Fred Tippens sends this.

WESTFIR — A cougar was shot and killed Sunday at Casey’s Riverside RV Park in Westfir after it had spent at least a week prowling around the mobile home portion of the park, residents said Thursday.

“It was after the feral cats,” Gayle Murphy, 68, said. She lives at the park between Highway 58 and the Middle Fork of the Willamette River, just west of Oakridge.

The 100-pound, male mountain lion was full grown but thin, Murphy said. Recently, she said, the animal had crawled onto the porches of her neighbor. It would come in from the nearby forest, following a dry creek bed.

“The cat had a pattern,” she said. “He was (at the park) about every other night.”

The cougar was shot about 100 yards from Murphy’s fifth-wheel trailer, where she’s lived for the past year, she said.

The man who shot the cougar has parents who live in the mobile home park, said Randy Christian, owner of the park. He said the cougar, which residents had seen off and on for at least a week, came into their backyard and the son shot at it.

“There were two shots,” Christian said. “One shot hit the cougar, and it ran down into the trees and they found it dead down there.”

He said the man then called Oregon State Police. An OSP wildlife trooper responded, didn’t issue any citations and took the cougar’s carcass.

Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife spokeswoman Michelle Dennehy in Salem said the shooting was allowed under state law. “The person who took the cougar was legal to do so under statutes that allow killing of cougars causing damage or public safety issues,” she said.

She confirmed that the cougar had been at the mobile home park recently and it had killed house cats. She added that the mountain lion was two or three years old and thin for its age.

ODFW officials estimate about 6,400 wild cougars live in Oregon, Dennehy said, particularly in the southwest Cascades Range and the Blue Mountains in Eastern Oregon.

Nestled in the foothills of the Cascade Range, Westfir is in mountain lion country.

“There is a healthy population of cougars that live in that area,” Dennehy said.

The presence of the mountain lion had unnerved mobile home park residents, Murphy said.

“This cat was definitely too used to this environment, and he either needed to be moved or shot because he was a danger to us,” she said.

Mid-way through the article I was about to say that they only made one mistake – they called the police.  On the other hand, it sounds as if he reacted with some wisdom.

Look, for all of you environmentalist types who think we’re invading their territory and we should just learn to live with them because we’re in their back yard, not ours, you’ll think that way until a mountain lion takes the scalp off a friend or family member and kills them (it’s happened before).  Then you’ll change your mind if you have any sense at all.

Always carry guns.  You can no more let an animal harm you and destroy your belongings than let a man do it.