Cougar sighting was really a house cat, wildlife official says

Suffering succotash. Wildlife officials investigating a cougar sighting at a Geiger Heights school playground think witnesses only saw a pussycat.

Investigators deduced the animal couldn’t have been a cougar after viewing video footage shot at Windsor Elementary by a local TV news crew and determining that the star of the film was a house cat. The footage, combined with the presence of deer calmly grazing nearby, persuaded officials that a cougar hadn’t been in the area Sept. 6, the day of the sighting. The sighting prompted a brief lockdown at the Cheney District school.

“In our experience, if a cat had been there probably an hour before, you would not have deer around,” said Madonna Luers, a Washington Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman. “KXLY shot what they thought at a distance was a cougar, but it was a house cat.”

As crazy as it sounds that a 10-pound domestic feline could be mistaken for a wild one 5 to 8 feet long weighing 100 to 200 pounds, it is possible under the right conditions, Luers said.

However, Windsor Principal Kaye Aucutt said her witnesses know a calico from a coug. The wooded area is no stranger to big cats, after all.

“It was our music teacher and one of our classes that saw it,” Aucutt said. “She told me ‘I’ve been to Cat Tales. I know what a cougar looks like.’ It was a cougar.”