Cougars are ours and you can’t have them

Mountain Lion. Puma. Catamount. Lion of the Andes. Panther. All different names for the same thing: But unlike Death Cab for Cutie, none of those are authentically Washington. You see, out where I’m from, that critter you see above is called a cougar.

Although aware of the existence of those many alternatives, I actually went years thinking “cougar” is a relatively common term. It certainly helps that it has taken on a strong secondary connotation in pop culture. So imagine my astonishment when I took the New York Times’ Dialect Quiz about a year ago and discovered that the name is pretty much endemic to Washington:

Looks like I owe a meow culpaw

I recently came across what I instantly believed to be the worst idea for a non-profit organization I had ever encountered, and my immediate instinct was to share it with you all. It appeared in a story about an African serval — an exotic cat — spotted running along a road on Vancouver Island (somewhere it obviously didn’t belong):

Doug Nelson, a Nanaimo cat breeder, said the serval could be the same one he sold to a Sooke resident. That serval escaped in August and couldn’t be recovered for several weeks.

Seems like a perfectly plausible explanation. But the article went on: