The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
Pointer size, as ordered — the name tested, the animal not found
Lead: The town's animal name is a cougar, and it is only a name. New Prairie High School, at New Carlisle, fields the Cougars — the name runs through the New Prairie United School Corporation's athletic handbook, its “Cougar Code of Conduct,” the fight song (“Go, you New Prairie Cougars”), and Cougar Road's address — and it is a team nickname in the ordinary American way, carrying no kept animal behind it in any source reached.
The test this row was ordered to run was for a genuine kept or mascot animal — a living animal kept by the school, the town, a society or a business as its mascot — in the town press and society record. Searches: New Prairie / New Carlisle with live mascot, kept cougar, school animal, and the town's organizational record as reached in this section. Result: no kept mascot animal was found. No live cougar, no school-kept animal, and no town menagerie animal is documented — which agrees with, and does not repeat, this history's zoo article and its printed negative (no menagerie, deer park, animal collection or sanctuary ground in town). One kept-animal fact of a different kind does stand on preserve ground and is pointed to, not developed: the Bendix Woods Nature Center's Children's Discovery Room exhibits a working beehive, in the county parks' own program literature — kept bees, interpreted to school groups, are the closest documented kept animal to a mascot this ground produces. Pointer ends.
Sources:
- New Prairie United School Corporation, 2025–26 Cougar Code of Conduct / Athletic Policy Handbook (New Prairie High School) — Cougars nickname, fight song.
- St. Joseph County Parks, Bendix Woods County Park program literature — Nature Center Children's Discovery Room, working beehive exhibit.
- Companion file this history (this build) — zoo/menagerie negative for the town, carried there.