Darting a cougar, The Black Hills, South Dakota.
A researcher aims a dart gun at a cougar to sedate and collar it with a GPS-tracking device. Biologists in South Dakota are studying the cougar population and the cats’ movements to prove to local hunters that cougars are not responsible for the lack of elk and deer in their forests. This is the 368th cougar collared for this study, but each year an average of 20 study subjects are killed during the legal cougar-hunting season