No Place for Predators?

Braced for savagery and sacrifice, European settlers in the New World came to the Pacific Northwest to tame the final frontier, the last refuge of “dismal wilderness.” While colonists in the East were poisoning, shooting, and trapping cougars to extinction during the 1880s, hundreds of thousands of pioneers flooded into what would soon become the new state of Washington. Following the well-worn pioneer playbook, Pacific Northwest immigrants converted forests to farmland and pasture and, fearing local predators as unacceptable threats to life, property, and game, paid bounty hunters to destroy all carnivores, large and small. It would take over 30 years to exterminate the wolf, and several more decades to nearly eliminate the cougar—whose famously reclusive, solitary nature may have helped the cat survive a systematic eradication effort. Yet even against a backdrop of ongoing persecution, complaints of cougar attacks on livestock and game continued apace, and legislators, assuming that more complaints meant more predators, increased incentives for hunters to thin the population. By 1940, two United States Fish and Wildlife Service senior biologists reported that cougars had been “exterminated in practically all of their former range in the United States and are fast being eradicated from many parts of the West” [2].