OreCat welcomes the support of the Felidae Conservation Fund for many of our cougar pictures and for all their technical support. OreCat wants to extend a thank you to artists Mark Elbroch and Trish Carney for their wonderful supply of cougar pictures. And the 1800 hours of mentoring Mountain Lion Foundation gave me to help make OreCat happen.
Felidae aims to advance the conservation of wild cats and their habitats planetwide through a combination of groundbreaking research, compelling education and cutting-edge technology.
We believe this can be achieved collectively with utmost collaboration between scientists, educators, international communities, and lawmakers. By helping people understand the critical role these animals play in their particular ecosystems and the challenges they face, our hope is that we can preserve habitats, stave off further extinctions, and promote healthy ways for humans and wild cats to co-exist. We team up with world-class researchers, and supply education, outreach, strategy, funding, media, field support and assistance with logistics and planning. Through our innovative education programs we serve as a conduit for sharing the results of these studies with the public in a way that’s engaging and inspiring.
We believe that children play a vital role in the future of our natural world, and therefore we provide opportunities for kids to become involved at any age.
Felidae collaborates on strategic research studies that clearly define a process to understand human impact on wild cats and wild places. The goal is to prevent further extinction of felidae species, and to preserve complete ecosystems around the world. Our contributions build new outlooks toward wild cats and the preservation of global ‘wildness’.
Felidae Conservation Fund is committed to spawning compelling educational messages through stories, visual media and outreach campaigns that pilot a healthy coexistence of humans and felidae species around the world.
HOW MANY COUGAR DO WE NEED??
To help stop fear about the cougar and to promote better management practices and decrease sports hunting for "fun", OreCat promotes information regarding predator protection buildings, pens, lighting, fencing and guard animals that help protect livestock and wildlife, as well as educational presentations for schools and local communities.
Currently, cougars are extinct in 36 States of the Union due primarily to sports hunting and then habitat loss. Each year hundreds of baby cubs are orphaned because their Mother was shot or trapped. Why can you kill a Mother with dependent young that cannot live without her? Here in Oregon, ODFW hunting laws theoretically does not allow a hunter to shoot doe’s with fawns, bear with cubs up to a year old, and cougars with cubs with spots. Mother cougars hunt without their cubs, so hunters do not know until after she is shot, if she had cubs. Cougar cubs with spots are only 3 to 4 months old. By the time they are 5 months old the spots are gone or nearly gone, but they still need to nurse and are not big enough to bring down food. Both of these issues indicates how flawed and inhuman ODFW cougar plan is.
It takes 18 months for a mother cougar to raise her cubs to be independent and if she is killed, which ODFW plan targets primarily female cougars; than these orphaned cubs will either be sold on the black market, held in captivity by some harden soul for release near your schools to create fear in the hopes of promoting more cougar killing, killed by hunters or their dogs for fun, killed by natural predators, starve, or eat you pets and livestock. ODFW policies create problem cougars where there were none or rare before. And more spotted cougar cubs are being found in the woods orphaned than ever before!
Currently in Oregon, there are no open spaces dedicated to just the cougar and corridors for their safe passage. There is no humane or sustainable plan for the cougar and none for the orphaned cubs. A den consists of a tree stump or outcropping of rocks. Cubs are exposed to the elements so when orphaned, they die in very bad circumstances. It is estimated from cougar kills, that over 1000 cubs die horrific deaths each year as a result of their mother being killed for fun, or better known as the "sport" of hunting. Here in Oregon, it is open season on cougar and many are now hunted down with dogs (which is also very inhumane for the dog!) and off road vehicles that damage our fragile ecosystems.