Western Standard - September 11, 2024


Giant cat kills family's feline, tries to get in their house west of Calgary

No Conflict of Interest with Mark Carney Governments have lost the public trust

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

211.22

Word count

1,388

Sentence count

127

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A cougar has been spotted near a woman's home in Calgary, Alberta, and it has not been quenched. The problem is, it's a cougar that has been around for a long time and it's not scared of humans.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
00:00:00.000 All right, now I'm going to talk about something else that's been breaking on the news, and it's
00:00:07.300 pretty important, especially if you do live south or southwest of Calgary, as I do, and I want to
00:00:11.520 explain a few things. So it's been hitting the news, the Western Standard broke that last night.
00:00:16.680 A woman had a cougar on an acreage southwest of the city of Calgary. It came into her yard.
00:00:24.500 Her daughter was eating lunch, a five-year-old girl, and looking out the window, she started
00:00:28.420 screaming that something has got their cat, Oreo. As you can see in this video, the cougar was right
00:00:33.920 outside their door. It was pawing at the door at some points. It was snarling. The dead cat,
00:00:39.500 unfortunately, is behind the cougar there. It had killed it, and it would not be scared away. It
00:00:45.600 was there for over five minutes. This is behind my place now. You see some video. I'm only a few
00:00:51.220 miles from there. This is three young cougars walking a trail behind my house. I have a game
00:00:55.620 camera back there. It just wasn't me filming it, of course, and it was in the night. What I want to
00:01:00.240 establish is I understand how to live with and around wildlife that can be potentially dangerous.
00:01:06.800 I live among them now. I have no interest in harming animals. Never want to, but I also understand
00:01:13.880 when the line has been crossed and an animal has become too dangerous to tolerate. So this cougar that
00:01:19.600 came to that woman's house, she called fish and wildlife once it ran away, and a lot of bizarre
00:01:24.080 behavior. The cougar left the dead cat in the garden. It didn't take it with it, so it wasn't
00:01:28.680 quite, or maybe it is starving. It was skinny looking in the video, but food might not have
00:01:32.840 been the motivation. Then the cougar came back, as you can see in this picture, in the night.
00:01:36.040 It came back and was behind the door. It looks like a young cougar, a smaller cougar, but still,
00:01:40.500 when you think of the power of a five-pound house cat, think about the kind of power in even an 80 or 100
00:01:46.540 pound cougar, a very, very, very dangerous animal. It's extremely rare for a cougar to attack a person.
00:01:54.120 Very, very rare. It's something a lot of people don't even realize. Like, as I showed with my game
00:01:58.380 camera, cougars are actually quite common. You just don't see them. They're very shy. They stay in the
00:02:04.220 woods. They have no interest in interaction with people. And it's, as I said, the amount of people
00:02:09.520 around, if cougars were that dangerous, we'd see a heck of a lot more adverse outcomes. We'd see a heck
00:02:14.740 of a lot more attacks. Thankfully, we don't. But when it happens like this, when that line has been
00:02:20.360 crossed, when a cougar is behaving so unusually as this one, as bizarrely as this one, as dangerously as
00:02:26.740 this one, it has to be destroyed. And I've been watching the online discussions of this. Of course, a lot of
00:02:32.500 the armchair quarterbacks, that's why I'm giving some of my pedigree. I'll point out, like I said, I grew up in
00:02:36.600 Banff, for those who know me. I worked 20 years as a surveyor in isolated areas. And now I live on an acreage
00:02:42.600 where, yes, every few weeks I have cougars go through my yard, bears, lots of other critters.
00:02:47.440 I love that. And we have gotten along fine. I've never shot so much as a squirrel in my yard. And
00:02:51.640 hopefully it stays that way. But when we get a circumstance like this, an outlier with a cougar
00:02:57.240 like this, this is very frightening. That area, and again, if anybody lives southwest of Calgary
00:03:01.460 watching this, watch out. People put their kids out in the mornings to get the school bus at seven
00:03:06.000 o'clock. This cougar is still running on the loose. It's come to this house and tried to get in their
00:03:10.680 door twice. Other people saying, well, we'll just tranquilize it. It's not that easy, I'm afraid.
00:03:16.800 Cougars aren't like bears. Okay, they can't be easily trapped in a large live trap and then
00:03:21.500 relocated somewhere else safely, unfortunately. Tranquilizing isn't that easy either. They're
00:03:26.580 smart. They can hide out quite well and just trying to get there and get a dart into it. Again, people,
00:03:32.080 and what are you going to do with it? You can't rehabilitate it. I mean, again, it's behaving so
00:03:37.040 unusually like that and so aggressively and so dangerously. It has to be put down. They aren't
00:03:43.120 endangered, but a lot of people are endangered. So people saying it was just a cat. That's not the
00:03:48.000 point about the cat this thing killed. It's the fact that it came out during broad daylight and did
00:03:53.240 it. It did it in somebody's backyard and then tried to get in the door to her daughter. So for fools saying
00:04:00.300 we should just leave it be, it's nature. Look, some people are urban dwelling. They don't 0.99
00:04:06.520 necessarily understand. In these cases, it has to happen. Out where I live, it's ranch country.
00:04:12.540 There are a lot of cougars. There are a lot of bears. There's a lot of interactions. I know they
00:04:16.920 don't publicize it a lot, but I guess what? Actually, a number of cougars get shot every year
00:04:20.200 out my way. It's usually because of adverse interaction with livestock producers, but they are
00:04:25.200 not endangered. It's a last resort. Those of us who choose to live out there do it because we love the
00:04:30.140 wildlife because we want to be around them. I mean, there's smart things you should be doing.
00:04:34.340 Don't leave your food or garbage out. Don't attract animals around. Some other people saying
00:04:38.740 somebody was clearly feeding that cougar. No, no, I don't believe they were. They're not like foxes
00:04:45.140 or bears where they can become habituated quite so much. Again, they're so shy with people. There
00:04:49.440 wouldn't be the opportunity for somebody to start feeding it, though. Who knows? You leave enough meat
00:04:52.800 outside or you can attract anything. I don't think that was the case happening here. Cougars, again,
00:04:56.680 tend to stay away. It would grab it in the night and take off. This is just not typical behavior.
00:05:04.760 So the news is going to come out on this story as it keeps unfolding. I'll spare you the name of the
00:05:09.740 lady. She is a neighbor of mine just a few miles away. But either that cougar is going to be found 0.94
00:05:13.620 and destroyed, as I'm afraid it has to be, or even worse, that cougar is going to attack somebody.
00:05:20.080 Something is wrong with that particular animal. You've got to think about it like people. Again,
00:05:24.280 99% of people won't harm anybody. They don't want to. Things happen. Sometimes something switch flips
00:05:31.400 in somebody's head or whatever else. They go off. They get violent. They get dangerous. And we have
00:05:35.600 to do something about it. In the case of a cougar like this, as you can see in that picture with the
00:05:39.640 blood on its paws, aggressive and trying to get into the house, there is no other option. So again,
00:05:45.300 if you're watching in the Southwest, if you know people with acreages down there, though, this is
00:05:48.700 ongoing right now, tell them to watch out. Keep the pets closer than usual at home. And by all means,
00:05:54.820 of course, keep your children nearby. The few attacks that cougars have ever done, which are
00:05:58.740 very rare, almost never with men. Predominantly, it's been with women and children. They're opportunists.
00:06:06.300 They're hunters. They will go for what they feel is smaller and more vulnerable. And as rare as those
00:06:10.900 attacks may be, of course, the outcome is as tragic as you could possibly imagine. We couldn't imagine a
00:06:15.620 child being killed. And that's an area where there are a lot of families and children living. So
00:06:19.380 keep the eyes open. Let's hope this gets resolved. And, you know, we can have a rational discussion
00:06:24.900 about living with wildlife, managing wildlife and getting along with them, but understanding that
00:06:30.440 sometimes there's just no other choice. Public safety has to come first.