Happening on the Mormon Homeworld from where I came from, comes this tragic news - two women are jogging in the early cool of a Sunday morning up Millcreek Canyon. A lovely slice of intact Wasatch National Forest that has remained a singularly beautiful piece of the original mountains of the Wasatch Front. Almost pristine and I do mean almost. Millcreek Canyon is off limits to dogs and that's about it. Millcreek Canyon is mostly off limits on account of the canyon being part of the Salt Lake City watershed and has been since the days of Brigham Young. We'll leave Salt Lake and Mormon history out of this here narrative. Anyway, these two women are jogging up Pipeline Trail and as the pair rounds a bend in the trail they come face to face with a cougar. A for reals and genuine mountain lion. This sudden situation is a bit of a shocker for the ladies AND the cougar. The women start to back away all the while maintaining eye contact with the cougar. Maintaining eye contact with a cougar is fundamentally sound in the given encounter. The women are backing away and one of the joggers loses her balance and the cougar makes a grab at the fallen jogger. A bad situation takes a fall for the worse. The cougar takes a swipe at the fallen jogger and the fallen jogger gets the worst of a cougar swipe. The other jogger that is still on her feet picks up a rock and gives the rock a good shot at the cougar. The thrown rock causes the cougar to flee back up the trail on a run. So...the first responders are called in to care for the cougar swiped lady jogger and of course Utah's Division of Wildlife Resources charge in with coon hounds for tracking the cougar and the ever so butch DWR honchos find the aforementioned cougar and shoot the cougar dead. The cougar, who happens to have been a maturing young cougar is, and to be perfectly and socially correct here, "euthanized." The butch fish and game guys could have trapped the cougar and relocated the animal AS Millcreek Canyon is where the deer and the cougars like to hang on account of the entire rest of the Wasatch Front has been urbanized, civilized, developed, over developed, and all the prime cougar habitat has been raped and denatured several times over. Had this cougar been after taking the joggers as prey, the joggers would have gone missing for days and possibly weeks before some other jogger found the eaten corpses. But now no one has to worry about a scared to death cougar as the startled cougar is now to be stuffed, mounted, and put on display at the headquarters of Utah's Division of Wildlife Resources. The joggers were in the cougars habitat and the cougar has to die because the joggers startled a young cougar trying to figure out how to survive in our gloriously civilized world. This unhappy tale of wildlife encounter has a bullshit ending and the cougar is not to blame here. The joggers should have been making noise to announce their presence. THEY WERE JOGGING IN COUGAR HABITAT!!! Damn shame no doubt. Now for Monday machine art and NO cougars will be "euthanized" in the presenting of our machine art.
soaring -
spreading wings -
eye of the beholder -
totally absurd -
some day, maybe, the fish and wildlife guys will learn a better method other than euthanizing a wild creature and how to relocate offending startled cougars that scare the bejesus out of the precious white people who have no right to be encroaching on wild creatures habitats. damn shame no doubt. 😡
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