Researchers contend mountain lion was wild

• Debate focuses on claws, paws and other factors.
• State would need to develop management policies if mountain lions were to establish themselves.

A wildlife research organization that studies the expanding range of cougars in North America has come to a different conclusion from the one offered by state authorities on how an ill-fated mountain lion made its way into Kentucky.

The evidence gathered by the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources suggests it wandered into Kentucky on its own, not brought to the state by someone or raised in captivity, said Michelle LaRue, executive director of the Cougar Network.

"We are not an advocacy group," she said Tuesday. "We just look at the facts."

State officials on Monday came to the opposite conclusion while making public several documents from their investigation into the mountain lion, which was shot in December by a game warden after a Bourbon County property owner's dog had chased it into a tree shortly before dark. They have said it's the first confirmed mountain lion in the state in more than a century, and the mystery of its appearance in the state has intrigued many people.

Officials said the animal was too healthy to have been living on its own, and at five years old, too long-in-the-tooth for what's called a "dispersing male," on the move to claim new territory. Fish and Wildlife Deputy Commissioner and wildlife biologist Karen Waldrop said the animal didn't even likely spend much time on the ground in Kentucky. "This was either a released or escaped captive lion," she said.

State officials have said the presence of a population of a top-tier predator would be controversial.

If such a wild population were to get established, then the state agency would likely have to develop management policies, as it has done for bears, which have returned to Kentucky after a long absence, said Ed Morris, president of the Kentucky League of Sportsmen, a hunting and conservation group. In this case, he said he agrees with the warden's decision to kill the animal and the agency's conclusions that it had been captive.

But in a statement provided by LaRue, the Cougar Network goes point by point through state biologists' arguments and reaches different conclusions. For example:

• The necropsy results found no tattoos and the animals claws were intact. Typically, captive animals are tattoed and declawed.

• Though the animal was in good condition, it was infested with tapeworms and ticks suggesting it had been consuming wild mammals.

• Genetic testing suggested that the animal originated in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

"The thing that was the linchpin for me is that it came from the Black Hills," said LaRue, a conservation biologist and research associate in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Minnesota. The Black Hills is a known source of dispersing males, she said.

She agreed that the 125-pound animal was a little old to be roaming around looking for new territory, but she said mountain lions moving east from South Dakota likely are not behaving exactly as they would if they stayed in their familiar territory in the West. They are looking for a mate, and since there are no known females east of Nebraska, they may just stay on the move, she said.

"This was most prominently evidenced by the male cougar that was killed in Connecticut in June 2011," she said. "That animal traveled for almost two years across more than 1,500 miles from South Dakota to the East Coast."

In all, more than 150 cougars have been killed outside of western populations since 1996, in states including Illinois, Iowa, and Arkansas — all of which are far from western cougar range, she said. A number of them have been photographed by trail cameras in Missouri, which she said is most likely where the Kentucky lion lived before it came into Kentucky.

The nonprofit Cougar Network was founded in 2002 and conducts research on mountain lions and their habitat. It has documented more than 700  mountain lions outside their established range in the North American west.

"We feel that neither the physical evidence nor the overwhelming evidence of cougar presence in the Midwest over the past 25 years matches the message of Kentucky wildlife officials," the group's statement said. "In our professional opinion, the animal was a wild, dispersing male from the Black Hills, South Dakota."

 Reach reporter James Bruggers at (502) 582-4645 and at jbruggers@courier-journal.com.