you are absolutely correct about the cougar sighting in Olathe…it was my sister’ neigborhood to be exact..out around the 150th st. area of Olathe. It killed her friends Chihuahua right in the back yard and made off with it for lunch. I happened to be in town visiting when it all happened.

Jay,

Do you live in the midtown area? My brother lives just east of Nelson Atkins on the MO side…Campbell St. to be exact.

Jay and Miles,

We’ll have to organize some sort of Chicagoboyz “outpost” gathering the next time I am in KC.

When I was a kid, there were always ‘neighborhood dogs’ running around. They’d make their rounds through the development to visit each other and play with the kids. These weren’t stray dogs, they were domestic dogs that lived in the neighborhood. The benefit of this was that they’d mark trees and otherwise make their presence known so that deer very rarely entered the neighborhood – and this was a development very near farms and expanses of wooded lands.

But with further development came urbanites and their morbid fear of dog poo, and unleashed dogs. So they’ve mitigated the dog problem but have found themselves inundated with deer.

Only a skilled game butcher should mess (term used advisedly) with road kill. If the integuments between the upper and lower body cavity are ruptured–typical in a car encounter–the meat is essentially poison, shot through with fecal bacteria. Despite what you’ve heard, the Dodge Ram is not the hunting weapon of choice.

Now we in Boulder are generally — I unfortunately have repeatedly failed the examination — the spiritual superiors of the rest of the US, and a symptom of how evolved we are is that we disapprove of hunting. But the same number of deer need to die each year, and do die each year, whether we hunt them or not. This means that our chief control agent is the automobile. So instead of taking them with a $0.50 .308 cartridge or a $7 arrow, we take them with $3000 worth of auto repairs. But it’s worth it to us. It keeps us pure. (Incidentally and not surprisingly, our margins for Obama were bigger than yours.)

Its a pretty large group to find enough resources to live in the capital of Texas (granted we are not downtown, but still its fairly urban).

Animals can adapt, its a basic feature of all life.

The day will come when cities have walls and no one will take a walk in the burbs w/o a pistol.

I am looking forward to it.

Venison is also the second lowest cholesterol red meat behind American Bison… and it’s yummy.

I was going to tell the story of me hitting a deer on my motorcycle, but the guy who hit one on his bicycle has me beat by miles! LOL!

Yet we have deer: the first summer I lived here while going to college a major freeway interchange some 10 miles from any open space was shut down because a deer had crossed into the road and was blocking traffic. (He hopped onto the freeway during a traffic jam, so he wasn’t hit because cars were going slow enough to avoid him.) I’ve also seen deer eat very expensive landscape installations in my neighborhood, like very high end salad bars.

We have coyotes: I’ve watched packs of them walk up and down my street. They prey upon people’s cats and dogs and brown squirrels which are a plague out here. (Figuratively and literally, as brown squirrels out here are often bubonic plague carriers.)

We have raccoons and possums: I’ve seen more than one dead possum in the middle of the road, though it appears raccoons are smart enough to look both ways before crossing a major intersection. Raccoons also use the storm drainage system as an underground freeway.

And it’s not uncommon to hear reports of skunks in the Hollywood area at night. (I’ve seen skunks in Hollywood late at night on the side roads leading off of the main tourist stretches of Hollywood and Sunset.)

We also have bats, owls (which are awesome if you can spot them at night–they’re completely silent), rats, and pigeons, and–of all the crazy things I’ve ever seen–feral parakeet flocks.

My father once encountered a wildlife biologist doing a population count of groundhogs in Bakersfield while he was running and asked her about what she was doing. He learned from her that it was a myth that urban encroachment destroyed the local wildlife–that while it was true some critters failed to adopt to urban encroachment, other local wildlife adapted quite well and often thrived in an urban setting. Groundhogs did especially well along the farming canals that crossed Bakersfield, especially behind shopping centers with restaurants: the left-over food dumped by those restaurants provided a much higher quality of food than groundhogs normally ate in the wild, and so were often numerous, fat and happy.