Florida simply doesn’t need panthers. It’s just stupid in this day and age.
Perhaps those who support the protection of large predators should contribute to a fund to compensate the owners of the prey.
One was killed just 8 miles from where I live in Illinois.
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- As teenage cowboys my older brother and I were out tracking three of our Brama steers that had gotten loose.
- It was a dark and quiet night as we worked our way around a patch of taller trees and undergrowth about a mile from our farm.
- Suddenly we spotted really huge paw prints in the damp soil with our
flashlights, no rifles with us (dumb) so we scooted back to the farm.
- The plan changed to digging some postholes, putting up hogwire, putting a stout feed box within and rigging a swing gate that would lock closed as a small piece of wood was knocked off a a hungry six month old rowdy Brahma steer went into our trap.
- One by one we caught them and took them back to the farm.
- Brahmas tend to go over, under, thru a barbed wore fence.
- These went into our corral to be fed out on oats, corn, citrus pulp, beet pulp, millet, cottonseed meal, citrus molasses - then butchered for top grade freezer beef and sold to hungry load area physicians and attorneys.
- The butcher hung it, aged it a bit, and wrapped it in freezer paper - they got the hide, by-products, hoofs, horns, bones, etc. - no charge to the boys from the Lazy-J -
- We were cowboys - but I started keeping my scoped Mossberg semi-auto in the trunk of of the convertible.
“... 6-to-7-foot long predators...”
That’s just scary.
A remarkably stupid thing to say. The ranches in central FL are there, rather than developments, because at the moment there is little demand for development of this land. I can point you at several attempts that failed miserably. People want to live near the coast.
That said, there is a lot of really, really empty land in central Florida, once you get south of Mouseland. But not because the ranchers have preserved it out of a sense of environmental duty.
When I was researching material for my book, “COUGAR!”, I found out that this animal needs to consume between 15 and twenty pounds of meat a day and they will take a deer every week and a half. Out here in Texas, it is well known that they will take calves, foals, goats, and sheep so why would the other state natural resources departments deny their well known natural behaviors?
BYW, my book is a purely fictional account of a government conspiracy to bring predatory animals back into the environment to reduce the wildlife population, but I do have some good info about the big cats on my website: wwbrock.com. :)