collared female and three pups north of ellensburg

[Lowedog]

Thanks,  I will try to find a copy. 

I went to Amazon and downloaded a free Kindle app for my laptop and then bought the book and downloaded it. 

[358NM]

Kain and Lowedog
Another great read on wolves and how they hunt and kill and why they should be controlled to keep ungulate populations from declining is Jim Rearden's book The Wolf Man Of Alaska. It is the life story of Frank Glasner another government trapper from about the 1920's to the 1950's. Maybe it has been mentioned here before but it has lot of great first hand observations of wolf behaviour in it.

[bearpaw]

I can tell you from my professional experience of investigating dozens of cougar kills of deer, elk, domestic dogs, domestic sheep, and goats, etc, that a cougar attacks the neck (spine), breaking the neck or crushing the skull. Cougar do not attack the underside of the neck. Then once the kill is made almost every time they will drag their kill at least a short distance or maybe a long distance to a desired hidden location and first eat through the ribs on one side and eat the organs, liver, heart, etc. Once the organs are gone, they work on the rest of the animal, sometimes eating everything but the jawbone and teeth, hooves, parts of the lower legbones, and hair, everything else including meat, skin, and all other bones may be consumed. Roughly half the time it seems to me they will cover their kill to hide it, other times they only pull it under brush, but they rarely leave their kill in the open. I have seen a 90 pound female cougar drag 500 pound cow elk over 1/2 mile back to her layer for her kittens to eat. There was scattered bone remains of at least a dozen cow elk under trees and brush near that layer.

I would suggest watching wolves kill to know how they kill. Here are videos showing wolves killing. Wolves attack the hind end and the neck (the windpipe, not the spine), sometimes one end of the animal, sometimes both ends.

If you look at any of dozens of photos and videos floating around the internet and email, most wolf kills are left in the open and not hidden at all. You can even watch videos to see the wolves kill their prey in open ground and eat it there. They sometimes eat most of the flesh, leave most of the bones, and often only eat some of the hind end, anus, and fetus. Alll videos and photos of wolf kills I have seen and that my son has seen in the wild are usually in the open where its easy for the wolf pack to eat. They have no concern about hiding it. It seems to me very easy to distinguish cougar kills from wolf kills and I am willing to stake my reputation on that fact. This is BS if they say they cannot tell wolf kills from cougar kills, or else the investigating person doesn't know what to look for. 

Two Wolves Hunting an Elk

Wolves Hunting Elk in Snow

Wolves Hunting Bison

Wolves vs Elk Bull

[Lowedog]

Niemeyer states in his book that about the most telling evidence of a wolf kill is that the hind end of the animal almost always shows trauma from them attacking there first to bring the prey down.  There and also on the front legs and underside of the chest and shoulder. 

[danderson]

Just to clear up one thing about cougar kills, I had a cougar kill a full grown bull elk a few years ago close to my home, it clamped itself onto the chest of the bull dug its hind claws into the lower brest area, and bit the windpipe from underneath crushing the airway, it couldnt drag the bull more than 10 feet because of the 5 foot snow berm and I came up on it while plowing snow, my call to the local game warden confirmed the kill as caused by a couger, it wasnt hard to figure out with all the tracks in the snow, the marks left on the elk were a few claw marks on the chest and the neck was wet from the cougars mouth crushing the wind pipe, so they do attack from the front.
   I have seen a lot of kill sites and was wondering is there a way to tell the differance between a wolf kill and a cougar kill after all the animal has been consumed, I am thinking cougars break up the bomes more to get at the marrow , verses wolf kills dont consume as much so the remains will  be more intact.