It’s Come To This: School Officials Ban ‘Cougar’ Mascots

I’m pretty sure this news means we’ve reached some civilizational end. A new high school south of Salt Lake City, Utah, asked incoming students to pick a mascot and school colors. The kids, again being from Utah and all, picked the Puma concolor, aka the puma, the mountain lion, the mountain cat, the catamount, the panther, … the cougar. They picked cougar.

Picking the cougar to be your mascot of a Utah-based school is not exactly revolutionary. Brigham Young University’s mascot is the cougar. A bunch of other schools in Utah and surrounding Western states use cougar as the mascot. The cougar lives all over Utah. I’m sure these kids and their parents hunt them and do their best to avoid them when hiking, fishing and rock climbing.

The cougar is by far the biggest and fiercest cat in the region. If it weren’t so overused, it would be an excellent choice for a mascot.

But the kids at Draper’s Corner Canyon High School were denied their request by the yokels running the Canyons School District school board. They worried, and I quote from this Fox 13 News story on the matter, “because it’s used as a derogatory term for some women.”

Oh come on. Really. Yes. So we’re going to subvert zoology for a slang word that lost its cache five years ago? Really? We’re going to do that? Should we also black out all textbooks that talk about the great mountain cat, too?

Cougar isn’t even necessarily derogatory toward some women. It was a silly thing a few years ago to describe women of a certain age who pursued men of a certain lower age. Sure, it could be negative if thought of as a middle-aged woman trying to hang on to her youth through poor dating choices. But as a mascot, the idea of a fierce Courteney Cox pursuing her prey is in no way a bad image.

On that note, I hate to break it to the folks at the Canyons School District, but the Cox vehicle Cougartown is the only remnant of this trend and it slipped from 57th place to 67th place in TV rankings between its 1st and 2nd seasons and the 3rd season was supposed to air beginning in November, then January, then February. You get the idea. This is not worth telling the kids to pick a new mascot for, you know?

They’re now called the Chargers. I don’t know what a Charger is (Urban Dictionary tells me it’s either a muscle car or an early morning act of sexual congress). Also, I hope the kids start a new internet meme to make “Charger” a word for something totally inappropriate. Just as payback.

Image via Thinkstock Photos.