To my knowledge there has never been a "release" of cougars anywhere in Canada. Any serious thinking about what it would take to raise a population of cougars in captivity, but with all the conditions necessary for ensuring they could hunt and survive when released will reveal just how silly that idea is, especially when it seems cougars are expanding their territories in many regions of Canada. There is just no need for such a complex, difficult, expensive, and environmentally useless program.
Cougars are very secretive animals, and the live in many places that people don't expect them to be just because they seldom get spotted. The fact there is often so much conjecture and surprise when someone spots one, or when one tries to use domestic animals as food (as if someone "introduced" them) is not because there are so few, but because they hardly ever interact with human activity.
They can eat quite a few deer in a year, but they are not going to be the reason any deer population falls. Winter kills and vehicles are far more important factors in varying deer populations that cougars. Here in Saskatchewan in 2005 over 11,000 deer were killed on Saskatchewan roads. THAT is an expensive waste of a resource. I don't think cougars in Saskatchewan (and they most certainly are all over the province) are a major problem for deer.
I understand that cougars cant eat frozen carion, their jaws and teeth were not designed for it?.
I don't think they have any problem gnawing off a piece of frozen meat. The DO, apparently, have problems keeping coyotes, wolves, magpies, ravens, etc. from cleaning up the carcasses. They are not huge predators, and protecting an old kill is often more "expensive" for them than getting another. If a magpie can get meat off a frozen carcass with nothing but a pointy beak, I would expect a cougar's evolution prepared it to snack on one too.
