I know full well what a minority I am here on X Marks. Perhaps all the more reason for me to voice my opinion from within the fray. Two quotes immediately sprang to mind while reading through this thread, both from the gadfly and defender of the American West, Edward Abbey.

"The rancher strings barbed wire across the range, drills wells and bulldozes stock ponds everywhere, drives off the elk and antelope and bighorn sheep, poisons coyotes and prairie dogs, shoots eagle and bear and cougar on sight, supplants the native bluestem and grama grass with tumbleweed, cow ****, cheat grass, snakeweed, anthills, poverty weed, mud and dust and flies--and then leans back and smiles broadly at the Tee Vee cameras and tells us how much he loves the West."

"We need coyotes more than we need, let us say, more people, of whom we already have an extravagant surplus, or more domesticated dogs, which in all fairness could and should be ground up into hamburger and used as emergency coyote food, to raise their spirits and perhaps improve the tenor of their predawn howling."

Perhaps the same could and should be said of cougars...