Cougar see…cougar do…
As many of you all have probably heard over the news, whether it is your local radio station or television news channel that we have had a “cougar” running around the campus in Maryland. Now we have been looking for this so called cougar for the past week now and none of our officers have even seen a good look of this animal. We have dozens of cameras all over this University and we have not spotted one animal to even resemble something that big.
We may have less than a dozen officers who are qualified to ride around with a rifle as I am one of them. Just recently within the past four days one officer was in the woods with others responding to a sighting of this animal and the only thing he saw was a black blur in front of his face. We had officer in the woods with shotguns and rifles looking for this beast and no proper sighting was seen. Fortunately, our camera’s caught a sighting of this so called beast of an animal and it turned out it wasn’t a cougar at all. The state Natural Resources has stated that this is some type of an African animal and it is considered a “great dane of the cat family”.
Now you would think this would breath a sigh of relief since we know we are not chasing a cougar or a bobcat around the campus, but we need to make sure we know what it is. The whole cluster of this situation is funny because the only thing we have are weapons that can kill or mame it. I wonder how have the higher ups in our agency thought about this situation. We are not animal control so if we cornered it the likely hood result would be that this animal would come out fighting and force us to take action putting an officer or officers at risk. Animal control won’t come out because they don’t have anything possibly big enough to catch it excpet shoot tranquilizer darts at it. Even though we live and patrol a urban area there are some woods on campus and in the surrounding area that this animal could hide.
So what do we do when we catch this animal without anyone getting hurt? If you have an idea of how we should catch this thing ‘terrorizing’ our campus please let me know and maybe I can forward the idea to our higher ups who make triple digits a year to figure these things out.
