Long Vanished Eastern Puma That Was Driven To Extinction By Humans Added To Extinction List

[Correction: We Adjusted the original title on this article to better emphasize that the Eastern Puma Has long vanished, and it didn’t go extinct recently.]

On 22nd of January, 2018 Eastern Pumas were officially declared extinct. These beautiful, proud felines were once found all along the eastern side of the Mississippi River and now their time has passed. This is hardly a new phenomenon. We hear about at least one species going extinct every week but there’s no such thing as getting used to it. When the US Fish and Wildlife Service officially put out the news that the Eastern Puma had been moved from the ‘endangered’ to the ‘extinct’ category, it was expected by the conservationists.

This wasn’t a sudden occurrence. For the past hundred years, the species has been teetering on the brink of extinction. At the turn of the 20th century, hunters and trappers had already wiped out most of the population. According to Mark Elbroch who is the leading expert in Panthera’s puma division believes that the animals have been going into extinction for a long time.

It was only in 2011 that the US Fish and Wildlife Service started intensively researching the situation of the Eastern Puma. They typically live in the forests and marshes along the coast and they have been in the endangered category since 1973 despite never being seen in their usual habitats for the last thirty years. A hunter in Maine killed the last recorded member of the species as far back as 1938. This was before World War II had even started.