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Injustice in Our Own Country
By: Carole Baskin

Dusk was settling in; cold and drizzly damp the kind of cold that just makes your bones ache. A single mom was bathing her toddlers before tucking them into bed for the night. Their bellies were full and their eyelids beginning to feel heavy as she hurried to dry them so that they wouldnt chill while she was gone. She had to go to work and there was no one she could call on to keep her babies safe while she made a living for the four of them.

It didnt used to be so bad. The neighborhood was a safe place when she was born here but now three kids later a lot more people had moved in and they werent good neighbors. Some of them were downright evil and she made a point to try and make herself invisible when she saw one of them coming.

Usually the bad ones were pretty easy to spot. They were bawdy smelled of alcohol and cigarettes and drove noisy trucks with beds full of howling chained dogs. As long as she kept to the shadows they were usually too drunk to notice her. As she quietly sang her babies a lullaby she shuddered at the thought of what would happen if one of these barbarians found her children alone.she couldnt think about that; she had work to do and she had to keep her mind on the job. The family was counting on her.

When the last of the little ones had drifted off to sleep she stepped out into the moonlit chill. She was still trying to shake off the awful scenes that her imagination had just conjured up when she stepped on a twig snapping her attention into the moment. As she looked up she found that she had caught someone elses attention as well. She froze hope against hope that she had not been noticed but he was close enough she could see in his eyes that she had made a fatal mistake.

Her mind raced as she assessed the severity of the situation: He was big. He towered over her and she could smell the beer on his breath. She didnt have to see the gun pointed at her to sense his lack of respect for life. She knew his kind and had witnessed the cavalier way they extinguished lives in their lust for blood. They killed the innocent and the unarmed to prove that they were men. He was too close. If she ran he would find the kids. Her love a mothers love would not even think of saving herself and leaving her young ones in the hands of such a perverted mind.

But what could she do Perhaps she could bluff her way out of this. She had learned enough about this kind of man to know that they are all cowards at heart. If she could make herself look fierce enough perhaps he would run. If he did she resolved that home or no home she would pack up her brood and leave town in the very next instant.

With all of the courage she could muster she raised her slender 100 lb frame to look as commanding as she could and shrieked with a sound that would make your blood run cold her threats of what she would do if he came one step closer.

Laughing at her pathetic attempt to deter him he fired the gun point blank into her. The impact at such close range spun her around and he fired again dropping her dead on the spot. He didnt see a single mom doing her best to raise a family in a hostile world.

All he saw was what a trophy her head would be hanging on his wall.

Pulling out his knife to sever her golden haired head from her shattered bleeding corpse he barely heard the mewing through his gleeful stupor.

The gun blasts had awakened her three sleeping kittens. Their eyes werent quite open yet because they were less than two weeks old and they could barely focus on the scene. What a horrible sight to be one of the first that these young innocents would ever see! Any right thinking person would be appalled to consider the horror that these little ones must have been experiencing but the hunter didnt think anything of it.

In fact he was even happier at the thought of being able to raid this nest. His Neanderthal pea sized brain was musing over how cool it was going to be to have three mountain lions on leashes. He would raise them with the dogs; maybe drown some of the bitches puppies so she could feed his little prizes for him. Then wouldnt he be the center of attention Women would probably do anything for him just to get a chance to pet his new cougar cubs. He would be the envy of his drinking buddies when he had the biggest baddest pets in town.

He would have been singing all the way home with his new little pets in a bag and their mothers head in the back seat if it werent for one of the babies who was crying hysterically. He pulled over and in the drizzling icy rain tossed out the crybaby by the side of the road near a farm house.

By the next day he had sobered up enough to see that raising two mountain lion cubs was not as easy as raising a couple of hunting dogs. The babies cried incessantly for their mother. They refused to eat. They were sick with grief and fear and wanted no part of this man and the lifestyle he had envisioned. Being the coward their mother had thought him to be he had a relative turn the cubs in to the Idaho Fish and Game Department. He claimed that he had killed the nursing mother in self defense and no charges were pressed.

Just the night before the officers had gotten a call from a man who found a screaming baby puma on his front porch. When he asked what he should do for the kitten the officers told him to leave it outside to die. Unwilling to treat any living creature so heartlessly the man took the baby in and tried to offer food and comfort to no avail.

To spare the infants life the

kindly farmer contacted the press with the story and once the news was out that the cub was to be left to die the Fish and Game Department decided to pick up the kitten and place him and his two siblings that had come in from the hunters family with Mady Rothchild a licensed wildlife rehabilitator working with the Animals In Distress Association. Now they were her problem and to make matters worse she was instructed to find a zoo that would take them or they would have to be killed because big cats are not allowed to go back to the wild in Idaho once they have been handled by humans. It might make hunting a dangerous sport if the hunted were not afraid of the hunter.

With twenty years experience in rescuing wildlife and returning them to their rightful home Mady did not like the alternatives presented to her. She knew the dirty little secrets the zoos hid from the public and knew that if these siblings went to a zoo they would be used split up and bred for more babies who would live out their lives in prison cells. When they didnt attract a paying crowd anymore they would be sold out the back door to brokers who would sell them at auction to back yard breeders and canned hunts.

It is legal to kill a cougar in a cage in the U.S. and call it sport hunting. It is the only way most