What was reasonable alternative to killing cougar?

Police always get a bum rap.

While we should be grateful for the job they do in protecting society, and deep in our hearts we would hope that most of us are, it's always the cop who gave us the speeding ticket that we remember - and blame him rather than our lead foot.

So it is with the Chicago police who shot and killed a cougar that was roaming the residential streets of that city last week.

Cougars not being the norm around these parts, experts theorize that the young male probably wandered down from one of our northern neighboring states after being run out of an area that had too many male cougars for the female population.

OK, so this proves that love doesn't necessarily conquer all, especially among cougars.

The hunting down and eventual slaying of the beast became a media circus, with pictures of the cougar both alive and after it had been killed much in evidence on television and in Chicago-area newspapers.

Both the use of photos of the dead beast and the fact that the Chicago police killed it upset many readers who sent letters to the newspapers, including this one.

As for the news media, it's perhaps the onslaught of coverage on both television and in newspapers that brought out the animal-loving nature of a lot of people.

One reader wrote to us, "All creatures should be afforded basic dignity in death, including this poor cougar" and criticized the fact that children looking through, in this case, The Sun, would find themselves facing a photo of the dead beast.

As for the police, the criticism seemed to come mostly along the lines that the animal should have been tranquilized, not shot, and that the cougar should have met a kinder fate than to have ended up dead on the concrete.

Sure, we would liked to have seen a living cougar ending up in one of the zoos.

We'll wager at least some of the police involved would have preferred that as well.

However, a cougar is a big, strong, fast and dangerous creature - not readily stopped quickly by a tranquilizer gun.

And the Chicago police are charged with protecting the lives of Chicago residents, lives that could easily have been endangered if the cougar had been permitted to keep roaming the streets.

So while killing that big cat was unpleasant, trying to capture it alive brought its own danger, and we ask what those who object to police shooting it would have had them do instead?