“The Cougar is a must read for any­one who spends time in cou­gar hab­itat. Although most people will nev­er see a cou­gar in the wild, the poten­tial for danger is very real. Paula Wild uses com­pel­ling first-hand ac­counts and inform­a­tion from ex­perts to ex­plain what to do if you en­counter a cou­gar, ways to pre­vent an en­counter from turn­ing into an at­tack and how to de­fend your­self if an at­tack occurs.”

~ Gary Shelton, au­thor Bear Encounter Survival Guide, Bear Attacks The Deadly Truth and Bear Attacks II Myth & Reality.

“Paula Wild cov­ers the gamut – from the cat’s bio­logy and demo­graph­ics to the les­sons people need to live in cou­gar coun­try. With this, will come under­stand­ing, and with under­stand­ing will come a bet­ter fu­ture for cougars.”

~ Howard Quigley Teton Cougar Project Director,
Executive Director Jaguar Programs at Panthera

Both feared and ad­mired, cou­gars are rarely seen, but odds are that a big cat’s watched you walk through the woods while you’ve been totally un­aware of its pres­ence. And that’s part of what makes the cou­gar an icon of all that is beau­ti­ful, wild and dangerous.

Cougars have been ob­served leap­ing 5.5 metres (eight­een feet) straight up from a stand­still, 18.5 metres (60 feet) down from a tree and nearly 14 metres (45 feet) ho­ri­zont­ally onto their prey. They’re mys­ter­i­ous and curi­ous, elu­sive and powerful.

And some­times dan­ger­ous. Cougar en­coun­ters are be­com­ing more com­mon. Statistics from the past two hun­dred years show that nearly half the at­tacks on hu­mans have oc­curred since 1990.

As the biggest cat in Canada, and the second largest in the Americas, cou­gars range from the Yukon to Patagonia. They’re found in the wild back coun­try, along the edge of sub­urban devel­op­ments and, at times, in such un­likely places as the down­town park­ing gar­age of the Empress Hotel in British Columbia’s cap­ital city of Victoria.

Once one of the most widely dis­trib­uted large mam­mals in the Western Hemisphere, cou­gar pop­u­la­tions were decim­ated by hunt­ing in many areas.

But their num­bers are in­creas­ing, es­pe­cially in west­ern Canada and the United States and some are mi­grat­ing to the mid-west and beyond.

Wild de­scribes the cougar’s bio­logy, be­ha­viour and life­style, as well as sur­pris­ingly fre­quent vis­its to urb­an set­tings. The book ex­am­ines the lives of cap­tive cou­gars and also presents in­form­a­tion on the im­port­ant role large car­ni­vores play in the del­ic­ate bal­ance of our ecosystem.

The Cougar is a skill­ful blend of nat­ur­al his­tory, sci­entif­ic re­search, First Nations stor­ies and first per­son ac­counts. With her in-depth re­search, Wild ex­plores the re­la­tion­ship between moun­tain lions and hu­mans, and provides the most up-to-date in­form­a­tion on cou­gar aware­ness and de­fense tac­tics for people liv­ing, work­ing or trav­el­ling in cou­gar country.

The Cougar can be ordered at book­stores through­out Canada and the USA. It can also be ordered from Indigo, Barnes and Noble, Amazon​.ca and Amazon​.com.

If you’d like an auto­graphed copy, please con­tact Paula.

Ebooks can be ordered from Amazon (Kindle), Apple (iBooks), Kobo and Google Play.

 

 

A BC Bestseller!