Most people using the trails in the Municipal District of Bighorn are probably not thinking about cougars in Alberta communities. The cougars, for their part, are almost certainly thinking about the people. A two-year study is now trying to figure out exactly how much overlap there is between the two groups – and what to do about it before anyone has to find out the hard way.
Exposed Wildlife Conservancy, an organisation that advocates for apex predators across Western Canada, has been running its Cougar Coexistence Project in the MD of Bighorn for roughly eighteen months. Motion-activated cameras have been placed along select trails to monitor the movement of cougars and other wildlife alongside human activity. The project concludes in August 2026, after which the footage will be reviewed, compiled into a report for the MD, and presumably watched with considerable interest by everyone involved.
Why Cougars in Alberta Communities Tend to Go Badly – and What Canmore Did About It
On February 13, residents gathered at the Cochrane RancheHouse for the MD's “Living in the Natural Environment” session. Executive director Maggie Spizzirri presented the project's progress to an audience that had, by all accounts, chosen to attend a wildlife talk on a Thursday evening, which says something about how seriously the community takes this.
Spizzirri's core argument is that generic wildlife advice is only mildly useful. What actually works, she suggested, are recommendations built from real, local data – the kind that tells you specifically how cougars are moving through Big Horn's trails, and how many dog walkers are moving through them in the opposite direction at the same time.
“We can custom-build those suggestions to the communities based on the real data we're seeing,” she said.
She pointed to Canmore as a place that has largely worked this out. The town's last recorded cougar incident was in 1998, followed by a grizzly bear incident around 2000. After that, the community committed to a sustained set of coexistence measures – trailhead signage, bear spray, making noise near blind corners, and public education on encounters with grizzlies, black bears, and cougars. It has been, by the standards of living next to apex predators, relatively uneventful ever since.
Removing the Wrong Animal Makes Things Quietly Worse
The section of Spizzirri's presentation that perhaps deserves more attention than it typically gets is what happens when fear drives the response to wildlife conflict. Misconceptions about cougars generate public pressure. Public pressure sometimes results in animals being destroyed. And the animals most likely to be destroyed, she noted, are the mature adults – the ones that have spent years learning where the boundaries are.
“Based on the science and studies, a lot of the animals that do get killed are the more mature adults,” she said.
Those animals are also the ones teaching younger wildlife how and where to hunt. Remove them, and you are not left with a safer landscape. You are left with younger, less experienced predators and no one to show them the unwritten rules. It is, as wildlife management problems go, a fairly avoidable own goal.
What Happens After August
Once monitoring wraps up, the footage review and report compilation is expected to take several months. The resulting recommendations will be specific to Big Horn – not borrowed from a neighbouring municipality or adapted from a pamphlet written for somewhere with different terrain and different trails.
In the meantime, the standard advice holds: carry bear spray, make noise on the trail, keep dogs leashed, and perhaps take mild comfort in knowing that whatever is on the other side of that camera is, statistically speaking, more interested in the deer than in you.