As of January 22, 2018, the eastern puma has been officially declared extinct.
The declaration was made by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, who subsequently removed the Eastern puma from the list of endangered species.
The cats were known for roaming American states east of the Mississippi River.
Unfortunately, this declaration was a long time coming. The endangerment of the Eastern puma began over a century ago.
By 1900, most of these large cats had disappeared from wildlife due to systematic hunting and trapping.
Some scientists, such as Mark Elbroch, the lead scientist for the puma program at the big cats conservation group Panthera, believed the Eastern puma to be “long extinct” given their rare sightings.
Since 2011, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service conducted a thorough review into the status of the Eastern puma. The cougar was declared endangered in 1973 despite the last wild sighting of the large cat being over three decades prior.
The last documented sighting of the Eastern puma was in Maine in 1938 when the cougar was found killed by a hunter.
In 2015, federal wildlife biologists declared the preservation of Eastern pumas beyond saving in the eastern United States. With this conclusion, the cougar was no longer under protection from the Endangered Species Act.
Pumas, which is a synonym for cougars, are cousins to the well-known mountain lions that still roam the Western United States. Eastern pumas are also related to the endangered Florida panthers found in the Everglades.
The large cats were a total of 8 feet long from head to tail and weighed up to 140 pounds. At one point, the Eastern pumas were the most widely spread land mammal in the Western Hemisphere.
But eventually, humanity and nature met, resulting in an extermination campaign and systematic habitat destruction that led to the majestic animals becoming extinct. The pumas were hunted for their fur or killed to protect livestock.
However, according to some biologists, there is a silver lining to this extinction – with the help of the Eastern pumas many cousins, there would be more possibilities for conservation.
“We need large carnivores like cougars, which would curb deer overpopulation and tick-borne diseases that threaten human health, so we hope Eastern and Midwestern states will reintroduce them,” said Michael Robinson, a conservation advocate at the Center of Biological Diversity.
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