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Feature No Place for Predators? Time and again, advancing civilization has set people against large carnivores. On the front lines of Washington State, wildlife biologists hope that knowledge can trump fear, and ultimately lead to détente. Liza Gross “The whole continent was one of continuing dismal wilderness, the haunt of wolves and bears and more savage men. Now the forests are removed, the land covered with fields of corn, orchards bending with fruit and the magnificent habitations of rational and civilized people.”—John Adams, 1756 [1]. raced for savagery and sacrifice, European settlers in the New World came to the Pacific Northwest to Btame the final frontier, the last refuge of “dismal wilderness.” While colonists in the East were poisoning, shooting, and trapping cougars to extinction during the 1880s, hundreds of thousands of pioneers flooded into what would soon become the new state of Washington. Following the well-worn pioneer playbook, Pacific Northwest immigrants converted forests to farmland and pasture and, fearing local predators as unacceptable threats to life, property, and game, paid bounty hunters to destroy all carnivores, large and small. It would take over 30 years to exterminate the wolf, and doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060040.g001 several more decades to nearly eliminate the cougar—whose famously reclusive, solitary nature may have helped the cat Figure 1. Echoes of the Past: Cougars Face the Same Threats Today survive a systematic eradication effort. Yet even against a That Nearly Eliminated the Species 100 Years Ago backdrop of ongoing persecution, complaints of cougar The cougar, Puma concolor, once the most widely distributed carnivore in the United States, was extirpated east of the Mississippi River by attacks on livestock and