Cougar found in city put down
A cougar that was tranquilized by conservation officers outside a Kelowna apartment complex was later put down rather than relocated back into the wilderness.
The underweight animal was in poor health, with a broken and infected tooth, and open sores on its body, conservation officers say.
“The cougar was not doing well at all,” Ed Seitz said Monday. “It would have found it very painful to eat.
“To put it back into the wilderness, where it probably would have starved or been killed by another cougar, we would have just been causing more suffering and cruelty, and we're not prepared to do that,” Seitz said.
“Euthanizing an animal is a tough part of our job, but to put that cat back into the wild just wasn't an option,” he said.
The cougar was spotted near the entrance of an apartment building in the 2100 block of Cooper Road about 9 p.m. on Sunday.
“The tenants wisely kept their distance and stayed inside the building until police arrived,” Kelowna RCMP Const. Steve Holmes said.
It’s rare but not not unheard of for a cougar to be spotted so close to buildings in urban areas of the Okanagan. The conservation service gets more than 100 calls a year from people about cougars sighted passing through yards or farms in the region.
Many calls are simply logged for information purposes, but COs respond if livestock has been killed, the cougar seems to be lingering in urban areas, or it has been injured by a vehicle.
In the winter, cougars prey mostly on deer, but they also hunt moose, black bear cubs, grouse, mince, coyotes, mountain goats, wild sheep, and household pets.
“Normal behaviour is one of human avoidance, although cougar often display a harmless curiosity toward the actions of man,” the ministry of environment website says.
“They have been observed sitting at a vantage point and watching, sometimes for hours, people either working or playing out of doors,” the website says.
Cougar attacks on humans are “extremely rare”, the ministry says. Over a 10-year period, there were 10 cougar attacks on Vancouver Island, and no fatalities.