Knife Saves Lad in Cougar Attack

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Boy Recovering After Mountain Lion Attack - BLADE Magazine – The World's Number One Knife Publication

CAUTION: some may find the boy's facial wounds and swelling to be graphic. This is a news video.


This is about a cougar that attacked two families in Big Bend National Park. One group scared it off by hitting it with a backpack. In the other case,it actually got hold of a six-year-old boy.

His father drew a Spyderco pocketknife and stabbed the cat in the chest. It escaped and was still at large the last I heard.

This attack happened right at a lodge, on the sidewalk! The lodge refused to warn guests, probably to avoid bad publcity and loss of customers.
 
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Glad the boy will be ok. He's handling it well. BIG Kudos to Dad, if he had froze up that would have been a lot worse.
 
If you watch the video, you can see the dad's knife on his camera images, with the boy in the hospital as he was stabilized, or whatever. The Spyderco has a wide blade, and the stabbing depth is limited by the wide hole at the top, which is used to pivot the blade open.

I doubt that the blade, maybe three inches long, achieved any great stabbing depth. The wound was probably not mortal, although it scared the cat off.

In another case in which a knife saved a man, he was about 67, hiking in rural British Columbia, on Vancouver Island. He used a Schrade LB-7, that company's version of the basic Buck Model 110.

I talked with this gentleman by 'phone, and wrote up the incident for, Knife World. He said that his single greatest difficulty was in getting the knife out of its belt pouch and opening it while keeping the cat's teeth from his throat.

He was scalped, although doctors repaired most of the damage, and I believe he lost an eye. The RCMP confiscated the knife, thinking at first that he had been involed in a crime. I don't know if he got it back, but I suggested to the Schrade PR lady that they replace it, and the offer was made. Others also offered him new knives.

He was very lucky to survive. Some of you may have later seen him in a documentary about cougar attacks on, Discovery. I think his name is Anderson. He was one of about three survivors who talked about their attacks. His account was very sobering, and I am grateful that his wife let him speak to me, as they were avoiding the media, which were not polite or charitable in their coverage of the matter. I convinced her that I was a cutlery writer, not a sensation seeker or someone from PETA. He was very nice and seemed to enjoy getting some things off of his chest to a sympathetic listener. He wasn't long out of hospital at the time, and was probably still in pain. He needed extensive surgery.

The cougar/puma/mountain lion that jumped him was a female weighing maybe 90-100 pounds, if memory serves. The one that went after the little boy in Texas was much smaller and in poor shape. Had it been bigger or in better shape, the incident might have ended differently.

I do know of the case in which South African game ranger Harry Wolhuter successfully stabbed a lion that was dragging him off. Wolhuter drew a knife very like the old Dadley Green River pattern and got the knife in the heart as it dragged him by his other shoulder, which never really healed right. The blade was six inches. The maker was a UK firm called Wilson. The hide of that lion was displayed for years at Kruger National Park.

If you must be in cougar country, carry a gun if you can. These attacks have been increasing over the past two decades, as more "lions' need territories than are available in the wild. California's ban on cougar hunting has caused some of the problem there. More such attacks seem to happen there and in B.C. than anywhere else. I have a specialist book that addresses the problem, showing where known attacks have occurred.

If you must rely on a knife, get a longer blade than this boy's father had, and learn where to stab, or try to cut the throat, which is what Mr. Anderson did with his Schrade, which had a blade of four inches.

This kid was exceedingly lucky. God bless him and his gallant father.

The lodge behaved as many towns do after shark attacks. They don't want bad publicity, and that takes precedence over common decency in warning visitors of danger. I think that failure to warn should constitute a crime of wilful endangerment, and they should be held liable if another immediate attack takes place. How do you feel?
 
michael thornton said:
glad the kid is ok, did they find couger?
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Michael-

I posted above that to my knowledge, it was not located, or I just haven't seen a followup story.

You can call the National Park Service rangers at Big Bend National Park in West Texas or Channel 7 TV in that region. They may know more. All the story said was that certain trails were closed. Nothing about bringing in dogs and a professional lion hunter.

Interestingly, although cougars do attack people, there seem to be no known accounts of serial attacks, by what we'd term a "man-eater" if a lion, tiger, or leopard. Some of those animals have individually accounted for literally hundreds of human victims before being shot. It has always puzzled me why Jim Corbett was never knighted or awarded the George Cross for his brave efforts to kill notorious man-eaters in British colonial India. At least two cats that he killed had scored each over 400 human kills! One tigress was credited with 436 kills, although many more were believed to have taken place and never been credited to her. Some occurred in Tibet, before armed parties drove her over the border into India.

I also know of no known serial man-eaters among jaguars, although some natives believe that jaguars do take human victims. I once read a first person account of a jaguar consuming a man attacked in his hammock, as the second man lay terrified in another nearby hammock, in the dark.

Sasha Siemel was jumped by some jaguars, but he was hunting them on foot, in long grass and jungle. He used S&W revolvers and a Winchester M-92 carbine among other firearms. But he found a stout spear best in some situations.
His books are wonderful. One shows his much younger American wife with a caiman (jacare) that she killed with a bow! Siemel was originally from Latvia, not Brazil, hence the non-Portuguese name.

I have studied wild animal attacks for decades. They make fascinating reading, but I hope that none of us here ever has to experience one. (I have had to draw knives in a few cases to scare off urban dogs, but they seemed to realize the danger and retreated.)
 
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Texas Star said:
... California's ban on cougar hunting has caused some of the problem there. ...
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I think not, and here's why ---

Mountain lions are killed by sport hunters "using" three techniques: 1) encountering one by accident, the result of pure dumb luck, and having an opportunity for a shot, an occurence so infrequent as to rival winning the lottery or being struck twice by lightning; 2) bringing one to bay after pursuit with hounds, a technique that gives guide and client some selectivity in their quarry, and selects for large male lions as trophy specimens; or, 3) luring them into close proximity with predator calls, often at ranges so close that any lion is perceived as a threat, or a remarkable trophy, and shot DRT. (Been there, done that, helped others to do the same...)

The large male lions typically selected by hound hunters have nothing to do with rearing the juveniles, and so have no learning, innate fears, or etc., to pass along to their offspring, and contribute absolutely nothing to their offspring's knowledge.

The very few lions killed by "bumping into" them is insignificant.

Those lions killed by predator callers, often females, are incapable of passing along any "learned" instinct or instructions to their offspring, once they're dead.

So, hunting, per se, doesn't provide a mechanism by which juvenile lions learn to avoid humans and learn that humans are not acceptable prey.

What probably most accurately describes the relationship of lions and humans in much of quasi-rural California is that they are occupying the same mutually desirable/hospitable habitats, in population densities that inevitably overlap, and where conflicts occur, in one-sided confrontations in which humans are attacked by well-equipped predators with fang-and-claw instincts and superb tools, and humans who have willfully abdicated their rights to self-defense, given up their tools, and keep electing predators worse than mountain lions to the Assembly.
 
I just saw a news story about a German Sheppard that treed a cougar and kept him there all day. Tough dog!
 
What probably most accurately describes the relationship of lions and humans in much of quasi-rural California is that they are occupying the same mutually desirable/hospitable habitats, in population densities that inevitably overlap, and where conflicts occur, in one-sided confrontations in which humans are attacked by well-equipped predators with fang-and-claw instincts and superb tools, and humans who have willfully abdicated their rights to self-defense, given up their tools, and keep electing predators worse than mountain lions to the Assembly.[/QUOTE]

This sure looks true the number of wilderness runners and bikers constantly increases everyone wants a low use area and those activities jogging in particular look like saying get me. Read once that when an African lion initiates an attack they are sucessfull 10% of the time. Cougars on the opposite end were sucessfull 90%+. Deer are easier than African game probably. We visited friends in Sierra Vista and I noticed that there were signs on how to react to an attack. My earlier Madonna quote was in no way to deride the injured child.
 
DeathGrip said:
I'm truly off of the Cougar List at this time in life. That's some scary stuff. :eek:
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Meeee, too! What IS this world comin' to? Like a good buddy of mine in Cali once said... the more women he dated the better his dog looked! ...and he didn't even have a dog!!!
 
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