Weidensaul (2002) discussed the phenomenon of why so many people claim to see eastern pumas and why there has been so much public interest in their possible return to eastern North America: "The idea [of pumas being present] is incredibly seductive – the notion that these gentle mountains, long settled and so badly misused by people for centuries, could have reclaimed such a potent symbol of wilderness as the mountain lion. Sometimes, I think, we need to believe such things even when the evidence (or its absence) suggests we are deluding ourselves. Deep down in our overcivilized hearts, we need the world to be bigger, and more mysterious, and more exciting than it appears to be in the cold light of day – especially in this age, when the planet shrinks daily and no place seems truly remote or unknown. We're unwilling to accept that there isn't more to the world than what we can see." Butz espoused that the multitude of puma sightings represented "wishful thinking, or that peculiar human desire to bear witness to something nobody else has seen before."
Both Weidensaul (2002) and Butz (2005) hypothesized that humans by nature are a hopeful, optimistic species and that the belief that pumas still haunt the East "adds luster to an ever-dimmer planet." At the heart of the eastern puma controversy and debate is hope – hope that past environmental transgressions did not eliminate the puma, and if it is gone, hope that against odds it is making a comeback to its former habitats in eastern North America. "The more dramatic, colorful, or formidable an animals is – the longer shadow it casts upon its environment and the bigger psychic hole left by its absence – the less likely we are to accept its loss, and the more apt we are to keep hunting and hoping, even when the evidence is pretty grim" (Weidensaul 2002). Bass (1995) said (of grizzlies in Colorado, but it applies equally well to pumas in the East), "there is a place in our hearts for them, and so it is possible to believe they still exist, if only because that space of longing exists." "The eastern cougar is less a concrete, biological organism than it is a talisman, a totem of wilderness to which people can pin a lot of their dreams… of all the lost species that may haunt the globe, few have the evocative power of these ghost cats. More than for almost any other extinct animal, people want to believe – maybe even need to believe – that big cats still linger on the wild margins of their urbanized world" (Weidensaul 2002).
