Into All That

Taking a firm stance on the whole cat people vs. dog people debate, Police in the Chicago neighborhood of Roscoe Village took down a 150-pound cougar that wandered into the neighborhood. Responding to calls from residents (I’d love to get my hands on the 911 operators’ responses to the first couple), police initially set out to capture the cat, but had difficulty doing so since, as reported by the Chicago Tribune, “police officers do not typically carry tranquilizer guns.”

“It was turning on the officers,” [Chicago Police Captain] Ryan said. “There was no way to take it into custody.”

We may never know whether it was an escaped exotic pet or a wild cat from (as speculated by reporters) Black Hills, ND, 1,000 miles away, possibly (as speculated by me) to get away from all the damn tourists at Mt. Rushmore.

Funny aside: I first saw mention of this article on nationalgeographic.com which, as a respectable publication can’t just grab photos off of someone else’s website the way other, less on-the-level blogs have been known to do. So their story had a photo of a mountain lion in what I quickly deduced was not, in fact, a trendy Chicago neighborhood:

So I set out to research the story further. A quick Google search gave almost half a million responses — I was shocked that the story could be this big, yet hadn’t come to my attention in the five days since it happened. Turns out, only a small percentage of the results for the search terms chicago cougar actually have anything to do with cats. Errr, hunting big game. Errr, this story.

This entry was posted on April 22, 2008 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Bizzare Behavior, The Unexplained with tags cats, chicago cougar but *not* middle-aged women, gunplay. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.