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A cougar's killing bite is applied to the back of the neck, head, or throat and the cat inflicts puncture marks with its claws usually seen on the sides and underside of the prey, sometimes also shredding the prey as it holds on. Coyotes also typically bite the throat, but the work of a cougar is generally clean, while bites inflicted by ...
A cougar in the snow at North Cedar Brook in Boulder, Colorado, the USA. The North American Cougar is a carnivore and its main sources of prey are deer, elk, mountain goats, moose and bighorn sheep. [25] Despite being a large predator, the North American Cougar can also be the prey of larger predators like wolves and bears. [26]
Standing still however may cause the cougar to consider a person easy prey. [5] Exaggerating the threat to the animal through intense eye contact, loud shouting, and any other action to appear larger and more menacing may make the animal retreat. Humans are capable of fending off cougars, as adult humans are generally larger.
The Florida panther had for a long time been considered a unique cougar subspecies, with the scientific name Felis concolor coryi proposed by Outram Bangs in 1899. [11] A genetic study of cougar mitochondrial DNA showed that many of the purported cougar subspecies described in the 19th century are too similar to be recognized as distinct. [12]
Certain populations may also hunt and prey on non-native, introduced species, such as red deer in Argentina, blackbuck, or North American beaver. In San Guillermo National Park, the vicuña is the cougar's main prey species, and constitutes about 80% of its diet. [13]
Puma (/ ˈ p j uː m ə / or / ˈ p uː m ə /) is a genus in the family Felidae whose only extant species is the cougar (also known as the puma, mountain lion, and panther, [2] among other names), and may also include several poorly known Old World fossil representatives (for example, Puma pardoides, or Owen's panther, a large, cougar-like cat of Eurasia's Pliocene).
Due to the expanding human population, cougar ranges increasingly overlap with areas inhabited by humans. Attacks on humans are very rare, as cougar prey recognition is a learned behavior and they do not generally recognize humans as prey. [14]
A stoat surplus killing chipmunks (Ernest Thompson Seton, 1909) Multiple sheep killed by a cougar. Surplus killing, also known as excessive killing, henhouse syndrome, [1] [2] or overkill, [3] is a common behavior exhibited by predators, in which they kill more prey than they can immediately eat and then they either cache or abandon the remainder.