Might the autopsy on the Cougar that was recently killed by a connecticut motorist reveal that the Cat was indeed wild and free-roaming? The reporter below utters my frustration with the seeming need for every East Coast State to emphatically say that cougars are either "non-native, are extinct or never existed..........While this dead animal might prove to be a released pet and go further to re-verify what USFW has concluded(That Cougars are extinct in the East), it is a sad commentary on Eastern USA residents that they are so afraid of having Cougars rejoin Black Bears and Coyotes(and perhaps one day wolves) as top trophic carnivores in our Woodlands..............Bottom line is that while we all might have different regional accents around the USA, we all seem to share a desire for having the least amount of wild carnivores on the land with us.......How do we get back on the humanistic track that seemed to be building from 1970 through the end of the 20th Century where restoring nature and all of her bounty seemed to resonate with the general populace..........Has our economic woes caused us to turn so inward that we are incapable of sharing our world with the other life forms that were put here by a power much more knowing than us?

Why is it so hard to admit that mountain lions live in Connecticut?

As evidence mounts, state DEP continues to deny the possibility that mountain lions might live here. And my wife saw one!

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Mountain lion - Scott Snyder

I am a completely rational person who believes in the importance of the scientific principal of observation/theory/test to prove a hypothesis. That is why I count myself among all the believers who swear that mountain lions must live in the state.

When I was a newspaper reporter and editor, we spent quite a bit of time writing stories about mountain lion sightings. We would report them to the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection -- and they would dismiss us. The DEP folks would say that untrained observers are not good at distinguishing between similar but different creatures. The sightings were undoubtedly bobcats or dogs or even housecats.

I don't doubt that some reports were sketchy. For example, my wife came home one day to say she saw a bobcat. It caught her attention because it was definitely a cat but it was big. Our daughter, 7 at the time, asked what a bobcat was. My wife went into great detail and the kid asked about the tail. I piped up and said it's called a bobcat because it has a bobbed, or short, tail. "Oh," my wife said, pausing. "There was definitely a tail. A long tail." We looked at each other silently. Mountain lion.

All right, so the DEP would tear that apart. But the state's skepticism continued even after we at the newspaper described eye-witness accounts from people who work outdoors and with animals, and who should know what they're talking about. Still, the DEP said, to prove a mountain lion lives in the state, you need a sample of its poop, or a footprint in the mud, or a photo.

Then we published a photo on Page 1 of a silhouette of what looked to me like a mountain lion. A homeowner had snapped the picture, showing the cat in the backyard near a tire swing. He described the animal and although he didn't go out to take a tape measure to it, he provided a lot of convincing details. The next day, the DEP went to his house and let us know that, in fact, the photo was of a house cat. They did take measurements from the house to the tire swing and compared them to the height of the cat in the photo. It was a tabby, they said.

At about that time that I began to wonder whether the DEP might have some reason, besides fact, to maintain official mountain lion denial. Is someone afraid of public panic? Yes, mountain lions are damn scary. But bears and moose are scary, too, and state officials willingly admit their existence. Are they worried that hunters would head out to track down an announced mountain lion and end things before they got started? I would support some secrecy to achieve that goal, but we could admit we have mountain lions without saying where they are.

At one point several years ago, the DEP changed its line. Instead of denying that mountain lions might exist in the state, a spokesman said that if there is a mountain lion out there, it escaped from a private zoo. They pointed out that if Connecticut had a mountain lion population, one would occasionally be killed by a car while crossing the road.

Now we have a mountain lion carcass. I assumed it would force the DEP to issue a statement with a new spin. Silly me. This mountain lion must have been raised by humans, the DEP said – because there are no wild lions in Connecticut!

I was happy that Patch reporters Ronald DeRosa and Barbara Heins asked questions about the dead mountain lion. It turns out it had not been neutered or declawed, didn't wear a collar and wasn't fat like a regularly fed cat would be.

I'm not a conspiracy nut. I believe Oswald killed Kennedy and all that. But as I said at the beginning, scientific analysis would follow this protocol: Observation (We have a mountain lion!) Theory (Maybe there is a chance a few mountain lions live in Connecticut) Test. Wait and see – with an open mind.