Braced for
savagery and sacrifice, European settlers in the New World came to the Pacific Northwest to tame the final frontier, the last refuge of “dismal wilderness.” While colonists in the East were poisoning, shooting, and trapping
cougars to extinction during the 1880s, hundreds of thousands of pioneers flooded into what would soon become the new state of Washington. Even against a backdrop of ongoing persecution,
complaints of cougar attacks on livestock and game continued apace, and legislators, assuming that more complaints meant more predators, increased incentives for hunters to thin the population. By 1940, two United States Fish and Wildlife Service senior biologists reported that cougars had been “exterminated in practically all of their former range in the United States and are fast being eradicated from many parts of the West.
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/? request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0060040
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