“The big cats face no fewer threats than when they were originally listed. “This is a simple case of a broadly-dispersed North American subspecies moving to recover its historic range east of the prairie states,” said Lynn Cullens of the Mountain Lion Foundation. Cougar biologists now generally agree there is a single North American subspecies. and the rare historic specimens tested east of the Mississippi River. Modern research cannot distinguish between the thousands of cougars living throughout the western U.S. The 2011 USFWS review acknowledges that the 1946 taxonomy of the eastern cougar is flawed. In 2011 the USFWS opened comments on removing the Eastern Cougar from the Endangered Species List. However, genetic research in the 1990s determined there were just six subspecies, including the one that is widely distributed across North America, Puma concolor cougar. Listed as an endangered species in 1973, Puma concolor couguar, the eastern cougar, was just one of 32 subspecies described in 1946. “The USFWS needs to develop a federal recovery plan for the entire historic range of the North American cougar including the eastern U.S.” Questions of TaxonomyĬurrently, the puma species native to the western hemisphere taxonomically is named Puma concolor (also known as cougar, mountain lion, and panther). “The USFWS cannot declare extinct a cougar subspecies our best science now understands never existed,” said Cougar Rewilding Foundation president, Christopher Spatz in 2016. It is a poor excuse for delisting given that cougars in the Eastern United States continue to meet all of the qualifications for protection under the Endangered Species Act. The Service’s insistence that the cougar is extinct and therefore subject to delisting is a spurious argument that cannot be substantiated given the most up-to-date DNA analyses. In 2016, 73 conservation organizations submitted a letter to the USFWS stating that the problem with a decision to delist based on extinction is that no scientific evidence exists that the cougars which once ranged the East are different than other cougars throughout North America. The fact that the Service holds that “the eastern cougar listing cannot be used as a method to protect other cougars” demonstrates a serious flaw in Federal policy affecting species which have been intentionally extirpated across vast areas, damaging human and environmental health, but are not protected because they exist in a sustainable population somewhere else, far across the country. The delisting will take effect February 22, 2018.When the Service first declared in 2011 that the eastern cougar was extinct, taxonomists replied that the subspecies never existed. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) announcedthe official removal of the Eastern cougar from the Federal List of Threatened and Endangered Wildlife. Learn more about our work through our Save LA Cougars campaign.On Monday, Januthe U.S. There are less than 160 Florida panthers left in the wild. subspecies of mountain lion, are listed as critically endangered on the endangered species list. Fish & Wildlife Service in 2011, although individuals from western populations have been confirmed to wander as far as the East Coast. The eastern cougar, a subspecies of mountain lion, was declared officially extinct by the U.S. By preserving enough wilderness to support a stable mountain lion population, countless other species of plants and animals that share mountain lion habitat benefit. A mountain lion usually requires about 13 times as much area as a black bear or 40 times as much area as a bobcat to thrive. Mountain lions are an "umbrella species" for conservation because their conservation depends on the preservation of large amounts of habitat. While there are still several thousand mountain lions in the wild, their population has significantly decreased from their historical population due to unsustainable hunting, habitat destruction, and conflicts with livestock. Due to conservation efforts, mountain lion populations in the western United States are stable, although far lower than they were historically. The species was maliciously hunted and almost eradicated from the eastern United States. Throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, people feared the mountain lion because it posed a risk to their livestock. The species was so wide-reaching and populous that it had multiple subspecies that varied based on location. The historic range of the mountain lion included almost all of North and South America.