Excel's Coffee Shop

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Your tax $$$$$$$$$ at work once again!
Hey I got a better idea since cougars would start killing livestock also how about upping the hunter permits.

Oh man common sense just can't exist in this country.




UW study: More cougars could save lives, reduce crashes by lowering deer population
BY KOMO STAFF THURSDAY, JULY 14TH 2016



SEATTLE - A new study by the University of Washington says bringing back wild cougars to the eastern United States could save scores of lives by thinning the deer population, which causes more than 1 million vehicle crashes each year.

The study says that deer, with their soft, liquid eyes and timid demeanor, are North America's most dangerous mammal to humans because of their frequent collisions with motor vehicles.

Each year, deer cause 1.2 million crashes in the U.S., triggering more than 200 deaths, some 29,000 injuries and $1.66 billion in costs associated with vehicle damage, medical bills and road cleanup.

"These staggering figures are in part because deer's natural predators — large carnivores such as wolves and cougars — have declined in population, leaving large ungulates like deer to reproduce mostly unchecked," says the UW study.

But if cougars were to recolonize the eastern U.S. within the next 30 years, they could thin deer populations and reduce vehicle collisions by 22 percent — each year preventing five human fatalities, 680 injuries and avoiding costs of $50 million, says the study by a team that included the University of Washington's Laura Prugh.

The project was initiated during a class Prugh taught in 2014 at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The lead author is Sophie Gilbert, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alberta who will start in the fall as an assistant professor at the University of Idaho.

"The important take-home is that there can be very tangible benefits to having large carnivores around — economic and social benefits, not just ecological benefits," said Prugh, a UW assistant professor of quantitative wildlife sciences in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences.

She concedes that cougars and other large carnivores are controversial in populated or suburban areas, generating a lot of fear, anxiety and resistance.

"We are hoping that showing people how their lives could really benefit in a tangible way from having large carnivores around could help people become more accepting of living with them," Prugh said.

Cougars, also called mountain lions, used to live throughout most of the U.S. and Canada. State-sponsored bounty hunts to protect livestock and humans from the cats led to their complete removal from the Midwest and eastern states by the early 20th century.

In the meantime, without as many predators, the deer population has grown across the U.S., particularly in the eastern states.

The researchers calculated the cougars' impact by comparing white-tailed deer population densities and the numbers of deer killed by vehicles with and without cougar predation.

Their models showed that cumulatively over 30 years, at least 155 human deaths and more than 21,000 injuries could be prevented by the presence of cougars in 19 eastern states. A single cougar would kill at least 259 deer over its average six-year lifespan, preventing eight collisions and saving nearly $40,000 in associated costs, the study showed.