Cougar

Overview

Confirmed Rockstar’s Mount Kalaga stills include a cougar stalking a herd of deer drinking from a stream, in Rockstar’s own description of the image. Our read It is the only cougar in the official material so far.

Confirmed Rockstar’s Grassrivers text also warns of far deadlier predators than the gators among the mangroves, without saying what they are.

Key facts

• Confirmed Where: Mount Kalaga National Park, against Leonida’s northern border.
• On screen Behavior: stalking, head low, through the shallows of a stream.
• On screen Prey shown: a herd of four deer, none of them alert to it.
• Confirmed The park: Rockstar sells Mount Kalaga on prime hunting, fishing and off-road trails.

The official still

On screen The cougar fills the left of the frame, tawny and wet, its long tail low as it wades through the stream toward the herd. Across the water one deer drinks, two more stand on the sandy bank and an antlered buck rests on the ground, all of them unaware.

Our read It is staged as a predator-and-prey moment, which hints that Mount Kalaga’s animals react to each other and not only to the player. Rockstar has not said whether cougars attack people.

Another wild cat

Confirmed Rockstar’s description of a Grassrivers still mentions a dead wildcat on a hunters’ airboat, beside a dead alligator. On screen It has a spotted tan coat and dark-tipped ears.

Our read That looks more like a bobcat than a cougar, so we treat it as a separate animal until Rockstar says otherwise.

The real animal

Our read The real Florida’s cougar is the Florida panther.

Reported The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s February 2017 estimate put the population at 120 to 230 adult and subadult panthers, not counting kittens, in a breeding range in south Florida that lies mostly south of the Caloosahatchee River. The panther was on the first endangered species list in 1967, and the agency says panthers once roamed the entire southeastern United States.

Our read Rockstar puts its cougar in the far north of Leonida, while the real panther’s breeding range sits at the southern end of the state.

Questions

Are there cougars in GTA 6? Confirmed Yes. Rockstar’s official Mount Kalaga still shows one stalking deer at a stream.

Where do cougars live in GTA 6? Confirmed The only one shown so far is in Mount Kalaga National Park.

Is the cougar a Florida panther? Our read Rockstar only calls it a cougar. The Florida panther is the real state’s endangered cougar population, found mostly in south Florida.