I would have liked to see an outcome where both cat and man escaped unharmed, but in a situation like this one, that’s improbable. I certainly can’t ask any human being to accept their prey status without a fight.
However we draw the boundaries between human and wildlife, those boundaries are going to be crossed, especially since there is no way for the wildlife to understand them. In the case of an attack like this, killing the cougar is probably the best result for the species as a whole, since it means that the cougars that avoid humans are the ones that survive and teach their offspring to fear us.
