Editorial-Opinion September 2024

This picture was captured by Jon Pierce’s trail camera on Nov. 2, 2008 on the Flatrock Hunting Club in Harris County. Two weeks later, a cat later identified as a juvenile male Florida panther was killed by a deer hunter about 20 miles away in Troup County along West Point Lake.

Few calls generate a more pronounced roll of the eyes as the cougar sighting. Brad Gill and I have been at this for a very long time­—35 years for me and 26 for Brad. We’ve easily looked into more than a thousand reports of a cougar in Georgia. We even ran a year-long Georgia Cougar Quest contest, with a $1,000 prize for the best evidence of a wild cougar in Georgia. Far from the best evidence, we got no evidence.

Yet the reports continue—and when photos show up, we see what objectively are pictures of bobcats, house cats, labrador retrievers… anything but a cougar. Report after report, picture after picture, it’s just never evidence of a big cat.

Until it is…

In 2008, I was sent the trail-camera picture included here. It came from the Harris County hunting club of one of our GON Hunting Advisors, Jimmy Harper. The Harris County picture looked like a big cat, but… surely not. Georgia just doesn’t have cougars. Right?

It must be human nature to jump to the extraordinary—that would help explain why Brad and I look through so many house cat and bobcat photos and have to delicately offer our opinion that we’re just not seeing a cougar. It would help explain how Bigfoot hunters on TV hear a Sasquatch marking its territory every time a limbs falls in the forest.

Rather than jump to the extraordinary, I prefer the Occam’s razor approach. Occam’s razor is a problem-solving principle that boils down to explaining something by starting with what is most likely. The simplest explanation is usually the best one, rather than jumping to the most unlikely explanation, which seems to be human nature.

That trail-cam picture of a cat with a bob tail? Most likely a bobcat, rather than a cougar with no tail.

It’s just very unlikely to be a cougar or a panther… until it is.

And let’s clarify the term. The subspecies of cougar found in south Florida is known as a Florida panther. The Eastern cougar that once called Georgia home is officially extinct. The Western cougar has expanded its home range eastward to the Midwest, and young males have been spotted as far east as Tennessee and Mississippi. Yet there is no evidence of a breeding population of cougars living in Georgia.

The 2008 Harris County trail camera image was all but confirmed to be a cougar—or panther—when two weeks later a deer hunter on Corps property at West Point Lake shot and killed a male cat that weighed 140 pounds. He later got hit with serious charges and fines when DNA testing confirmed it was an endangered Florida panther.

Let that be a lesson—if you see a  big cat, don’t shoot!

Like young male bears, young male cougars apparently might go for long walkabouts. They’re looking for new territory that has a female but no adult male that would rather kill it than share its patch of woods.

Interestingly, during the same time frame that the Muscogee County trail-camera images were captured last month, WRD got a call from someone reporting a large animal that looked like—but surely couldn’t be—a cougar crossing Highway 80 in Muscogee County. Meanwhile Tommy Hutcherson, a Forest Technician with Fort Moore (formerly Fort Benning), said they’re running 180 trail cameras across its 180,000 acres. In more than 300,000 trail-cam images from this year, not one picture of anything that remotely looks like a cougar. Tons of hogs, quite a few armadillos, no cougar.

So could it be a cougar in the Muscogee County images? In my opinion, yes, it could be. If it is, it is most likely a young male Florida panther that has wandered far from its south Florida home, or even a young male from the Western cougar subspecies whose range seems to be expanding ever eastward.