Family Life

Cougars are mostly solitary animals, except for mothers raising dependent cubs and the time males and females briefly spend together while mating.

Solitary does not mean that cougars do not have a social structure--quite the contrary. Cougars live in low-densities on the land, meaning that a single cougar requires from a minimum of 50 to 100 square miles to breed, raise young, hunt, and survive. Both males and females maintain and defend home ranges as well as advertise availability for breeding through a system of feline communication which includes scent marking with scrapes (in tree bark or troughs in the dirt usually made with hind paws which are then often urinated or defecated on) and vocalizations. Females are more tolerant of slight overlaps in their territories by other females than are males.

Cougars are dedicated mothers, and are either pregnant or raising dependent cubs for the majority (76%) of their lives. Mothers spend an average of 18-24 months raising and apprenticing a single litter to maturity and nurse their young for just the first seven weeks of their lives. Litter size is usually 2-3 cubs and research in New Mexico by Ken Logan and Linda Sweanor shows a survival rate of 60-66% in an area where cougars were not susceptible to hunting pressure by humans. As cubs grow, female’s survival rate increases, while that of the males decreases, likely due to greater competition and lesser tolerance in supporting an overlap in home range by a newcomer male.

Intraspecies competition proves as another source of mortality among cougars. Most male cougars involved as study subjects show battle scars, indicating that cougars fight to defend territories, breeding females and food. Male will kill entire litters of cubs to induce estrus in a female and populate the territory with his offspring; females have been documented as dying in such battles in an attempt to defend her family.

The greatest cause of mortality amongst cougars is human-related, and include illegal poaching, auto-related deaths, sport and depredation hunting, lethal removal of visible (and often therefore “problematic”) cougars, and the orphaning and often subsequent death by starvation/predation of cubs when their mothers are killed by any of the above causes.