I guess it would depend on what you consider to be sparsely populated and what you would consider to be a reasonable number of predators. Any given county indownstate Illinois might be sparsely populated by Chicago standards, but it still means that you have homes and farms at least every 1/4 of a mile on the average. Not a whole lot of room for humans and panthers to get along and i doubt that local folks are gonna entertain much argument about it. On the other hand, a couple panthers out in the middle of Shawnee forest might not create much problem, except when they startreproducing and spreading outside of the isolated areas.