Enough Already

For days after Chicago police shot a cougar to death in Roscoe Village, the websites for our two remaining major newspapers, the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, kept running the same photos for the big cat's body lying on the concrete, blood running down its fur, over and over and over again.

And now that it's been decided that the cougar's remains will be archived at the Field Museum of Natural History--a place I found creepy as a child, because of all of the preserved animals there, including Bushman the gorilla (who lived at the Lincoln Park Zoo until his death in 1950 and has been on display at the Field ever since) and the man-eating lions known as the Ghost and the Darkness (the same ones whose story was told in that crappy Michael Douglas/Val Kilmer movie)--the two newspaper's websites are running the same photo of the big cat's pelt sitting on a table over and over and over again.

Please, Trib and Times. Stop it. This story is sad enough. The animal should never have come anywhere near this city. Why keep shoving its bullet-riddled corpse in our figurative faces?