Moore Outdoors With Chester Moore 12/20/24--Chester asks have mountain lions just been proven in East Texas?

• Have mountain lions just been proven in East Texas? Chester Moore talks about a cat road-killed near Longview and what it means for the topic of these cats in the region

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to More Outdoors on News Talk five sixty KLVI.
This is Chester Moore and in the history of this program,
which is twenty five years, kind of unbelievable for me,
but twenty five years, have been honored to be here
talking about the great outdoors. The number one topic in
terms of listener engagement has been big cats wildcats. And

(00:22):
there is a huge story that just came from the
Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. I'm going to read their
official media statement to you right now. It says, in
the early morning hours of Tuesday, December the tenth of
twenty twenty four, a mountain lion was struck by a
Longview Police Department patrol vehicle. The police department contacted the

(00:44):
greg County Game Warden and coordinated the retrieval of the
deceased lion to collect biological samples, including DNA. The lion
was estimated to be between three and four years old,
and it was a female. The wait eighty three point fives.
Several of the samples will be sent to Caesar Kleeberg

(01:04):
Wildlife Research Institute. It's part of an ongoing research project,
and some were retained by TPWD staff as part of
our effort to learn more about mountain lions in Texas.
In Texas, mountain lions are primarily found on the trans
Pacos and parts of South Texas. However, individual lions can
move long distances and can show up in areas where

(01:25):
they are not typically known to occur. They give some
information and say East Texas residents should report mount lion
sightings to Dave dot Holder Man at TPWD dot Texas
dot gov. That's Dave dot Holder m A N N
Man at TPWD dot Texas dot gov. This is really cool.

(01:46):
I mean, I hate the fact that it's a roadkill,
but we definitely have official disclosure that there are cougar's
mountain lions and East Texas, and that's one of the
things we got to get. This whole program is going
to be about mountain lions and cats, and I want
to get some of the language out of the way.
Mountain lion and cougar are the same animal. Just you know,

(02:07):
it's a regional names or preference of names. I'm going
to use cougar. That's my typical terminology for It's also
a puma that's usually used in Central and South America.
A panther like the Florida panther, and even in the
Rockies Catamount. I just saw a catamount mountain area in Colorado.
It's typically used in Canada. This animal ranges from Canada

(02:32):
down to the lower reaches of South America, which was
always an interesting thing to me to look at the
historical distribution of cougars. And then you have officials saying
that there were not any cougars here in East Tactics.
Now we know for a fact there are cougars in
East Texas, and TPWD mentioned these animals can move a
long way, so I have researched this for a long time.

(02:55):
I saw cougar in East Texas myself, and I'm pretty
qualified to say what I saw. You know, I was
fourteen years old, but I'd already studied them deeply. And
this cat walks right out in front of me, I
mean him talking from ten yards away. And my neighbor
at the time had a cougar for a pet true

(03:16):
story in West Orange back in the nineteen eighties. And
I called her once I saw this cat and ran home.
It was probably a quarter mile from where they lived,
and she said it must be the male And I said,
what male? Well, their cat had went into heat and
apparently a male had roam through the area. It was

(03:38):
calling back and forth to the female. So I saw one.
It was a gigantic event for me as a young
outdoors lover. It was one of the things that sort
of thrust me into wanting to write about these animals
and do journalism about them because I learned that some
people thought we didn't have cougar's here. Well, here's the

(03:58):
real story. You know they I don't think that there
are large They are definitely not large populations of cougars
in East Texas, but by game cameras. As a matter
of fact, By the time you hear this broadcast, go
to Higher Calling dot Net. That's my website, Higher Calling
dot Net, and the top blog will be a cougar

(04:21):
photo from eleven years ago at a deer feeder in
Newton County. This wasn't one distributed on the internet and
Fordavery or sent to me. I published it in the
Port Arthur News back then. But I want to show
you on Higher Calling dot Net this photo to show
that cougars have been here for a long time. But
what happened is, like everything wildlife populations got ravage in

(04:43):
the late eighteen hundreds up to the middle nineteen hundreds,
and then animals started coming back. So predators in particular
got wiped out because of conflict with livestock and game.
And so when white tailed dew numbers were gone, predator
numbers were gone. And then as white tailed deer numbers
and also feral hog numbers started to rise, you had

(05:05):
plenty of prey for these animals to be here. So
we've always had some cougars in East Texas. I think
I know for a fact we've had breeding populations. I've
talked to a man in the who in the late
nineteen eighties, a very credible hunter watched a cougar and
her babies crossing the road in Newton County. There have
been cats here, but I believe it's a small population,

(05:28):
and there are also these cats that like move great distances.
But we're seeing game cam photos of cougars in Mississippi,
in Louisiana, you know, Indiana, a lot of different places.
So this latest, you know, cougar sighting, this unfortunate roaguekill
up near Longview, definitely proves that they are cougars here.

(05:49):
So not everyone who says they see a cougar is
having a moment of misidentification. But I will say this,
I believe the vast majority of alleged cougar sightings in
East Texas or bobcats. And the reason I say this
is I have received several hundred photos of bobcats from

(06:11):
all around the nation, and the bulk of the photos
that I've received have had this question in the email.
Am I looking at amounta line? Is this amounta lined?
Is this a cougar? Most of the people seeing these
bobcats think that they are actually cougars. And I'm looking
at a cats group on Facebook currently and there's a

(06:34):
ton of bobcat photos taking at a distance people think
they actually are seeing a cougar, And so I believe
most alleged cougar sightings in East Texas are actually bobcats.
But there definitely are cougars here as well, although extremely
rare in comparison. You know, Texas has a fair to

(06:54):
good population in the trans Paikos region. Also in South
Texas seems to be according to some landowners that I know,
sort of a growing population out around Southwest Texas in
the area of Rock Springs, out around Vanderpool and Barksdale
and all those campwood all that area out there, but
they are here in East Texas and you can go

(07:16):
to my blog at higher Calling dot net see the
article about the road killed cougar, the photo that was shared,
as well as an exclusive that I received about eleven
years ago publishing the Port Arthur News back then. It's
up at Highercolling dot net of a very live cougar
at a deer feeder in Newton County, Texas and even

(07:36):
the date is stamped on the photos. So very cool thing.
I'm so glad when people send me this neat stuff
because actually, at the time, I had another cougar photo
which I've since lost. It was in Jasper County and
it wasn't one of these it was distributed around the internet.
It was one that was sent directly to me and

(07:57):
it was definitely without any question. And I think it's
really funny that someone in Arizona sent me this great
video from a game camera that they actually thought were bobcats,
but it was four cougars and that's up on my
YouTube channel and you can check that video out there.
But you know, it's an important topic because this topic

(08:19):
gets people interested in the wild and a lot of
people have interesting sightings. If you think you might have
seen a mount line, there's some other cat or animal
you quite don't know what you saw. Email me at
chesteratchestermore dot com. I promise I won't make fun of
your photo. Chester at Chestermore dot com. You know there's

(08:39):
no shame in misidentifying something, not at all. You know,
we live in a hyper judgmental culture and I think
that needs to go bye bye. I hate the fact
that people can't post something without people going absolutely out
of their mind. It makes me sick. So it's not
how I do things. So send me an email Chester
at Chestermore dot com. I love to check out your photos. Also,
got to hire Calling dot net. Subscribe to that blog

(09:02):
and you'll get a ton of great wildlife. So but
you'll see a photo of a cougar taken over a
decade ago in Newton County at a deer feeder, and
really cool stuff. And that's the kind of thing we
like to have here on More Outdoors we've had over
the last twenty five years. Also at my blog work
at higher Calling dot net. Three time award winning from

(09:25):
the Press Club of Southeast Texas blogs. Very proud of
the work on that blog. I put a lot of
work with a heart and soul into it, as well
as I do here on my program here More Outdoors
once again, if you missed the very first part of it,
she'll go back and listen to the podcast on iHeartRadio.
A cougar has been road killed by a police officer

(09:45):
of all things. In longviews showing that there are cougars
in East Texas in the Pawnee Woods region. We're gonna
talk a lot more about cougars and other alleged cat
sightings in East Texas. Welcome back to More Outdoors on
News Talk five sixty klv I. This is Chester Moore

(10:09):
talking about cougar's in East Texas and beyond. And if
you've seen a cougar, or you have a photo or
a video of a cougar, or a record or even
a tax durmy of a cougar killed in East Texas
or let's say in Louisiana as well, I would love
to see that information. Email me at Chester at chestermore

(10:30):
dot com. That's Chester at Chestermore dot com. By the way,
you can follow me at the Chester Moore on Instagram,
A great way to keep up. Higher Calling Wildlife on
Facebook also a great way to keep up. And you
can listen to the podcast this program at KLVI dot
com click on the podcast link at the top of
the pagesy More Outdoors the archives, or just listen to

(10:53):
the iHeartRadio app. Like I said at the beginning of
the program, I said, cougar's in East Texas have been
a very important issue to me because I saw one
when I was fourteen years old, and I was definitely
qualified to identify that animal. I knew exactly what a
mountain lion looked like. It was point blank range. It
was an evening but still very much daylight, and this

(11:15):
cat looked right at me, and it was a very large,
probably one hundred and twenty pound plus cat. And the
neighbors down the road at the time had a cougar
for a pet, and they said a male had been
calling back and forth to their home which was close
to the railroad tracks because it smelled their female that

(11:35):
it went into heat. Very interesting stuff, so kind of
a cool confirmation from my past. And we talked about
how some people get shamed on social media or shamed
sometimes by even wildlife officials who are kind of maybe
joking around with people about their sightings, and I don't
think that's a good thing. For the most part, our
officials are great and very gracious, but occasionally there's someone

(11:56):
on the phone that you know doesn't have the best
people's skills. I know one of those people back in
the nineties who when there was a Mountain Lion hotline
to call if you saw cats outside of their traditional
range in Texas, and I thought that was even ridiculous.
Actually it was out of their traditional range because East
Texas is their traditional range. New York is their traditional range.

(12:18):
That is where they were always in all the lower
forty eight and that is part of the myth that
cougars should not live here. They should. They were just
wiped out in the East, not completely, never completely. There's
plenty of historical evidence of cougar still existing in the East,
including the pocket of what's called the Florida panther, the

(12:40):
small subspecies in southern Florida. There always maintained a few,
and these cats range across huge areas, but for the
most part they were exterpretated from the majority of their
range in the Eastern United States. But now that we've
had unbelievable comeback of their prey white tailed deer. Also

(13:04):
an unbelievable rise in feral hog numbers, which when you
look at Texas studies that I got to be a
tiny part of back in nineteen ninety seven, you see
that feral hogs are an important part of their diet. Where
they range, they eat a lot of the juvenile hogs
in particular. Then it makes sense that you have these
cats that will be able to range back into those
areas and live survive that kind of stuff. I also

(13:28):
believe there are a lot of people who don't turn
the reports in, who don't share their game cam videos
because either shaming or they don't want people to know
they're out there. They're worried someone's gonna hunt them, and
there's a myth that they are considered an endangered species
in these texts, which they are not considered an endangered species.

(13:48):
So if you have any of this footage, I would
love to see it, any photos, historical references, and also
I know that there was a cougar killed. I do
believe it was in Jasper County in the nineteen nineties.
I was told it was mounted and at an either
sporting goods store or a lumberyard or something at one point.
If you know about this cat, please email me. I

(14:09):
would love to see them mount Chester at Chestermore dot com.
That is Chester at Chestermore dot com. But you know,
the cougar in East Texas thing is just part of
a larger story of animals that roam into areas beyond
distribution maps. It's not like these cats. If you look
at the current distribution map for cougars, it shows the

(14:31):
I thirty five quarter, which runs through Dallas. It's not
like they look at at the line and go, whoa,
you know what, there's more water over in East Texas,
or just as many deer, there's more hogs. Let's stay
over here. No, it's not the way it works. And
the other side of this is, by far, not every

(14:51):
cougar sighting is actually a cougar. And I probably know
this as well or more than anyone on the planet
because the amount of photos that I've read seed and
solicited from people literally all around the nation. A lot
of people think they've seen a cougar and they've seen
a bobcat. I know that might sound ridiculous at first,

(15:12):
because if you think right now, if you're really familiar
with the two cats. As matter of fact, I have
a full body cougar mounted in my office for her
that was given to many years ago, and this cougar
is huge. It's about the size of the cat that
I saw. And I've been around bobcats a whole lot,
and a bobcat's a lot shorter. The tail is radically shorter.

(15:33):
There's no spots on an adult cougar. The head's completely different,
the coloration is basically different. But people are not used
to seeing a cat in the wild. And literally, out
of all of the photos I've been sent to identify
if someone has seen a cougar or a bobcat and

(15:53):
they don't know and they think they probably have seen
a cougar, I can think of about eight cases where
it was a cougar and about two hundred cases where
it was a bobcat. Now, interestingly, recently, and you can
view this blog at Highercolming dot net, I had someone

(16:14):
from Arizona reach out to me and ask if what
was on their video from a game camera in their
back of their property in Arizona was a group of bobcats,
and it was the reverse situation. It was absolutely four
beautiful cougars, and I was happy to report Nope, that

(16:36):
is the cougar. And now I mentioned earlier that I
had three game camera photos that have been sent to
me from East Texas over the years. The eight number
I'm talking about is nationwide, So there have been other
cases nationwide where someone had maybe thought they didn't they
thought they had a mountain line but weren't sure, and
it was actually, you know, a cougar mountain lion. I'm

(16:58):
sorry I keep interchanging those two, but it's the same animal.
IMNA try to use cougar from here on out. You
got to look at this situation and realize that people
generally are not masters of wildlife identification, and so people
very very commonly mistake bobcats for cougars. And one of
the reasons is something I've written about is that some

(17:20):
bobcats have much longer tails than other ones. Some friends
of mine about a decade ago in Orange County sent
me a game cam video from broad Daylight from Orange
County of a very large bobcat that had about an
eight to nine inch long tail. Now, people think bobcats

(17:40):
don't have tails. They do have tails, usually about maybe
two inches long maybe three inches long. This was eight
to nine inch long tail. And since then I've had
game cam photos come in of people showing me bobcats
that had tails seven eight nine inches long. They're not
very common, but those cats are out there. So if
someone sees a bobcat with a much longer tail than normal,

(18:05):
then they're probably gonna think they just got a mountain lion.
And that makes perfect sense if you don't know a
lot about wildlife identification and things like that. So that's
part of the identification mystery. The other thing is people
are seeing feral housecats that have long tails and they
can't tell what the cat is from a distance. They

(18:29):
see this thing and snap a photo with their cell
phone or maybe at nighttime on a game camera when
there's the infrared, look to where you have the green infrared.
I actually kind of prefer the old school game cameras
at flash an animal when they come by. You get
the coloration and stuff like that, but the infrared thing
makes sense to spook the animals less. But on a
cat idea, it's a lot better to be able to

(18:52):
see the colors and stuff like that, because when I'm
trying to tell someone that it's a domestic house cat,
and show why the body configuration is nowhere near a cougar.
It gets a little fuzzy sometimes, but there are plenty
of domestic cat photos out there that people have thought
that they have seen a cougar. I've had videos sent

(19:14):
to me where people have thought that they have seen
a cougar and it was a domestic house cat. Now
here's the thing, and we're gonna talk about this more
in another episode. But there are huge domestic feral house
cats running the wilds of America and they look a
lot of different ways. As a matter of fact, their

(19:35):
studies being done in Australia, where there's a massive feral
cat problem, well they're finding like forty pound feral cats.
Now a forty pound feral cat with a long tail
seen in the distance, about the color of a cougar.
If you're not watching, you might think you've seen the
real things. There are different things making up part of

(19:56):
this mystery. We come back, we'll talk more about the coup,
one of the great mysteries of American wildlife. Welcome back
to more Outdoors on these top five to sixty klv
I having a great time talking about the cougar issue
in East Texas, and actually we're going to kind of
go beyond the East Texas region in this part of

(20:17):
the program. If you miss this program, go back to
KLVI dot com, kick on the podcast link and listen
to the archive because it's an interesting talk about an
incredible issue. One of the things I want to do
is I want to salute all the people who research
these great animals and protect them. I want to saluit
our game wardings, protecting them from poachers. I want to
salute our researchers open up the mysteries of these things.

(20:39):
When I was very young in the business, I got
to a company A great man named Jim Hilgey worked
for Texas Parks and Wildlife and a crew on a
Mountain lion radio collaring mission that my good friend Keith Warren,
the legendary wildlife and hunting and fishing TV hosts, invited
me to be a part of the So grateful he

(21:00):
invited me and a man named Lewis Harveston was there
doing his doctoral research and he's now the head of
the Borderlands Institute at Saul Ross University, so great, great
connection there. And the study was to show cougar movements
in South Texas. So we were to ranch near Ensignol

(21:21):
and there had been a female collared and this female
hadn't moved more than I think they said a mile
and a month or six weeks, and they knew that
it was the right time of year that she definitely
had babies somewhere. And I'll never forget the about six
or seven of us walking through this really tall, thick
grass and they had their radio telemetry thing and Jim

(21:43):
Hillgey looks at me, the Parks and Wallach biologist, head
of the project, said, chester you wadefish. I said, yes, sir,
go shuffle your feet like you're wadefishing for stingrays. Because
if you're wadefishing and you want to avoid stingrays hitting it,
you shuffle your feet and you kick the sting ray
instead of stepping on it and usually almost off along
he said that this cat's and this grass that might

(22:03):
move to her on top of it. And I'm thinking
about the idea of stepping on a cougar. Wow. So
we're going along here beep beep beep, and he says,
probably two hundred and fifty yards away, beep beep, beep, beep,
beep one hundred yards away, b b beep somewhere in

(22:24):
this fifty yards and we're looking all around and moving
real careful, and he finds a big hole in the grass,
sticks a metal rod down the hole, and you hear
rap the familiar sound of a cougar, and this female
with the radio collar jumps outd Now we're ten feet
away from this cat. She's looking right at us, and

(22:45):
then she runs the other direction. They move in and
they remove two beautiful cubs and they fit them with
elastic collars that would grow with them, and to study
their movements. I got to hold one for a picture
and it was just so awesome, with an incredible experience.
And then the study they found out that these cats

(23:07):
move incredibly long distances in Texas, and there was one
male that would move up to one hundred and twenty
five miles. This is why research is so important. It
blew my mind of this cat movement, you know, one
hundred and twenty five plus miles. And so that's why
I saluted the biologists and the game wardens and all

(23:28):
who protect and work on these great cats and other animals,
because it's important that we know more about these kinds
of animals. So that was another incredible cougar experience, and
it taught me a lot about their secretive nature, their
range and distribution, how they move just from the journalistic perspective,

(23:51):
and connected me with some great people at Lewis Harveston
who's ahead of the Borderlands and suite there at Saul
Ross And that really inspired me even a lot more
because that happened, you know, basically ten years after I
saw the one in East Texas and it was truly
a fascinating thing. But this research shows these big ranges

(24:12):
and all this kind of stuff of the cat, and
it's not just East Texas where there's mysteries about them.
There are other mysteries that have to be addressed if
we're going to talk about this cat on the program. Now,
many people claim to have seen a black panther quote

(24:32):
unquote black panther. Now, I'm not gonna go deep into
the black panther mystery on this program. That's an entire
other show. We've done one before, we'll do a new one.
According to some research that I've been part of and
working on, But most people that I've spoken with who
think they have seen a quote unquote black panther in

(24:54):
Texas think they have seen a black cougar. Here's the problem.
There has never been one time a black cougar observed
by science, and there are thousands of sightings of people
thinking they saw a black panther. What's the issue here. Well,

(25:15):
the black panthers you see on television in zoos, etc.
Are black leopards for the most part, or black jaguars.
Both species throw what are called melanistic offspring, occasionally leopards
more than jaguars, and most of those leopards are from
India that do this, and there's a few in Africa,

(25:39):
and most of them come in captive situations now, but
there are wild ones. Now, these are not escaped leopards.
They are not thousands of melanistic jaguars running around. So
what are they? That's a whole other show. But what
I can tell you is they are not black cougars,

(26:01):
because we have thousands of captive cougars all around the
world in zoo's private ownership. There have been tens of
hundreds of thousands shot by hunters, mounted museum specimens, and
there has never been one verified black specimen. There has

(26:23):
been white specimen. Recently, there's a white one that was
captured on a researcher's game camera in Brazil in the jungle.
There were white ones that were born in a zoo
in Belgium. There's never been one black cougar. So if
you think you've seen a quote unquote black panther, you know,

(26:43):
people may have seen a darker, like a more chocolate
colored cougar in low light conditions and thought that was
a black panther. But I am one hundred percent on
these reports are not black cougars. There's definitely a phenomenon
out there, and I have named what I call the
black long tail, but that's a whole other program just

(27:08):
to talk about the black longtail and what I think
that is, and it's quite controversial to some people, but
it's definitely not a black cougar. So you have to
take the black panther phenomenon, in my opinion, away from
the cougar. Now, the other side of this is that
cougars are born a little darker gray brown. They have spots,

(27:31):
some of them when they're born, and at times they
will keep some of those spots until they're a little
bit larger. They grow very very fast. In the first year,
you're gonna have a cat that weighs sixty seventy pounds
at least. And occasionally you'll have one that size that
keeps some of its spots, and that can get a

(27:52):
little bit confusing, But for the most part, they don't
have any the spots. They're the standard that brown color.
Now it does rain little bit. I'm looking at a
mule to your mount in my office right now, and
it's that typical deer color that's pretty much your main
cougar color. But I've seen them in captive settings are
more of a like a mocha color, So there is

(28:13):
some variation. Is it within the total realm of possibility
that there could be a black specimen that existed somewhere.
I'm not saying never, but I'm saying the black panther
phenomenon has nothing to do, in my opinion, with the cougar.
It's something else. And as a matter of fact, I

(28:33):
think it's several different answers of cats that make up
what's called the black panther phenomenon. But you know, it's
interesting that there are probably more regional names for this cat,
and most of them I can't pronounce because they're in
central South America. They're a name in Portuguese, names in
Brazil and Spanish names and little obscure areas, you know, catamountain, canna,

(28:58):
panther in parts of like Flora to the cougar is
what I call them most of the time, mountain lion,
puma in a lot of South and Central America, and
it's kind of like a crappie. I caught some crappy
a couple of days ago, my buddy Roger Bacon and
the Ox Bowl and Sabine River, and some people call
them white perch. Across the river we fish, they're called

(29:20):
sacala same fish. It's just regional names, so there is
some lack of communications sometimes going in the naming and
what people call these animals. But what we're talking about
here is the cougar. And we've talked deeply about the
East Texas phenomenon, about their travel, some of the research
done on them, and we come back on more outdoors.

(29:43):
I'm going to talk about some of the amazing things
that I've experienced, that I've researched and that I know
about America's great cat Felis con callar. Now it's puma,
con collar, the cougar, the mountain lion, the puma. When
we come back on More Outdoors, Welcome back to More

(30:05):
Outdoors on News Top five sixty klv I. Sometimes I
don't even know where this show is going to go.
I love the fact that it's kind of like an adventure,
and I've been talking about the cougar phenomenon in East
Texas mainly, and now we're gonna branch out and just
talk about this incredible animal that's very misunderstood. And if
you didn't catch the first few segments, please go back,

(30:27):
go listen to the podcast at KLVI dot conflict on
the podcast and you can see archives and More Outdoors
see this episode. Also listen on just go to the
iHeartRadio app and the date of this program and you'll
be able to check out what I think is a
very informative program on a great cat. Now. As I started,
I said, my interest came from just being a wildlife fanatic,

(30:48):
but it went into hyperdrive when I saw one in
Orange County when I was fourteen years old, and it's
been burned in me ever since. Now. These cats are
not a game animal in Texas, are considered a varmint essentially,
and that is controversial at some level, but you know,
it's working for the most part, and we're gonna let

(31:10):
other people hash that deal out. But what's most intriguing
about me is like how these cats are almost like
ghosts in areas they live in. You know that there
was a cougar that lived behind the Hollywood Sign in Hollywood, California.
They put a game camera you can actually see part
of the letters of the sign. And these great cats

(31:32):
can live in the shadow of people. They can live
in rainforest, they can live in high desert, they can
live in the swamps of Florida. They are incredibly diverse
animals and in terms of the prey they kill. An
adult cougar will kill prey larger in proportion to its

(31:53):
body than any other cat. There are documented kills of
cougars killing full grown bull elk, a monster cougar a
legendary like world record sized cougars two hundred pounds, most
about one hundred and twenty one hundred and thirty forty pounds,

(32:15):
and a bull elks eight hundred nine hundred pounds, and
they've actually killed those things. Now, the way they typically
kill it is they jump on something and they grab
it by the neck. On an elk, they would probably
mainly jump from a tree and do that. They do
jump from trees and brush and stuff like that, or
catch it by surprise. I was on a South Texas

(32:37):
ranch when I was in college and I could smell
something and I walked up as I was going out
to find a place to hunt hogs. I was bull hunting,
and I found a Corsican ram, which is an exotic
ram species huntred on Texas ranches other ranches places as well,
but mainly Texas. And it was cashed away. It had

(32:57):
been hid in the neck and it had been harshly buried,
and that is a sign of a cougar kill. And
that was really neat thing. I couldn't find any tracks,
it was really dry there, but that was a really,
you know, cool thing to actually find the kill of one.
I also found a cougar scratching post in Bluff Creek, California.

(33:18):
Is a very famous film filmed in Bluff Creek, California,
and I was there in the early two thousands of
me and my dad and I found a scratching post
on a tree. Finding that scratching post was a really
really cool thing and just once again connecting with a
great animal like that. And these animals are very ghost like.
I mean, they can live amongst you. I talked to

(33:38):
people in Colorado that see them, some people that see
them once or twice a year, that are hunting guides,
and I talked to people live in some of these
areas that have you know, thick cougar populations and hardly
ever see them. But they are magnificent animals. Did you
know that cougars are not considered a big cat. Cougars
can actually get as large as a leap and probably

(34:01):
average larger than leopards in some parts of India and Africa,
but they're not considered a big cat because they cannot roar.
The only cats considered quote a large or big cat
are the leopard, the lion, the jaguar, and the tiger,
and those are all typically you know cats that you

(34:21):
think of as you know, large cats. But you know,
let's be real, cougars are as big as a leopard.
But it's the it's the ability to roar. They don't
have that. They actually sound in a lot of ways
like a domestic cat. You have that typical rat cougar
sound that we know. I did that pretty well, by
the way. You see on like these the cougar TV

(34:43):
car commercials and shows, and I've heard them do that,
but they make a lot of other vocalizations. They whistle,
they perr. I've been petting a captive cougar before at
a facility and uh, it just wanted me to pet it,
and it was purring like a mo I mean. So
it's just they're really unique, have many different kind of vocalizations.

(35:05):
Animal that kill prey, Like I said, that's far larger
in proportion their body than any other animal. And they
vary greatly in size. I mean, there have been cats
two hundred pounds killed in the Pacific Northwest, like in
British Columbia, and the ones in southern Florida probably averaged
seventy five eighty pounds, So a lot of difversity in

(35:29):
terms of the size of these great animals. And the
reason I want to do this show is because there
have been recent reports and I want to say, hey,
look here's my journey on this cougar in East Texas thing,
and let you make up your own mind. And some
people get shamed for saying they saw this. I think

(35:49):
that's ridiculous. No one should be shamed for an animal sighting.
Of course, in our culture today, we shame everybody for anything.
People have went stupid about stuff. You can't anything without
someone being in experts and shooting you down or whatever.
And it just absolutely makes me sick, and so I
wanted to have a show. We're gonna have an open
discussion about this. Yes, I do believe most quote unquote

(36:15):
cougar sightings in East Texas are not cougars. People have
seen something else, a bobcat, a domestic cat. And I
explained why I believe that because I have a lot
of photos sent to me where people are saying, hey,
I just saw what I think is a cougar. Can
you verify? And it's a bobcat. But that doesn't mean
there are not cougars. I've examined three first source non

(36:37):
circulated game cam photos in East Texas that match up
with East Texas habitat and vegetation. There are definitely cougars.
I've seen one myself. I've cast tracks since I've seen
that one a couple of times in East Texas. Unfortunately,
I lost the best set that I had in one
of the hurricanes, and that really upset me. I lost
some of my good plaster casts. But but they do

(37:02):
exist in small numbers. Most are probably passing through, but
I wouldn't doubt that there are, you know, maybe a
few that breed and you know, raise or young here
in East Texas. Also in Louisiana, there was a cougar
killed about a decade ago by game wardens in Bosier City, Louisiana.
It was someone's tree in their yard. And so these
things do range outside of what are considered their current arranges.

(37:26):
Game camera photos showing that all over the place. They're
not abundant, but they're not nonexistent. And that's all I
want to get across, because I want people to be
able to, you know, openly talk about seeing wildlife, and
the social media people will shoot you down. Occasionally an
official you talk to will shoot you down. Most are

(37:46):
great on the official side, but usually people in the
public side will be like, oh my god, I can't
believe you couldn't tell. I mean, it's read that's my
idiot people voice. That happens so much, and it's something
I'm against because we should have a free exchange of information.
About wildlife. But the most important thing here is this

(38:08):
is an amazing animal. If you have seen a cougar,
you have seen greatness. One of God's finest creations, an
absolutely inspiring, beautiful animal and animal its controversial. They need
to be managed, I believe, and cougar hunting is management.
You have to manage them. We have messed up wildlife
and habitat in areas where you have, you know, huge

(38:30):
concentrations of these guys and you have low densities of
wild sheep and things. Sometimes you got to fend the
cougar herd to help the sheep herd out or other animals.
There's nothing wrong with that. We're doing that and maintaining
good cougar populations out west. But we can't wipe these
animals out either. It was terrible what was done in
the eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds of wildlife. Or we

(38:50):
just wiped out every single predator in a lot of areas.
But animals are very resilient, and I mean seriously resilient.
So when those dear populations rose, the faral hog population
just skyrocketed. Cougar's responded by showing back up and some
of the habitat and reclaiming it at least a little bit,

(39:12):
and that is a great sign for us that wildlife
can and will make comebacks. And you have what you
think is proof, a photo, a video, or whatever, shoot
me an email Chester at chestermore dot com. That's Chester
at Chestermore dot com. I would love to see that,
even photos of one someone may be killed or tax
dur me that might have been taken in East Texas
or Louisiana. I would love to have that information. You know,

(39:36):
these animals have intrigued me my entire life and will
always be intriguing animally, they're gorgeous, they are beautiful. They're
potentially dangerous, they do harm people sometimes, but they're mainly
just absolutely awesome and judging from the comments, the likes,
the shares on you know, some of the programs we've
done before, we'll even mention these guys and we'll talk

(39:57):
more about that black panther thing and a whole episode
some new research. God bless you and have a great
outdoors weekend.