The ghost cat

Big Curves Acres Farm, which Reta Regelink runs with her husband, Henry, is a substantial horse-breeding operation. One of its studs is a son of the celebrated thoroughbred Secretariat, and the Regelinks also raise rare historic breeds of farm animals. The main farm is near Orillia, in the township of Oro-Medonte. They have an 80-hectare pasture in the area and had moved the filly to this field after purchasing her in June 2005.

“With the colour and size of her, she was just like a deer,” says Reta Regelink. The filly was new to the herd, and in a stifling August heat wave the small, tawny animal sought refuge in the shade of a stand of cedars, which was where her corpse was discovered. “It was a classic on-the-neck bite, with the shoulder chewed out,” Regelink says. “And there were hand-sized cat paw prints around.”

Such an attack on a horse was not without precedent in Ontario. In the fall of 2002, something mauled a mare on a farm in South Stormont Township in eastern Ontario so badly that she had to be put down. When a farm animal dies this way, a livestock evaluator must write up the incident for insurance purposes and to determine if the loss is eligible for compensation from the municipality or the Province. Provincial law requires municipalities to pay farmers for animal losses caused by coyotes, wolves and dogs, or some crossbreed thereof. The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs compensates farmers (and beekeepers) for losses due to bear predation. But no provincial statute covers losses resulting from a cougar attack.

South Stormont Township’s livestock evaluator had never seen an attack on a horse before. Following what was reported to be the owner’s “hunch,” the evaluator wrote “cougar” as the cause of death on his official report. This was a year after a well-publicized incident in nearby Cornwall in the summer of 2001, when a teenager was bitten in the dead of night by what he claimed was a cougar after he went outside to find out why his brother’s dog was barking. Photographs of the puncture wounds in his forearm were sent to a Montana wildlife biologist and a wildlife enhancement specialist at the University of California at Davis, who both returned a verdict of “cougar” for the bite pattern.

The Regelinks followed protocol and brought in their township’s livestock evaluator to assess the loss. The evaluator in turn called Greg Cull, a fish and wildlife technical specialist at MNR’s Midhurst office. A township evaluator is required to file a report within 10 days of an animal’s death if compensation from the municipality is to be provided.

The evaluator had taken photos of the wounds, as well as the tracks, during his own investigation. Unfortunately, no scale had been included in the pictures. Even so, Cull sent the photographs to Stuart Kenn, a puma enthusiast in Beeton, Ontario, who co-founded the Ontario Puma Foundation in 2002 to investigate cougar reports and gather evidence of his own. Don Sutherland, an MNR zoologist in Peterborough who maintains the ministry’s cougar-sighting database, calls Kenn “passionate” about cougars, and Kenn has developed a working relationship with MNR staff.

“Unfortunately,” says Kenn, “the photographer did not use a tape measure or other means of measurement in the photo and also obscured the posterior edge of the plantar pad with a leaf, eliminating a critical ID point on puma tracks.” But Kenn was fairly convinced by the photo evidence of the wounds. “The horse was alone among the trees and may have appeared like a deer to an inexperienced puma. The animal was killed right where it stood and there were bite marks on the back of the neck. Wolves and coyotes attack from the rear of an animal, biting at the legs and hindquarters, and the kill site is usually extensive and messy from the animal struggling to get away. The animals also eat from the hindquarters and move forward. Bears also make a big mess as they try to claw at their prey. A horse is too large for a lynx or bobcat.  This only leaves one animal – the puma. The bite marks around the shoulder area are typical.”

But Cull was not prepared to accept an unequivocal verdict of “cougar” on the basis of the livestock evaluator’s photos. “There was inconclusive evidence: no detailed photos of bite marks, no measurements. There is always a possibility that it could have been a cougar. It might have been an escaped cougar, but we have no evidence to support any of that.”

In Ontario, determining whether alleged cougars are wild or exotic opens a can of regulatory worms. The fact that livestock losses will not be compensated if death is attributed to a cougar is just part of it, as Mike Draper, chief inspector of the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (OSPCA) in Newmarket, learned the same year as the incident on the Regelink farm. The OSPCA was called to a home near Bolton, in the Caledon Hills, where they discovered a young cougar in a small dog crate in the basement. Draper found what is referred to in exotic pet circles as a “basement cat,” an animal cruelly housed and almost certainly improperly nourished, in a private home.

Draper knew that native wild animals in Ontario can be held in captivity only with a permit from MNR. “We contacted MNR,” he recalls, “and they said there was no requirement for the man to have a permit.” The ministry, in other words, did not consider this captive cougar to be a native wild animal, and provincial law says exotic pets are for municipalities, not MNR, to worry about.

The reticence of government agencies in eastern North America to accept marginal (especially anecdotal) evidence of the existence of wild cougars is understandable. But also, some cash-strapped agencies may be reluctant to acknowledge the existence of an endangered species with huge territorial requirements. Doing so would necessitate expensive management plans, among other regulatory headaches, and could wreak havoc with approvals for development. Another concern may be legal liability, arising when families of attack victims at public parks sue the government for allegedly failing to properly monitor these predators and provide adequate safeguards to the public.

In Ontario, one can be forgiven for suspecting that the cougar is a political hot potato. If MNR admits that wild cougars exist in the southern part of the province, it will have to implement recovery and management plans for an endangered species. The provincial government will also come under pressure to extend compensation for livestock kills to incidents that township evaluators categorize as “cougar.” At the same time, if livestock evaluators can call these cougar attacks the work of wild animals, then they are not a legal concern for municipalities, which otherwise would be expected to regulate the possession of exotic cats.

Is Ontario’s MNR being cautious about recognizing wild cougars in the southern end of the province, or is the ministry determined that sightings remain as credible as flying saucers?

The OSPCA accepted MNR’S “exotic” verdict in the 2005 Bolton case and took in the cougar. Because there is no province-wide law restricting exotic pets, the number of undocumented and unregulated owners of exotic cats in Ontario is believed to be among the highest of any jurisdiction in Canada. “We know there is a trade in cougars and other large cats in Ontario,” Draper explains. “We have more roadside zoos than anywhere else in Canada. There are no limitations on owning these cats, except under municipal laws.” And not all municipalities, Oro-Medonte among them, even have a bylaw that prohibits owning exotic cats. “The last [purchase price] I was aware of,” Draper says, “was $2,000 for an adult cougar, but you can probably get them cheaper.” Indeed, harried owners will even give a basement cat away. Some will “return the animal to the wild,” leaving it to the locals to deal with the consequences.

While clearly some of the cougars killed in eastern North America were escaped or deliberately released pets, that does not mean that all credible sightings have involved exotics. Most captive-bred cougars are declawed and many are defanged, rendering them incapable of hunting for themselves. It is possible that the extensive wilds of the Appalachian range, home to Great Smoky Mountains National Park (more than 2,000 square kilometres) might contain remnant historical cougar populations. Upstate New York’s Adirondack Park, which sprawls across 24,000 square kilometres, regularly produces cougar sightings. And, as Dave Anderson says of his corner of Ontario, “Up in our part of the world, there’s a whole bunch of country.” Parts of Quebec and New Brunswick are also capable of sustaining wild populations. A hair sample collected by Parks Canada at Fundy National Park in 2003 was typed as cougar by researchers at the University of Montreal. And in 2005, Quebec’s Ministry for Natural Resources, Fauna and Parks confirmed the presence of cougars in the Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean and Capitale-Nationale regions, adding to previous confirmations in the Gaspésie–Îles-de-la-Madeleine region.

Stuart Kenn has proposed that cougar numbers in southern Ontario have increased through interbreeding between relic populations and escaped exotics, although he has no hard evidence for this, and the rebounding white-tail deer population. But known cross-breeding by private collectors between native North American cats (generally kittens orphaned by hunters in the west, who turn them over to pet traders) and South American stock greatly complicates the gene-pool picture.

In more urbanized and intensively agricultural areas like southern Ontario, the idea of actual breeding populations of cougars, whatever the origins of the animals, might seem farfetched. But the animal has proved to be more adaptable to human encroachment on wild lands than once thought. Nevertheless, it can be argued that, if cougars were here in sufficient numbers to represent a thriving population, surely by now at least one would have been hit by a car (or a train), as several have been in the eastern United States.

“We’re talking about a highly cryptic animal,” MNR’s Don Sutherland says of the cougar. “But I think it’s interesting that there’s been an increase in the number of reports. Some reports definitely seem highly credible. Some clearly pertain to cougar, and others do not. Are they part of a recovering remnant population, migration from other jurisdictions, released captives or some combination?”

In the aftermath of the Regelink incident, things got pretty exciting around Oro-Medonte. People reported seeing cougars all over the place: one right in Orillia in February 2006, and two at the golf course in Coldwater that spring. The sightings suggested either a small local population of active cougars, more than one escaped or released animal, mass hysteria or some combination of these factors.

“I’ve had a few people now tell me they’ve seen them,” says Simcoe North MPP Garfield Dunlop. “They are respectable people. Half a mile from my home near Coldwater, someone in a subdivision saw one directly behind his house, where wild turkeys had been. I’ve never seen a cougar myself, but the people who say they have seen one have seen something big. If it were up to me, I’d believe the people.”

So far, MNR has managed to steer clear of the controversies embroiling some U.S. wildlife agencies over official responses to reported cougar sightings. But the ministry is not showing an aggressive enthusiasm, in the manner of its provincial counterparts in Quebec, to prove the animal’s existence. And Dunlop is not sure MNR is in a position to get to the bottom of the sightings anyway. MNR has undergone so much budget cutting, the Conservative politician notes, that it is basically an enforcement agency now. “I don’t think the money is there to do the research.” Asked about the Regelink incident, MNR’s cougar man, Don Sutherland, concedes, “I really don’t know anything about it.”

At Big Curve Acres Farm, Reta Regelink is weary of the controversy. Losing a horse to a cougar attack – especially when the farm’s business includes visits by school groups – is not the sort of publicity she and her husband covet.

“There’s no question in our mind what it was,” she maintains, almost a year after the loss of her buckskin filly. With the rise in hobby farms, Regelink believes there is enough wild land in Oro-Medonte to support a cougar population. She notes how bear and moose numbers have increased locally. “At every fair we went to afterwards, people were asking about it. They were offering their own stories, or saying maybe we were mistaken. I’ve been told that the only way people are going to believe that cougars are around is when there is a dead one on the hood of a car.”

“We’re beginning,” she confesses, “to feel like we saw a UFO.” Dave Anderson could tell her exactly what that felt like, almost 40 years ago, after an animal he initially thought was a deer stood up on the shoulder of a gravel road north of Kenora, displayed its unforgettable tail and disappeared into the forest. He hasn’t seen one since. But he knows the ghost cat, at least in his neck of the woods, is out there.

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Freelance writer and author Douglas Hunter wrote “Cry of the loon,” which appeared in the Winter 2005/06 issue of ON Nature. His book The Bubble and the Bear won the 2002 National Business Book Award. His next book, Hudson’s Boy, on Henry Hudson and Samuel de Champlain, will be published by Doubleday Canada in Fall 2007.

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