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Mark Freeman Commentary Mountain Lion is this big cat's proper title Quick: What's the largest member of the cat family roaming Oregon's woods? If "cougar" is your final answer, then you apparently don't want to be a millionaire. The officially correct answer in Oregon, as of Dec. 28, is the mountain lion. And if you then say the terms cougar and mountain lion are interchangeable, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife is ready to teach you a lesson in animal semantics. ODFW employees are now asked to drop all references to cougars and start calling them mountain lions. That goes for everything from telephone conversations and chitchats with the public to damage complaint forms and official department reports. The change comes at the behest of the ODFW's Lisa DeBruyckere, who wants her agency as well as all Oregonians to get in step with the rest of the West and start calling the critter by its standard name. The animal's scientific name is Felis concolor. The term cougar is considered slang, like catamount or puma or even panther. According to the reference book "Land Mammals of Oregon," by B.J. Verts and Leslie N. Carraway, the official English name for Felis concolor is mountain lion, so that's what it should be in Oregon. "It's not necessarily wrong to call it a cougar," DeBruyckere says. "We hope people understand _ the name of the animal is mountain lion." DeBruyckere is chief of the ODFW's Information and Education Division. The old slang terms for her job include flack, P.R. flack, talking head or spin doctor. But, like cougar and puma, those terms, too, are no longer officially used here. The first official sans-cougar literature is the ODFW's new four-page "Living with Wildlife" brochure. It lists mountain lion factoids, how to identify the animal and its tracks, how to report encounters or damage complaints and how to take precautions if you should cross paths with the predator formerly known as cougar. After the agency printed the first 5,000 of these brochures, DeBruyckere informed ODFW information specialists of the name change. Future generations of the memo have circulated among the ODFW's 900-odd employees, asking agency representatives to embrace it. Cougar is still used prominently in the various state administrative laws and Oregon Revised Statues governing cougar hunting and cougar management. In the 2000 Big-Game Hunting Regulations booklet, the term cougar remains everywhere it normally has for several decades. But each use of the C word is followed by mountain lion written in parentheses, like it's waiting in the wings to one day overtake cougar in headlines. "The first step in changing culture is changing language," DeBruyckere wrote in a Dec. 28 memo to official department spokespeople, and which has since been well circulated within the agency. "I would appreciate your efforts in referring to the cat as a mountain lion from this point forward. "We won't change the name of the animal overnight, but as a state fish and game agency, it's our responsibility to be accurate," she wrote. The agency's push for consistent nomenclature will continue, DeBruyckere says. For instance, the term "pronghorn antelope" is actually incorrect: The animal is a pronghorn and not a true antelope, she says. But the truth-in-labeling effort could go even farther. Oregon's black bears could become dark-pigmented bruins, and hunting regulations could start referring to pigeons by their actual name, rock doves. And the fellow biologists in the Fish Division have no interest gutting Oregon's sport-fishing synopsis, rewriting all its references for chinook salmon to king salmon so as not to confuse or offend Washingtonians. But the whole cougar-lion thing is a little confusing, and even a little offensive, to some animal-rights activists such as Sally Mackler of Williams. Mackler, a member of the Bear and Cougar Coalition, believes the name switch is confusing and meaningless. She questions whether mountain lion is a "scarier" term that "raises the spectre of a bigger, more sinister species." "I think it's silly," Mackler says. "The important thing is that we co-exist with these creatures, not whether we call them cougar or mountain lion." DeBruyckere agrees that management is more important than nomenclature. But she dismisses Mackler's notion of hidden agendas and believes the whole hubbub makes much ado of nothing. Despite their wide circulation, DeBruyckere's comments about mountain lions and changing of culture through language are not meant as agency-wide mandates, she says. It is just a simple explanation of why the new brochure favors the animal's correct name over its common, slang name. "I don't know if you can dispute what the name of an animal is," she says. "I don't think it sounds sinister." While all mountain lions can be called cougars in the local vernacular, not all cougars are necessarily mountain lions. The term is used to describe other non-lions in other parts of the country, which adds to the confusion. "There's only one true mountain lion," DeBruyckere says. As far as the whole name-game goes, some agency biologists like John Thiebes in Central Point say mountain lion could eventually replace cougar if the ODFW's power culture wants it to. "If our Portland office directs us to change a cougar to a mountain lion, eventually my vocabulary will accept that," he says. "But the bottom line is, it doesn't matter whether we call them cougar or mountain lion," he says. "We're referring to the same animal. As long as we manage them appropriately, that's all that really matters." (Staff writer Mark Freeman covers the outdoors for the Mail Tribune. Call him at 776-4470, or e-mail him at: [email protected] ) Outdoor Journal Today's Edition : News | Sports | Business | Weather | Tempo | Classifieds Mail Tribune Mail Tribune � 2000 -- Medford, Oregon USA