On monday a 120 # female mountain lion was shot and killed by law enforcement officers in the small Nebraska town of St. Paul (pop. around 2k). St. Paul is located in south central NE, about 20 miles north of Grand Island, in between the North and Middle Loup rivers. Over the past several months there had been several unsubstantiated reports of a lion in the area, including one of a horse being attacked.
According to stories that I have read in the papers, the cat passed within a couple of blocks of the elementary school, and near the high school about the time school was being dismissed. Reports were made by parents picking up their children. Some high school kids saw it and tracked it for a ways before the LEOs showed up and chased them off. They then followed the cat to an area at the edge of town where there were some junked vehicles parked in a bunch of cedar trees. The cat tried to take refuge under a flatbed truck and was shot by the officers with a shotgun and a "hunting" rifle. There has been some criticism of the shooting , saying they should have used a tranquilizer gun, but they are not standard issue in small town patrol cars (gee, neither are "hunting" rifles and deer season is over).
The dead cat was taken to UNL for a necropsy to determine its health status at the time of death. Officials have been quoted as saying that the cat must have been "mentally or physically impaired" (one of the witnesses in town has the cat clearing an 8' tall wooden fence - don't sound to impaired to me, in the pictures it looked to be in pretty good condition, as for mentally impaired, the only problem I see is that it didn't have too much fear of humans, probably been living pretty close to em for a while.) Other statements included that they didn't know how the cat could have gotten to this part of the state. Maybe they should ask the Tourism Dept. what that big blue line on the map (Platte River) that comes down out of Wyoming is. It could also have worked its way down from the Pine Ridge or Wildcat Hills (the other cats were killed out there in the northwest part of the state) by following the Niobrara, Snake, Dismal, and Loup Rivers.
For some reason the Game and Parks Commission doesn't seem to have any trouble accepting the fact that elk and even moose wander into the state occasionaly, even warning hunters not to shoot them, but is extremely reluctant to even admit the possibility that there are mountain lions living in the state. This is only the seventh "officially confirmed" sighting of a mountin lion in NE in the past 100 years, kind of strange though, in that four of the "officially confirmed" sightings have ended up with a dead cat (3 by LEOs), all within the last few years. There are about 350 sightings reported a year, but almost none are "officially confirmed". There have been quite a few sightings of mountain lions and tracks as well as missing calves in the area that I hunt turkeys and deer near the Niobrara River in north central NE. My dad and I spotted one about 80 yds away while turkey hunting a year and a half ago. They are a protected species in NE, so some ranchers are talkin "shoot, shovel, and shut-up", (actually it would be legal to shoot one if it were attacking your livestock) but it sounds like the LEOs will handle the shooting for you, and then maybe the sighting will be "confirmed".
for more on the story do a serch of the Omaha World-Herald at
http://www.omaha.com
bergie