Residents not wild over having a cougar next door

Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2002 | 9:52 a.m.

Mary K. Miller has been described as a compassionate woman who would help any hurt animal.

She has a menagerie of pets in her eastern Las Vegas home, and once paid for spinal surgery for a pit bull puppy that was hit by a car and abandoned on her doorstep, veterinarian Francis Vidya said.

But when she tried to extend her kindness to a disabled and declawed cougar, the neighbors let out a yowl that persuaded the Clark County Commission to deny her request for a zoning variance last week 5-0.

The female cougar, currently living in New York, is partially paralyzed because of a hind leg birth defect. The declawed animal weighs about 40 pounds, one-fifth the size of a normal adult cougar, county officials said.

County staff recommended approval for the variance, but 22 complaints from residents in the Sunrise Manor neighborhood of mostly single-family, one-story dwellings on quarter-acre lots near Nellis Boulevard and Washington Avenue weighed heavily in the board's decision.

Miller's cul-de-sac is a short distance from Stanford Elementary School, which ironically has a saber-tooth cat as its mascot. Area homeowners said, disabled or not, a real wild cat does not belong in a residential area.

"She is OK as a neighbor -- we just don't want a cougar in our neighborhood," Miller's next-door neighbor Olivia Saucedo said.

A 40-year-old father of two who lives near Miller said a cougar might be fine in a ranch area, but not in a neighborhood where the homes are so close together.

"If the cougar is disabled, it still can get out and drag itself toward its prey and do damage," the man said as his 3-year-old son and five-pound Chihuahua romped in their unfenced front yard.

"There is always some opposition to exotic animals in small neighborhoods," Charles Pulsipher, the county comprehensive planning zoning administrator, said. "What was unusual was that this animal is disabled and cannot be outdoors.

"Still, she (Miller) would have had as much trouble if it were a horse, a cow -- anything like that. I would have hated to have been a commissioner on this one, because it was a tough decision."

A day after the vote, Miller, 29, said she was disappointed and did not know what her next step would be. Her options included trying to convince one of the five prevailing commissioners to call the matter back for reconsideration or suing the county in District Court.

Francis said Miller, to show that the cougar was not dangerous, should have presented proof to the commissioners that the cougar had been taken to New York schools and used as an example of the results of poor breeding practices.