Dear Editor,

I read with unsettled interest about the starving mother cougar who was put down, leaving her dependent young to a life sentence behind bars in a zoo where they can be gawked and gaped at by all manner of selfie-snappin’ city-dwellers (“Cougar cubs captured after adult female euthanized” MVN, March 13, 2019). What caught my attention, besides that yet another Methow cougar ‘had to be’ killed, was that it happened along the Twisp-Carlton Road and it appeared she had been injured escaping a leg-hold trap. I can tell you firsthand that getting an animal’s foot out of one of those evil torture-devices is no simple task—an intense trauma for everyone involved.

Some years back, off that very same road, my shepherd/lab/malmute mix stepped in a rusty, old trap that clamped down onto his front paw, prying his toes apart. He cried out in terror and frantically tried to…