Sasha, the Bronx Cougar

Meet Sasha. One of the cougars in bronx (puma concolor). As of this writing, she is around eighty pounds and eleven months old – which makes her a pre-teen big cat. Like most cougars in bronx, she’s a carnivore, and a predator, and has a stronger bite force than a lion. Yes, that lion.

Until recently, Sasha lived in The Bronx. Not by choice, mind you. And not within the confines of the borough’s famous zoo either. Instead, Sasha shared a residence. Some might call that being a pet. Not when it’s this kind of animal. If you fear something more than it fears you, it’s officially not your pet. You’re closer to its pet really. Or maybe servant.

Sasha was acquired by her now-former owners at eight weeks old. Presumably they knew she was a baby cougar and that she would age and mature as such. After all, they did. They were small humans once, and then they became larger humans. That’s how existing works. Wasn’t as if they bought a goldfish and then one day, boom, it’s a cougar. Species stay species, y’all.

And so, up until these owners came to a comically foregone conclusion and surrendered her to the Humane Society, Sasha was raised a Bronxite. Like Chazz Palminteri, KRS-One, and Stan Lee before her. Sasha probably didn’t see much of her hometown though. There were no picnics in Van Cortlandt Park or day-trips to City Island. Her owners couldn’t take her anywhere public, on account of they’d be arrested. Or Sasha would’ve tried to eat someone. Really no positive outcome would have come of it. Alas, here these people were, with a house-bound killer cat. Just kind of… there. Why exactly?

This is Sasha and absolutely not a stock photo of a cougar.

Difficult to hide too, a mountain lion. Especially in those areas of The Bronx without giant mountain ranges. Imagine the stoop neighbor gossip:

“Ginny, I’m tellin’ you, there’s a goddamn cougar in that house!”

“A cougar? What the frig even is that?”

After being surrendered, Sasha made a stop at The Bronx Zoo to get a good look-at. It gave zoo director Jim Breheny the opportunity to comment on possessorship of wild beasts, especially big cats. “These animals often end up in very bad situations, kept by private individuals who don’t have the resources, facilities, knowledge, or expertise to provide for the animals’ most basic needs.” By private individuals, he means just fucking people, by the way.

The same kind of people, or person rather, who kept a tiger named Ming, all four-hundred pounds of him, in a Harlem apartment before being seized in 2003. I’ve had an infant child in an uptown apartment, and that alone is a chore. A tiger though? It’s like keeping a giant wall of spikes in your living room. Things will not end well.

And they didn’t. Ming bit his “owner” (I think even the tiger gave air quotes on that designation) while the guy was trying to protect his house cat from becoming tiger brunch. There’s some profound irony somewhere inside all that, but I just don’t have the energy to go searching for it. Oh, and they also seized a six-foot alligator from that same apartment, called Al, who deserved better name-wise I think we can all admit.

But this is nothing new. There was 1930’s Manhattan socialite and fashion designer Ruth Harkness, who owned not one but two different giant pandas. Even Salvador Dali once brought a leashed anteater onto the NYC subway – which might’ve been too Dali even for Dali.

It’s not some deep sociological insight to suggest city-dwellers, living in the most unnatural thing going, can have a cathartic urge for extreme wildlife. It’s why Central Park exists. It’s literally the natural world deposited into the middle of a city. (Displacing a free village of African-Americans in the process, but why bring politics into everything, Joe?)

Courtesy: NBC News who apparently knows Sasha personally

There’s an incongruous sexiness about a wild animal in the urban jungle. Just look at falcons. The fact that falcons inhabit the skyscrapers of Midtown is so bad-ass it’s like Stone Cold Steve Austin and Spartacus had a baby, and that baby was falcons in a skyscraper.

So, in a way, I get it.

But in every other way, I don’t.

And it’s for an admittedly hippie-dippie, crunchy-granola, snowflakey reason: nobody thinks of the animal.

Okay, Dali’s anteater probably had a hell of a fun time with him. But the others? It’s all an extension of this fetishization of animals that isn’t healthy for anyone, creatures included. I love animals. I love dogs and cats. I love elephants and zebras and goats and iguanas and swordfish and echidnas and grasshoppers. Animals are awesome, and keeping the right ones as companions is a beautiful thing. However, sometimes even that goes too far. (Dogs in strollers, people?)

Anyway, Sasha the cougar is off to a wildlife refuge in Arkansas, where she’ll spend the remainder of her days. It’s probably about as good as she can get it while still being in captivity.

At least it’s better than getting shoehorned into the human world. Anything has to be better than that.

Behind this lolly is another species of cougar, just as dangerous but much better at the art of conversation and baking.