The update from Moose Jaw Police Tuesday morning indicates a cougar spotted several times in the city yesterday has been euthanized.

The animal was tracked using a drone.

Police said officers put the animal down after consultations with conservation officers and due to the public safety threat.

The large cat was first spotted on a doorbell camera just after midnight Monday in the 900 block of James Street in northwest Moose Jaw.

Conservation Officer Bruce Reid said they were still tracking an elusive cougar late Monday after it was spotted three times in the city. Some schools wouldn’t allow students out for recess and asked parents to pick up their children from class.

He said the animal was initially spotted on a doorbell cam near a green space that includes an old railway track which creates a corridor east to west to connect with the city’s two golf courses.

He says there was a confirmed sighting at 8 a.m. Monday near the Co-op in Moose Jaw’s downtown just a few blocks from Main Street and then another sighting around 11 a.m. several blocks north. Reid says tranquilizing an animal like this is not as easy as it looks on TV and their absolute priority is public safety with a large predator in an urban area.

“It’s a long drawn process to be ready and then if the dart is in successfully it takes 4 to 7 minutes before the animal actually goes down. And they can cover a lot of ground in that time if they happen to bolt and being a cat they are very elusive, very secretive and the chances of losing it would be very high.”

He had said Monday that with public safety being the priority the decision would be made on site with a good possibility it would have to be removed.

Reid says it is either a younger adult cat, and now having left its mother, it is looking for its own territory or it could have been displaced by another larger cougar.

A cougar was destroyed by conservation officers in early October of 2008 when it showed up in the yard of a Saskatoon homeowner. Reid says he does not believe there has been a cougar in an urban setting in Saskatchewan since that incident.

He said they also just recently dealt with some moose in Moose Jaw and notes moose go into Regina and Saskatoon as well as smaller animals like coyotes.