iam getting in to this a little late but that never stops me. Chappy I still don't understand your statment about wolves and bears. They dont eat cats. (well the big ones anyhow). I dont know about washignton becouse I have only been here for a year ,but in my home woods of northern californa we have a lot of bears and a lot of cougar which I like. There great animals. The we have always had a large population of both but know that peta and the serria club have had the hunting stopped you can hardly take a piss in the wood with out pissing one off. The problem with both is different and yet the same so lets talk about one at a time. Bears . bears in cal. that raid house's and camps are not dealt with in the right way. The animal are relocated into the higher mountians were they are not a problem to any one. Thats what they tell use anyhow. the truth is that the bears are back in a week. there are two things happening that relocation does nothing about. The first is learned behavior. mommy bear teaches baby bear how to raid trash cans and destroy what ever they have too to get to food. I have seen car doors ripped open , truck canapies tore off and house ransaked. moving the bears to the mountians does no good becouse of the second thing. THERE ARE TOO MANY BEARS. sorry for the caps but i had to get my point across.thier are too many bears in the woods for the woods to support. and their is not enought room for them. in the old days we kept the population down by hunting and we kept the training of junior down by shooting mommy before she had a chance to teach the little tyke. today under no condition what so ever will the state shoot a problem bear. its the fault of the humans for leaving food out where the bears can get it. in the case of a friend that was the front seat of his locked truck in his damm drive way....!!!!!!. now for the cougers , I look at the big cats in a different light becouse bears ,problem that they are , have not killed someone in a long time. cats have and not very long ago either. The number of cat attacks are going up and the petas of the world always say the same thing . that we are moving in on them. The problem is that the attacks are not happening in newly delevoped areas or camping areas but in areas that have had homes in them for years. Why ? becouse the population of cats has out grown the wild areas and the younger cats are being forced in to urban areas. when I was still living in placerville ca.(look it up) i was in the propane field so I got to talk to a lot of people around the county on a daily basic. not a day went by that I did not here about a cat being seen or ran off. and not a week went by that a cat did not kill some ones cattle, dogs, goats or sheep. and not a month went by that a cat did not chase some one. you are thinking that if it was so bad why have we not heard about it. Two reasons really. one the papers in sac will not print stories about problem cats becouse they support no hunting and peta. over half of their staff belong to the serria club. if you think the seattle post is bad you have not seen bad.The second reason is that if you report a problem cat you will either be told there is nothing that can be done or a trapper will cost you the bigg bucks. yes you can get a permit to shoot it your self after the fifth time it kills some thing. but by then you are out of goats so why bother. instead what is happening is that people are praticing the 3 s's of couger managment . shoot , shovel, shut up. why should people live in fear of being aressted for managinig a problem population that the state has chosen not to so people in the bay area cant feel good about them selves??? The leader of the group that got hunting banned in cal. (iforgot his name sorry) said that even if kids started to get attacked that it would not be a reason to control the population. In the 80s a women was jogging and was attacked, killed and eatten by a cat in the foot hills near placerville. the cat was killed and the kittens where put in the folsom zoo. the sign on their cage reads that the mother was killed becouse some people believed that she may be a danger to humans. This statement is not only a lie. but leads people to think that some bad person shot the cat becouse he thought it might be a danger when in fact it killed some one and eat her. score one up for the p.c. bergade. Tom