Our Wild World

Our story today revolves around a heroic journey of one cat that apparently walked (and swam) from the Black Hills of South Dakota to the green estates of Greenwich, CT, looking for love. The Connecticut lion serves as vehicle for the larger story of the would-be repatriation of the East by mountain lions making forays from the eastern edge of the Rockies across the Great Plains, where they haven’t lived for a century or more. Reminiscent of US war on predators in the early 1900’s, bogus science, intolerance and draconian hunts, these pioneering lions are getting hammered by hunters and state agencies, essentially imposing a gauntlet against the lion’s eastward movements, and worse, this model of intolerance is being copied elsewhere. The news of coexistence coming out of California, while uplifting, is a world apart from the societal and cultural attitudes of America’s rural heartland towards our reigning big cat.