SERGEY ROSS: She is not aggressive and we have complete faith in her. I even sleep with Irma.
MARINA ROSS: We love her so much, I’d die for her right now.
SERGEY ROSS: Last year we took Irma and it changed our lives forever. Irma is an amazing animal, very smart,
very loving and affectionate, and just astonishingly beautiful.
MARINA ROSS: And she is a cougar; a true mountain lion.
MARINA ROSS: So, Irma was born in a poor zoo that couldn’t sustain her, and Irma had only two options:
either to be killed or to be sold, and luckily enough they decided to sell her.
SERGEY ROSS: We took care of Irma when she was seven months old, but before that time we didn’t know
what kind of lifestyle she had, but we can imagine that it wasn’t a good zoo, it wasn’t good conditions for her.
We take puma every morning for a walk at 5:30 AM and we spend about one hour climbing the trees.
SERGEY ROSS: And once a week, we go for a longer walk for 3-4 hours in the park.
SERGEY ROSS: When we first got her she wasn’t afraid, she didn’t think we were trustworthy, and she was very
suspicious of us.
And that you know, it took a long time for us to kind of find our common ground.
MARINA ROSS: She didn’t allow us to touch her.
SERGEY ROSS: Yeah, you’ll get a lot of bites, scratches.
MARINA ROSS: Irma, with us is already for more than one year, and we can only now I think probably say that
we gained her trust.
SERGEY ROSS: She is not aggressive and we have complete faith in her. I even sleep with Irma. Yes, now
she definitely shows us a lot of affection. Even in nature, they are very active.
MARINA ROSS: Pumas are actually solitary animals, and they do not like being surrounded by people. So, we try to
avoid human interaction with Irma as much as possible. She doesn't like being surrounded by people.
Even your presence here is uncomfortable for her.
MARINA ROSS: Irma is a healthy animal and she has a very healthy appetite. She eats one and a half or
even two kilos of meat per day. She doesn’t eat meat from the store, from the shop. She prefers only
farm meat, farm grown rabbits, goats, and recently we started to give to her wild meat.
SERGEY ROSS: To those people who would say that it is cruel to keep an exotic or a wild animal at home,
we would say that Irma is not a wild animal. She doesn’t know, she has never lived outside of the house
or a zoo, so, she cannot be reintroduced.
MARINA ROSS: She doesn’t have any survival skills, any hunting skills.
SERGEY ROSS: But next year, there will be a new law that bans, prohibits keeping such animals. We are you know,
a few people who are lucky to own such a big cat.
MARINA ROSS: Irma is totally worth everything. She is totally worth every bite and every scar and to gain trust
of such a magnificent animal is something amazing.