There are more than enough. Many of them hang around suburbs and eat pet cats and dogs. More than a few humans have been attacked, a few even killed and eaten.
Distribution: Other than humans, cougars are the most widely distributed land mammal in the Western Hemisphere. Cougars range from northwestern Canada to Patagonia, South America.
Click on a range map to see where cougars live in California.:
Sounds familiar.
Yep. No shortage of cougars. Especially in California. I hear they hang around High Schools and Universities.
Mountain lions in Southern California and along the Central Coast are gravely threatened by habitat loss and fragmentation from freeways and rampant sprawl development.Hemmed in by highways and killed by cars, California’s cougars are isolated in small, unsustainable populations. Barriers prevent young mountain lions from migrating in or out to establish their own home ranges and find mates.
That’s causing dangerous inbreeding and genetic-diversity declines, leaving some mountain lion populations vulnerable to extinction. In fact, some could disappear in just 15 years if inbreeding gets worse.
https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/species/mammals/California-mountain-lion/index.html