By Isa Ghani

Daily Titan Multimedia Editor

America is home to great and majestic wildlife: the bald eagle – a symbol of freedom and bravery; Shamu – the playful orca at Sea World; and, of course, the cougar. But I don’t mean the mountain lion.

The cougar I’m referring to is the virile, sexually dominant, 30-plus years old and often surgically-enhanced female of the human species. Sometimes they are lifetime bachelorettes but usually they are single moms or divorcees.

Cougars prowl nightclubs and search for young men to bring back to their lairs, whoops, I mean swanky loft apartments –

often paid for by alimony.

If you’re an American, then I’m sure you’re already familiar with the cougar (a variation of the MILF) and their temptress ways, ensnaring unsuspecting young males with come-hither looks, long claw-like nails and decades of sexual experience.

Let’s just say, it’s been a new experience for me.

In California, the land of the good-looking, older women look amazing for their age.

Granted, some overdo the Botox, achieving the “permanently surprised” look, but many women rich in years look so young, physically fit and just so … tight, I couldn’t begin to guess their ages, which is something I admittedly have a problem with already.

Many times I’ve mistaken mothers and daughters for sisters. On one memorable, but embarrassing, occasion I mixed up who was the daughter and who was the mother.

Women in California take care of themselves; they go to the gym, eat well and, of course, engage in the occasional nip and tuck.

I have to say, it’s great eye candy.

Just getting off the plane at LAX, I was surrounded by MILFs and cougars of all shapes and sizes. Walk down the Venice Beach boardwalk and take in the view – women above the age of 30, some even twice my age, but with bodies like a freshman co-ed’s.

It is wonderful how direct many of these women can be – usually by that age they know what they want in a man, be it good looks, washboard abs, a nice car or a large … bank account.

So when they go to nightclubs or bars and see something they like, they pounce. Hence, the cougar reference.

There’s even a show about this phenomenon called “Cougartown,” featuring Courtney Cox and a gaggle of 30-something cougars who run around chasing younger men, like me.

But there’s a darker side to all this, a question not many seem to ask: Why are there so many single women in their late 30s?

It wasn’t always like this. Is it a growing problem with women in America? With men? Is it a failing of society? Is it even a problem at all?

The American divorce rate is 41 percent for first marriages, 60 percent for second and 73 percent for the hat trick, according to www.divorcerate.org.

It appears that the older you are or the more often you marry, the harder it is to hold onto a steady relationship. Divorcees often appear to stay divorced – trading in old husbands for newer, sleeker models, much like men once did.

Perhaps the existence of the cougar is due to the liberation of women rather than their demarcation, where women desire younger men. Men who don’t have beer bellies, male-pattern baldness or graying pubes.

I honestly don’t know.

But I do know that I’ve met way too many attractive, successful, middle-aged women who are newly single. Friend’s moms, apartment managers, administrative clerks, random women in bars – there are too many sporting naked ring fingers.

In some cases, they don’t want to get married and more power to them. But I’ve also been regaled with war stories of philandering ex-husbands, messy divorces, vicious child custody battles and, in one case, the burning of all her ex-husband’s clothes.

Honestly, it makes me sad to see that it’s no longer part of the American Dream to be happily married with children, a dog and a house with a white picket fence. I don’t even want that myself, and I was brought up believing in that dream.

Men and women don’t seem to crave that kind of life as much as they used to. The best they seem to hope for now is to score younger, more attractive models of the opposite sex.

Cougars are great, and sure I’d love to nail a MILF, but if that means that the childhood ideology that I grew up with where the endgame of being happily married is a myth, I’d rather be 7 years old again.

Perhaps then my parents wouldn’t be divorced and I wouldn’t be hitting the bars around Fullerton looking for a hot, rich divorcee who has a fetish for Malaysians.