Published: November 05, 2007 10:32 pm         

Cougar believed seen in Warren County

Conservation officer says animal likely a coyote

PINE VILLAGE — The animal Larry Cline has seen on at least three different occasions over the past month near his rural home is no coyote, he says.

Cline says the animal, which his wife caught on camera Saturday, is a cougar.

Officials aren’t so sure.

Max Winchell, conservation officer with the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, took a look at the digital images Cline e-mailed, and said he thought the images could be of a coyote.

“The first [picture] looked like a coyote, and the second one I’m not sure isn’t a coyote,” Winchell said, adding that people often mistake deer or coyote for a cougar.

Cline said, “Coyote are here all the time, deer are here all the time.” He said he would recognize if it were one of those animals.

Cline lives near the town of Pine Village in Warren County, about 30 miles north of Covington.

The unidentified animal was first sighted in midsummer, Cline said, by a couple of people who were building a barn for him.

It was behind his property, in the woods.

Then on a Sunday morning in early October, Cline said he, a neighbor and his daughter saw the same animal – which they believed to be a cougar – in Cline’s horse pasture.

On Oct. 12, “it then ran across Highway 26 about a mile west of Pine Village,” Cline wrote in an e-mail to the Tribune-Star. “I just managed to catch it in my truck headlights.”

A neighbor’s wife saw the same animal in the afternoon on Halloween in Cline’s hay field, Cline said.

The most recent sighting, Cline added, was about 3 p.m. Saturday in his hay field near the edge of the woods.

He, his wife and his daughter saw the “cougar,” and that’s when the photographs were taken, he said.

Cline said during a phone interview that there are “lots of people who live close by” who say they’ve seen it, “but they’re afraid to say anything, because they think people won’t believe them.”

The animal was about 200 yards away, Cline said, when his wife “managed to finally get [a picture].”

He said his wife intends to call a local conservation officer to come out and look for the animal.

Livestock have been killed, but Cline says it would be hard to tell whether a cougar was responsible, because of other wildlife in the area.

He said he won’t hesitate to shoot the animal if he feels his family is endangered.

Joe Taft, the director of the Exotic Feline Rescue Center in Center Point, where a female cougar went missing in January, received a copy of the photographs by e-mail.

His simple e-mail response upon seeing the images: “Looks like a coyote to me.”



Deb Kelly can be reached at (812) 231-4254 or deb.mckee@tribstar.com.