Wrong Place, Wrong Time

The last few days I've been following the articles in the Chicago Tribune about the cougar that was shot and killed by city police. It was the first time in the history of the city that a cougar had been shot. (Or at least in the history of the archives.) DNA tests proved that the cougar was originally from the Black Hills of South Dakota.

(This isn't the actual cougar, obviously, but there wasn't much dignity in the photos from the Tribune.)

I do admit that a cougar in the city poses a problem or two. But it still seemed a shame that it traveled all that distance to end up wrapped in a tarp. At the risk of anthropomorphizing, maybe all it needed was to find its way home.

While following this story, I came across a similar item in the international news briefs in the Boston Globe. A two-year-old brown bear was killed in Switzerland. It was killed after government authorities decided that it had lost its fear of humans so had posed a risk. (Shouldn't it be the opposite way around?) It met the same fate as its older brother who was killed in 2006. Both were part of a plan to reintroduce the brown bear that is extinct in that part of Europe. Sometimes good intentions aren't enough.