Separate DNA evidence also indicates that cougars live in five other Michigan counties -- three in the northern Lower Peninsula, two in the Upper Peninsula.

The state Department of Natural Resources issued one farmer a permit to trap or kill the cats that attacked his animals, even though cougars are on Michigan's endangered species list.

A DNR spokesman maintained a cautious attitude Friday, saying the Kalkaska cats are "big felines that seem to be cougars," but 17-year-old Allen Strouse has no doubt.

"They were mountain lions," said Strouse, a Kalkaska High School senior whose 1,800-pound Percheron mule bears scars from an attack on its throat and back. "I've seen them twice pretty close, and a lot of other people have seen them, too. There are two of them, and if the big one is four to five feet long, then the smaller one is 3 1/2 to four feet."

Mountain lion is another name for a cougar.

In August, Strouse said, the cougars attacked and injured horses on his and a neighboring farm and also killed scores of ducks and chickens. Strouse's family farm received the permit to trap or kills the cats.

"My dog is a cross between a Pyrenees mountain dog and a Great Dane," Strouse said. "He weighs about 200 pounds. He's tangled with a cougar twice. I know it has to be a cougar, because I've seen him kill coyotes and foxes without getting a mark on him. But when he came back from those fights with the cougar, he was pretty torn up."

Penney Melchoir, a DNR biologist in Cadillac, said track evidence, sightings and scars on horses are proof that "we're dealing with a very large feline, probably a cougar. And if we can't trap or kill it, I just hope someone gets a picture of it."

Asked why a kill permit would be issued for an animal on the state endangered species list, Melchoir said cougars are not protected in Michigan by the federal Endangered Species Act because "they are listed as extirpated in Michigan. They are on the state endangered species list, but there is a provision that allows us to kill or trap animals that harm or threaten livestock or people."

Dennis Fijalkowski, executive director of the Michigan Wildlife Habitat Foundation near Lansing, called the state's argument "totally incomprehensible. Here we have proof from the DNA evidence and sightings that cougars are still around 100 years after they were thought to have been wiped out.

"And the first thing the DNR wants to do when it comes across a cougar sighting that it can't ignore is kill it?"

Mike DeCapita, a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said the agency still doesn't recognize the existence of cougars in Michigan and therefore "the federal act does not protect it. That could be rebuttable under the right scientific evidence, but right now the animal is considered extirpated, gone, from Michigan."

If it were determined that the cougars in question are rebounders prowling the state again, the only defenses for killing them would be self-defense and defense of another person, DeCapita said.

"If the entity were protected in Michigan and someone killed it, that would be against the law," DeCapita said. "The act does allow the endangered species to be taken in defense of human life. I don't think protection of livestock is a defense of human life."

Pat Rusz is a research scientist with the Michigan Wildlife Habitat Foundation, an organization that has spent two years trying to prove that cougars never were eliminated from Michigan. For years, the DNR said the last Michigan wild cougar was killed in 1906.

But Rusz thinks cougars survived in swamps and other inaccessible areas in the northern Lower Peninsula and the Upper Peninsula. He said the Kalkaska sightings are probably a female and her nearly grown cub. Adult cougars are solitary, he said, because their only predator is another cougar.

Rusz has been tracking the big cats in Kalkaska County and other parts of the state for a year and collecting their scat (droppings) for DNA analysis. He said the results of the first DNA analyses by Central Michigan University scientists prove indisputably that cougars live in Alcona, Presque Isle and Roscommon counties in the Lower Peninsula and Menominee and Dickinson counties in the UP.

"That was amazing," Rusz said. "The first five samples we tested came back positive for cougar. We have samples from a lot of other counties all over the northern Lower and the UP. What we have to do now is raise the money for more detailed analysis that will not only tell us how many cats we have and where they live but will show where we have breeding populations."

Rusz thinks 20-30 cougars live in the northern Lower Peninsula and perhaps 30-50 in the UP.

"We think there are a couple of big cats in that section of the Manistee River Valley where the attacks on the farm animals occurred," Rusz said. "When the DNR sent people out to look at the tracks after the attacks on the farms, they could tell that it wasn't a bobcat and it wasn't a bear. It was a very big cat, so they decided it had to be a cougar, although they still came up with the infamous escaped-pet theory."

For decades, the DNR has denied the existence of a breeding population of cougars in Michigan and attributed any credible sightings to captive animals that escaped or were released.

Tim Webb, a wildlife biologist and forester in the Traverse City DNR office, said the agency's position is that "it could still be an escaped exotic pet. When people make these reports, I tell them that I always put it down to four things:

"A) Mistaken identity. They saw a Labrador retriever or a bear and thought it was a cougar; B) they saw a cougar, but it was an escaped or released pet; C) they saw the offspring of B; and D) which I consider way down the list, they saw a genuine wild animal that either survived the persecution of the last century or wandered in from outside the state."