I used to be an avid hunter.  I've killed everything from frogs to elk.  I've never had any doubts as to the morality of the issue as long as I tried my best for the animal to die with a minimum of pain and the meat got eaten by somebody. 

I've never been a fan of trophy hunting or taxidermy.  I know people that have hunted bear, but I've never done it.  Like fishing, I think eating what you harvest is part of it.

I can understand why somebody wouldn't feel safe with a cat the size of the one in dangle's picture living around people.  Capture and rerelease might not be a possibility.  We had to do a soft lockdown at the school I teach in because of a mountain lion (cougar) sighting near the school.  There are a lot of bighorn sheep at a national park near where I teach.  It's a magnet for big cats.  Nobody's had to shoot one, but it's been close.

I will back up SJG's assertation that a big, strong hunter will shit his pants in the wild by the possibility of facing a big cat without a gun.

I used to go to an IB Physics training in Montezuma, New Mexico every other year.  It's at the badass castle up in the mountains where they teach this scholarship only college to kids from 120+ countries.  It's like 8,800' up the side of the mountain.  (http://www.uwc-usa.org/default.aspx)

One time, when I was there, they were having the worst drought in 140 years.  They were down to literally days of drinking water.  Plus, there was a massive fire on the other side of the mountain.  We weren't in danger, but they were using the football field to land helicopters, ferrying firefighters back and forth from the staging areas 24/7.

I was hiking, alone (I know, I know, you're not supposed to do that), around the side of the mountain to some hot springs.  Everybody else had pussied out because they hadn't adjusted to the altitude yet or didn't bring the right kind of footware.  It wasn't a rugged hike.  It was a well established path but only accessable from the college, so there was not a lot of traffic.  It was about four miles each way.

I was almost to the hot springs when I noticed giant, big-assed cougar tracks in the middle of the path.  These fuckers where huge.  The cat was probably the size of the one in dangle's picture.  I'm not Tonto, but I know the difference between dog tracks and cat tracks.  But since I'm not Tonto, and there's been no rain at all in months, I have no idea how old the tracks are.  They could have been a week old, or some one hundred and eighty pound cat could have been watching me right then.

I stood up and look around.  I didn't see a cat, but that's kind of the whole point of stalking.   I started to rationalize that I'm not a typical cougar victim.  I'm over 6' tall and over 200 pounds.  I'm a little on the big side for human cougar prey.  I was also paying attention now.  But then again... It WAS the worst drought in over a century... and there WAS a huge fire on the other side of the mountain displacing and putting pressure on predator and prey alike...  Even though I was less than a mile from the hot springs, I lost all interest in checking them out.  I double timed it back to the dorms and made sure to tell everybody I saw tracks.

I have to say, the creeping feeling that there was always a cougar right behind me was unsettling on the way back to the college.  When I would come to a particularly rugged part of the hike, where I'd have to crawl on hands and knees up the side of some rocks or use both hands to pull myself up onto something, I'd get a momentary morbid flash about a cougar taking advantage and bolting from under cover to get me.  It would be almost totally silent bearing down on me.  I wouldn't even hear it until it was too late to properly react.

No dogs, no gun, nobody to watch my back, and not even a fucking cell phone as there was unreliable coverage even back in the dorms.  It made me feel somewhat less of an invincible, chest pounding man.