More from the IDNR officer:

For what its worth, I spoke to an expert (only one expert) on Mountain Lions and the answer I got surprised me tremendously. He referred to the Eastern Mountain Lion as Florida Panthers (mountain lion, cougars, panthers etc all refer to the same animal) and stated he did not believe genetic testing could show it to be distinctly separate from the Western Mountain Lion. He also said that there would be no obvious external differences. However, that was only one expert (trust me, this is his field of study, he's an expert) so I'm going to check into this further with USFWS.
As far as destruction of private property, it's a 2-way street, they can't let their critter roam at will, doing whatever it wants. Kind of like letting a cow or horse wander and eat up a farmers crop or stand in the road causing an accident. I know several years ago we had a CPO who killed a tiger--got the complaint call and showed up to see a multi-hundred pound tiger had escaped and killed a horse and a chained canine, apparently it showed interest in him and he didn't wait to see if he was next on the menu. It was in southeastern Illinois (Jasper County area) about 4-6 years ago and if you dig around you can probably find the newspaper article on it.