To the Editor, 

I enjoyed Peggy Clark’s well-written piece, “Does the Eastern US Have Room for Cougars?

In 2014, a mountain lion was spotted in a tree in Bourbon County, Kentucky, one county north of my home in Lexington in the Bluegrass region of Central Kentucky.  No one knows how it got there, but a farmer spotted the animal – it was not harming anything, just sitting peacefully in a tree – and called the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources.

The brave officers quickly came to the scene and shot the animal, then posed for “trophy photos” afterwards.  

According to an article by Joe Gerth in the Louisville Courier-Journal, officers “feared that it would slip away in the darkness and threaten people in the nearby city of Paris [Kentucky].”