Do cougars exist? Well the easy answer is yes. Puma concolor, or the cougar, is one of just 3 wild cats in Canada.

As for the female human type…well what is a cougar? Urban Dictionary doesn’t really have any really good definitions of cougars, in my opinion.

Their #1 definition is as follows (9916 votes for, 1837 votes against):
An older woman who frequents clubs in order to score with a much younger man. The cougar can be anyone from an overly surgically altered wind tunnel victim, to an absolute sad and bloated old horn-meister, to a real hottie or milf. Cougars are gaining in popularity — particularly the true hotties — as young men find not only a sexual high, but many times a chick with her shit together.

Wind tunnel victim? Horn-meister? Please consider submitting your own definition of cougar. Message me; I’ll vote for your definition.

So if we use a very general definition…a woman who is older than 35(ish?) and is interested in mating with/dating a younger man. There are no specific requirements for the age difference but the general consensus is that the man should be 25 or younger. Check this infographic details the evolution of cougars from Kittens to Turtles.

PS: But why don’t we have any terminology for men who prefer to date young women? If you have a good term for an older male who likes to date younger women (let’s be a bit more creative than pedophile, shall we?), please let me know. I usually refer to these guys as Silver Fox or White Fox.

So do cougars exist?

Well….head down to your local watering hole and you are bound to see a cougar eventually. Demi Moore has become the poster girl for Cougars by marrying Ashton Kutcher (15 years younger than herself). Obviously Demi is not the first (or last) women to be in a relationship with a younger man. But older women in relationships with younger men is generally the exception. As an aside, Demi’s picture doesn’t come up until Page 4 in a Google image search of “cougar.”

A recent study on cross-cultural age preferences for dating partners would argue that cougars are a media phenomenon that rarely exist in reality.

In this study, researchers examined men’s and women’s minimum and maximum ages preferences at ages 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, and 50 in 14 different countries (Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Greece, Indonesia, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, UK, Ukraine). The researchers recorded self-reported age preferences from online profiles. For each age group, 100 men’s profiles and 100 women’s profiles (from each country) were used to calculate average minimum and maximum age preferences.

Overall, men preferred significantly younger women as dating partners and women preferred dating partners who were roughly the same age as themselves or older.

There were a few exceptions. Japanese women at age 40 and 45 reported younger average minimum age preferences of 32.4 and 35.2, respectively.

And Canadian women had a few interesting patterns…

Canadian women at ages 25, 30, and 35 reported minimum age preferences of 20.5, 24.3, and 26.4 for those corresponding age groups. Go Canadian cougars?!

But even in these cases where women reported a willingness to date someone younger than themselves, the men still preferred even younger female partners. The authors argue that these results reflect evolutionary patterns of age preferences: men prefer to date young fertile women and women to prefer partners with wealth and status.

So moral of the story: There are at potentially 300 cougars in Canada. Click here for information on immigrating to Canada.

Jocelyn Wentland is a Sex Researcher, PhD student at the University of Ottawa. You will find her blogs are sexual, risqué (she likes to push the envelope), potentially offending, fun, but most of all, real. Read more of Jocelyn’s blog at Sex Research and The City.com