I spent the first decade of my life in Vancouver Island, Canada, in an area rich with parks, lakes and forests. Deer would occasionally wander into our neighbourhood and nibble on the blossoms in our front yard. In that neck of the (literal) woods, mountains and deer also mean cougars.
My sister and I would play at a local park, then walk home along a track parallel to a dense forest. My older sister, being three and a half years ahead of me in life and therefore lightyears ahead of me in wisdom, would helpfully declare that if we encountered a cougar it would attack me, not her, as I’m the smaller prey.
Older siblings are nothing if not educational, so frequent park outings meant frequent reminders of my potential death. The butterflies in my stomach would whirlpool then drop to a flutter each time we neared the top of the street away from the woods. Was it fear? Yes. Excitement? That too. Disappointment? Strangely, also yes. We never once spotted a cougar.
There’s a subreddit that fosters this particular combination of excitement and fear, r/animalid, where users share photos of unfamiliar wildlife for others to identify. The most popular posts are colourful lizards and rare birds: YAWN. SNOOZEFEST. For me, the top-tier posts have little engagement at all: I’m looking for poor-quality photos with a handful of comments. I’m talking trailcam snapshots with captions like “this wolf has been stalking my family” accompanied by several comments of “that is a coyote with mange”. And, reader, it’s always a coyote with mange.
We’ll see a blurry photo of a rat which the poster insists is not a rat, actually, despite its size, shape, colour and rat-like behaviour. Another post depicts a small generic turd with fervent requests for identification of the creature it escaped from. Or perhaps a doorbell camera catching a cougar walking past someone’s house at night. A cougar?! Those ones make me bolt upright in bed, phone screen pressed against my eyeball. A real-life cougar?! Those lucky bastards. Except … it never is a cougar, merely a fat tabby. Or a coyote with mange.
Few people in this sub are clout-chasers; they are simply hopeful and curious. There is a distinct earnestness that comes with posting a photo of a blurry blob with helpfully added scribbles pointing at said blob. We squint and wonder if that blob is dangerous. Or even an animal.
Extreme sports, illicit drug taking, dating emotionally unavailable and annoying artists: humans long for thrill, even if – or because – it’s dangerous. This subreddit allows us to microdose that adrenalin rush in everyday encounters, turning them into Rorschach tests. Every print in the snow becomes a potential bear. We’re reminded that, in those rare places humans haven’t destroyed, we are not the apex predators – nature is. Maybe something greater and more powerful than us was here, mere moments ago.
“That is very clearly a human footprint,” people might rush to comment. But still the original poster remains hopeful.
Everyday life can be very ordinary and this subreddit exemplifies our desire for some extraordinary spectacle. What if that pigeon actually was a hawk? What if, today, the rat in my bathroom wasn’t a rat, but something more exotic, or even sinister? I’m thrown back to childhood: what if just once – only one single time – a mountain lion actually did emerge from the forest and attack me? Not fatally, but enough for me to be The Girl Who Survived A Cougar Attack. God, what a rush.
