The San Francisco Citizen

News comes today that the City and County of San Francisco is denying the claim made Amritpal and Kulbir Dhaliwal regarding the Christmas Day tiger attack last year upon Carlos Souza, Jr.

Why? You’ll just have to read the 84-page lease agreement between San Francisco and the San Francisco Zoo to find out.

Dennis Herrera is a crackerjack attorney, so he and his team aren’t going to make things easy for those trying to make money off of this tragedy. It’s not like San Francisco has a lot of extra sourdough to send down to the counties of Santa Clara and Los Angeles. 

Let’s all hope that the new and improved big cat grottos will be less vulnerable to any kind of harassment, even the “boys will be boys” fatal type of harassment.

An online article about grisly cougar attacks written by a Wisconsonite created some confusion recently, due to regional differences in the use of American English.

Commenters made references to Kim Cattrell and Jennifer Anniston. Why? Because the word cougar means something different these days, at least in California:

COUGAR: An attractive woman in her 30’s or 40’s who is on the hunt once again.

You don’t buy that? Well, check out this dictionary.com entry with keyword-based advertisements referencing “Date a Cougar” and, from the AARP, ”Cougars and Younger Men.”

So, that’s a cougar. Here’s a mountain lion from Marin County, California:

nollij via Flickr

That’s a good name, right? It’s like this: Kim Bauer was scared by the mountain lion.

And what about puma? Well, everybody knows that’s a kind of shoe from Germany. (See fake Michael Schumacher wearing a pair of  Puma car racing togs right here, just before his Ferrari F355 Spider got towed by the SFPD.)

So, a cougar is a person, a puma is a shoe, and a mountain lion is a mountain lion. Simple, right?

Now you’re talking Californian. Enjoy.