“Mom, don’t hit the cougar!” Faren Marée Ramos shouted as her mother pulled into their driveway at Ramos’s house in Nolensville, Tennessee, in June.

Ramos quickly snapped some blurry photos of a tawny wildcat striding through the woods, wondering if what she saw was a bobcat or even a cougar, a species long ago wiped out from Tennessee. Lively discussion ensued when she posted the photos to a private Facebook group, so Ramos sent her pictures to Michelle LaRue, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Minnesota and executive director of the Cougar Network, a group that researches the North American big cats.

She had come to the right place.

LaRue invented the game Cougar or Not,