ABSTRACT
During the final days of the summer of 1996, residents of the eastern inner suburbs of metropolitan Toronto encountered just a bit more “nature” than they had bargained for. Two workers from the Metropolitan Zoo-located in a wide expanse in Scarborough’s Rouge Valley-and an off-duty police officer confirmed what people in the area had been reporting for over a year: a 45kg cougar was prowling the edges of Canada’s largest city. The animal-which had not escaped from the nearby zoo-was about 2,500km away from its “natural” habitat in the western mountains of North America. The thing to note, though, was not the cougar’s distance from its nature, but the beast’s proximity to the front lawns of suburban humanity. The unexpected intrusion of wildness added a chapter to the story of Toronto as “zoöpolis”: spaces inhabited commonly by animals as well as people.1
