx Zoo and president of the Panthera Foundation, which is dedicated to helping big cats and people co-exist.

But Monday's encounter pushed the limits of that idea.

"If you don't put an animal like this down fast, you are risking a person's life," Rabinowitz said.

The animal was shot by police shortly before 6 p.m. Monday in the 3400 block of North Hoyne Avenue, police said. Mark Rosenthal, operations manager for the Chicago Commmission on Animal Care and Control, said that a crew was en route to the neighborhood and not on the scene when the shooting occurred.

On Tuesday, officials at the Cook County Animal and Rabies Control sought to answer whether the cougar was wild or had escaped from captivity.

"He did not have any identifying marks as if he had been owned. He was a wild cat," said Donna Alexander, administrator of the agency. She cited the lack of a microchip tag or tattoo, and intact claws and teeth that would normally be removed by pet owners.

Further tests being conducted by a veterinarian from the University of Illinois will determine the age of the cat, and DNA samples taken from the cougar will be given to wildlife officials from other states to try and trace the animal's movements, Alexander said.

A young male cougar will roam away from the land of its birth almost by instinct, many experts said. That could be a reaction to the dangers of genetic inbreeding or of overcrowding.

Clay Nielsen, wildlife ecologist at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and director of scientific research with The Cougar Network, said that more and more cougars are wandering out of high cougar population areas like South Dakota into Midwestern areas that have not seen them for hundreds of years.

"It's gotten to the point where there's no space, and animals have to go outside of the Black Hills," Nielsen said.

Though the cougar spotted in Wisconsin had not caused any safety problems and Fendry had no reports of it killing domestic livestock, he understood the concern that led Chicago police to shoot the animal found in Roscoe Village.

"When an animal gets in a urban area and gets confused, it can respond aggressively," Fendry said. "Occasionally up here, we'll get a bear in an urban area and it will have to be destroyed."

Martarano said tranquilizing a cougar requires such specialized knowledge that California runs training sessions on the technique for biologists and wildlife wardens.

"It's hard to get close enough to get the dart in the right area," said Martarano, who said the darts have no effect if they hit a bone. "It takes a while for the drugs to take effect, and during that period the animal can get agitated. If a lot of people are around, that can cause problems in itself."

Though California has the most cougars of any state with a population estimated between 4,000 and 6,000, attacks on humans are extremely rare. The state has recorded just 13 attacks since 1990, with three deaths.

"We have to learn to live with them. For the most part, I think we do a pretty good job," Martarano said.

Whether this week's cougar is the harbinger for more exotic animal visitors to Chicago or merely an anomaly remains to be seen.

But once all the tests have been performed, and the long trek of the cougar has been unraveled by wildlife experts, the cougar killed Monday may find its journey's end in the collection of the Field Museum, which has requested the skeleton.

"It's going to stay in Cook County," Alexander said.

Tribune reporter Angela Rozas contributed to this report.

rmitchum@tribune.com

jmanier@tribune.com