South Africa: Cougar national park

Lin Sampson studies the well-rouged mating habits of our titillating tannies

South Africa is the natural habitat of the cougar. Named for the panther-like wild animal, they are older women, fizzy with sexuality, whose quarry are the young males they track down in packs.

For a fleeting moment the highway criss-crossing Joburg was emblazoned with a billboard advertising www.cougarlife.co.za, where "confident, mature women in their sexual prime" can connect with young men called cubs.

Complaints forced its removal, but the local site has 37000 members and growing.

Recall Deon Helberg, the Blue Bulls rugby player who admitted having sex with 47-year-old Manda Reyneke, his girlfriend's mother. With mahogany hair, purple nails and a predatory gaze, she was an archetypal cougar. She also had a plan to get him killed if he left her.

I tooled into www.couchers.co.za (initially free but later you pay up with no refunds) under a male alias and discovered I was living in a cougarstan as I was hunted down by middle-aged women with lipsticked fangs and rouged claws.

Some women looked like headmistresses or elderly boy scouts. Margaret, 72, has vagrant eyes and chose to advertise herself with an enlarged photograph of her pubes, which looked as if they had been lightly sautéed.

The site was underpinned by an aesthetic of amateur porn, almost endearing in its seediness. Many of the women come from small towns and took selfies in bras or fingering themselves through lace panties.

Corrie, Rustenburg, 40, a lonely housewife, writes: "I love sex, any position, any time." Janie, Alberton, 45, is looking for "white boys 18 - 21". Bev, 44, sent a picture of herself wearing a leather jacket and no knickers and hunched over a Harley Davidson.

My e-mail was awash with amorous notes as I was delivered a load of anonymous women, under anonymous names, meeting an anonymous man - who is really a woman.

Someone called ShortsOnFire, 24, who entered the site as a woman, sent me a photograph of himself dressed in a suit and cravat. His skin looked like the bark of a tree.

The site was a racial scrum: 46.7% of young black men are looking for white cougars and 17.4% of young white men are looking for black cougars.

Cougars say they find lots of willing young cubs on this site; "Enough", said one, "to fill my life until I die."

I spoke to Marlo Jordan from Sacramento, a gorgeous 42-year-old who was voted Miss Cougarlife by patrons of the US site. She works as a "dating coach".

"Wow, young men," she says, "they fall at my feet." Her present partner is 29, a doctor. "The thing to remember is that women are at their sexual prime later than men, so it makes sense."

Marlo says that cougars require a degree of finesse when hunting.

There was little finesse on my night with cougars in a male stripper bar. "Just a bit of fun," says Maryanne, 50, a veteran cougar who has just dropped her 21-year-old lover. "Who needs a guy with petrol on his breath from siphoning it out of his father's car?"

The "girls" appear rapacious in their recklessly high heels; varnished and coiffured, toenails painted, and with a whisper of leopard-skin underwear.

They all have online accounts with Victoria's Secret. Their bible is Fifty Shades of Grey. The jewellery is blinding and the show of flesh from their décolleté dresses as shiny as newly peeled potatoes.

Research endorses the cougar. In their book A Billion Wicked Thoughts, neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam research sex on the internet and find that while men generally prefer younger women, there is interest in older women in their 40s, 50s and 60s, known as MLFs (the mother I'd love to ...)

There are lots of cougars around; carrying a tube of Chanel Rouge Noir and a pair of spare pantyhose in their bags, they are ready for sex on the run.

An experienced cub (known as a Ben 10 in the townships) warns: "Dating a cougar is fine, but beware their talons if you ever want to leave."

How to spot a cougar

Terrain: Singles' bars, plastic surgeons' waiting rooms. If you're young and male, she'll catch your eye and maybe ask you over for a drink. She'll pick up the tab.

Plumage: Killer heels. Cougars would rather break a leg than be seen in low heels. Décolleté. Industrial-strength make-up, false eyelashes. A discreet tattoo indicates she's still in the game.

Her age will be a blur of lifts and Botox and her hair will be a gold bomb. Cougars never go grey. In cougartaal, 48 means 50.

They believe their own PR, which is "You are as young as you feel."