For those of you who have never been Greenwich is basically what you imagine a town full of very, very wealthy north-easterners would look like. Needless to say there are more wine tastings than hunting trips so the panic these people are feeling now is probably worse than you’d imagine.
There is some talk that the mountain lion may have been an exotic pet let loose but frankly coyotes, bears, deer and bobcats have all benefited from a multi-generational decline in hunting pressure in the north so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that as American big cat numbers increase they would find their way into areas with easy pickings and no pesky gun toting humans in the woods.
If authorities don’t get a handle on this though this could end badly:
A full-sized mountain line was photographed on the campus of the Brunswick School in Greenwich on Sunday, along with a matching paw print and a 9-inch lion dropping that seals the scientific deal.
It’s not a bobcat, it’s a mountain lion.
“Bobcats have these little tails, but the mountain lion has this really long tail about half the length of their body, and are 6 to 8 feet long,” said Joe Cassone of the Greenwich Conservation Department. It’s not common to see a big predator like that in Greenwich.”
“From what we can determine, it was at least two to three times bigger than a dog and the dog is bigger than a bobcat,” said DEP spokesman Dwayne Gardner. “We’re also working with [the] New York Department of Environmental Conservation to try to obtain a trap for it.”
Not sure what kind of school it was but children are just about eating size for a big cat. Hopefully they’ll catch this guy before he gets too peckish: