Big Cat
I thought I had shared this story before but apparently not.
I did share my bobcat story but this is about a bigger kittie.
I saw one of these six years ago.
Mountain Lion, Puma, Cougar...big cat. 
One of these crossed the road in front of me in the middle of the afternoon, probably not more than 30 meters away. Came out of some tall grass and skulked across the road, low to the ground. An awe-inspiring and unmistakble image.
The problem is, they don't "officially" exist in these parts.
DEP (department of environmental protection) flat-out refuses to acknowledge the possibility of what they refer to as a "breeding population." They'll tell you that the only explanation could be if one was held in captivity and then escaped or was released into the wild. But
really they just tell you that you were confused and it must've been a bobcat or a coyote.
To which I would always explain, "Well there'e only one problem with that. I'm not a total moron, and I know what I saw was NOT a bobcat or a coyote or anything else!" They act like you're talking about Bigfoot or aliens. Plenty of people have seen them around here though. But the officials always say, "No carcass, no scat, no footprints, no clear photos, no blah, blah blah..."
It was a great learning experience for me as to how people react to eyewitness accounts of something they either can't wrap their heads around or are simply too uncomfortable with. It actually negatively affected a relationship I was in at the time.
The point to all this?
June 11, 2011| CNN
A mountain lion was killed in a car accident in Milford, Connecticut, on Saturday and authorities say the cat may have been the same one spotted this week in nearby Greenwich.
The 140-pound cat may have escaped from domestic captivity (which is illegal), but maybe not—he was lean, not declawed, and not neutered. Scientists will conduct a necropsy to determine what kind of diet it had been surviving on, and also to figure out if it's a South American or North American mountain lion. (The Hartford Courant reports that most of the mountain lions in the pet trade come from South America.) Officials say the last confirmed sighting of a mountain lion in the area was in the 19th century; the eastern mountain lion was relentlessly hunted and trapped until it disappeared forever.
After an extensive review, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service concluded in March that the eastern mountain lion -- also called the eastern cougar -- is extinct.
"We recognize that many people have seen cougars in the wild within the historical range of the eastern cougar," Martin Miller, an official with the Fish and Wildlife Service, said in a statement in March. "However, we believe those cougars are not the eastern cougar subspecies. We found no information to support the existence of the eastern cougar."
The one I saw was about 100 miles away from the one recently killed, and my sighting was in 2005.
Then this:
A day after a mountain lion was killed by a car on the Wilbur Cross Parkway, two new sightings were reported in Greenwich, suggesting that more than one mountain lion may be roaming in Connecticut.
Department of Environmental Protection officials said that there is no fresh evidence to suggest that more than one mountain lion is on the loose, but the department is investigating the sightings.
I haven't included any links because nearly every story has the same undignified picture of the dead cat laying on what looks to be garage floor.
Never in my life did I think I'd have mountain lions on my mind when out riding. But since 2005, I do — quite often.
Here, kitty, kitty, kitty...
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