You may be right

But this can be a double edged sword also. In Wisconsin they continually downplay the wolf population and they probably would have been taken off of the endangered species list if the true numbers were released. In order to remove nuisance animals they now call them hybrids rather than true, real wolves so they can then be shot. This is totally dishonest and misleading but this is the trap that their ideology has led them into.

The truth may be that the habitat is not as critical to cougars (or most other endangered species) as they would like you to believe and that the animals are actually highly adaptable and resilient and if you dont aggressively hunt or trap them out of existence and they are not in direct completion with another major predator, they can survive just fine just about anywhere south of the arctic circle. This, however, does not fit with their environmentalism belief system and therefore cannot even be considered as a possibility.