Puma attack

Joined
May 6, 2009
Messages
2,898
Reaction score
4,092
Mountain Lion Snatches, Eats Man?s Dachshund In Colorado Springs « CBS Denver

It would be horrible to have to watch a loved pet go this way. These puma attacks on pets seem to be on the rise here in Colorado. Be prepared if in the hills.

pop_wm_2569915.jpg
 
Register to hide this ad
Spring Lion Season

There will be a spring mountain lion season this year, April 1 to April 30 in Colorado. Might be worth getting a license so you can legally take one. That allows you to keep the pelt among other things.

Still legal to kill one in the process of attacking livestock, not sure where dogs ft into that category, I think as pets they are not protected the same way but not sure.
 
Ever alert. CCW is't all about criminals. Animal attacks should be in the thoughts of all who carry.
 
I know in MI if you shoot someones dog you might as well have shot them. Should work the other way around too.
 
Where I used to live in Northern California, we had mountain lion sightings all the time. We had one prowling our neighborhood for awhile. Came down around my corrals one night. My neighbor down the road shot one that was stalking his nine-year old son. In California, cougars are protected, but as the game warden told my neighbor, "It's one thing to shoot one that's 200 yards away. It's a completely different ballgame when one is in your backyard stalking your kids!"

A guy was attacked by a cougar a few years back in one of California's state parks up there in the redwoods. It was a young one and the guy's wife beat it off with a stick while he was stabbing at it with his ballpoint pen. The park rangers finally tracked it down and killed it.

The cougar will probably remain protected in California until some politician's kid gets eaten.

Here in Utah, we'll see them occasionally. My son was fly fishing a creek around dusk one evening and one was up on a ledge watching him. As my son slowly made his way downstream towards the truck, the cougar very slowly followed him along the ledge. My son told me that that was the last time he ever left his pistol in the truck while fishing.
 
There's far too many of 'em, they've overpopulated.

Their 'protection' here is part of an agenda to keep people out of the woods.

Can't have Agenda 21 if people aren't cowed into it somehow.

I've seen quite a few, too many, while hunting Northern California, but what shocked me was the one that got killed by a car on Hwy 1, three blocks from my house in Pacifica.

Myself and a hunting buddy walked up on one that was distracted, eating a deer. We turned a corner on a fire road and 3' in front of us was a big 'ol cat! Just like feeding time at the zoo - without the bars. That deep growl, the threat projection.

We leveled our rifles, safety's clicking off as fast as lightning and we both said to each other, 'don't run'.

I told my friend to go first, he went and signaled me, I went, and so on, never one of us not zeroing on the cat till we were clear.

Had several track me, finding their paw prints in my footprints after a day's hunt.

No sir, they're no damn good.
 
Won't the CO. legislature get busy now trying to pass a law making it illegal for cougars to attack pets and humans? After all if they are so concerned about acts of violence and passing laws to prevent it..
 
I hope you CO guys do not get caught with too many cartridges in your gun on these hunts after today. Just call your legislature rep and have him pass a bill preventing attacks on all small dogs under 20 pounds. Then everyone will fell good and go have a beer, knowing protection has been provided.
 
They are in the suburbs far more than people realize.My sister had a run in with one a few years back that wanted her dogs,She thought it was a bobcat ( 4:30 am).It ate her neighbors llama instead.I've been followed several times and didn't realize it until I back tracked.Sneaky buggers.
 
We have a cougar problem here in So Oregon. Had one in my backyard about a month ago! Down the street a lady lost two Alpacas in one night.

I just showed this story to my wife. Now she wants to take the shotgun with her when walking our little dog.
 
Last edited:
A guy was attacked by a cougar a few years back in one of California's state parks up there in the redwoods. It was a young one and the guy's wife beat it off with a stick while he was stabbing at it with his ballpoint pen. The park rangers finally tracked it down and killed it.
.

Don't let gun control people see this they will say they were right you don't need a firearm to protect yourself.
 
I'm a little surprised that it made the newspaper. around Ft. Collins it wasn't that unusual for a pet to turn missing for the people that lived on the first range of the mountains.
 
Looking for a house in Fountain Hills, AZ two years ago, my wife saw a large cat sitting on a vacant house's porch.

She asked if it was a bobcat, as the neighborhood is known to have many sightings of them.

I asked what it looked like, she said: "long thick tail, light brown, with fuzzy ears"

I asked, were the ears round or pointed: "round, fuzzy and round".

Uh oh.....

She had the sense not to get out of the car. Apparently the thing was just looking at her, totally relaxed.

Made my hair stand up.

For those not familiar with Fountain Hills, AZ, it abuts Scottsdale, AZ a very large urban suburban area, but also lies along the Tonto National Forrest. So we are the buffer zone for all manor of critters that get a hankerin' to come into town to snack on pets. A few years ago, a coyote drug a 4 yo kid out of the garage, and a month ago a coyote walked up to a man on his back porch reading a newspaper and bit him on the leg. The border of the forests and suburban zones are getting crazy!
 
Last edited:
Within the past year, a father saved his young son from a cougar by stabbing it with a Spyderco pocketknife with about a three-inch blade. This was at a motel within a national park in west TX. The blade wasn't long enough to inflict a mortal wound, but his ferocity in defense of his son drove the animal away.

The really bad part was that the motel didn't want to warn others, lest it affect their business! I don'r recall if park rangers found and killed the cat.

Some years ago, I interviewed a man on Vancouver Island who was attacked by a female cougar as he walked near his home. He somehow kept her teeth away from his throat while drawing and opening his Schrade equivalent to a Buck Model 110 lockblade pocketknife. He successfully stabbed the cat, but she'd ripped him up badly. His scalp was hanging off and I think he lost an eye. He staggered into a logging camp, where someone thought he'd been in a fight. They called the RCMP and searchers found the dead cougar and confirmed his story.

Taken to hospital in Victoria, his scalp was reattached and he began a long and painful recovery. His wife at first wouldn't call him to the phone as they'd been plagued by mainstram media. I convinced her that I was writing for a knife magazine, meant her husband no disrespect, and that I in fact considered him a hero. Mr. Anderson finally took my call and very graciously answered my questions for about a half hour. The story appeared in, "Knife World." I hope some of you read it. He said that getting the knife open with two hands while keeping her teeth off of his throat was the single hardest part of his ordeal.

Later, I saw him and two other survivors of cougar attacks on a Discovery TV program. Their accounts were chilling.

Schrade was then still in business and I called their PR lady. She promised to offer this man a replacement for his knife, which was seized in a bloody state and held for evidence. He eventually got it back, but it was a mess. I believe that some custom knifemakers also offered him free knives.

I've mentioned here before that my son had to stab a big coydog that attacked him at night in his back yard in central Texas. He drew his Benchmade folder with a tanto blade and ripped the animal from stomach through the chest and it ran off howling, probably to die unfound. He mentioned the difficulty of keeping its teeth from his throat as he opened the knife one-handed. His wife was aghast when she saw his bloody (and expensive!) leather coat. Thankfully, most of the blood was the animal's. He now carries a gun in the yard at night.

I study animal attacks and have some books about them, and a book telling those in cougar country how to co-exist with the animals. I am well aware that attacks have been rising, especially since the 1970's. But there were always more than the cougar huggers wanted you to know about. The cougar or puma is a large wild cat, and it acts like one. This is especially true where laws preclude thinning them out so that there's enough range for them. As-is, in states like CA, where they can't be hunted except through a special license for specific stock killers, they overpopulate and bigger ones drive younger, smaller ones down into populated areas, where they have to take what food they find. If they can't kill a deer, they'll take your pet or your child...or you.

BTW, I once wrote an article on guns for protection in cougar country. A few people asked me how I Photoshopped the cover photo to have the cougar behind a line of suitable ctgs. The answer is that the cat is actually a ceramic one, very lifelike. It was just placed behind the ammo, not Photoshopped into it from a pic of a live cougar. And I have a ceramic falcon on my desk that is so lifelike that guests have asked me what I feed it! They keep looking at it, expecting it to move or fly at them. This amuses me. But real cougars are no joke.
 
Last edited:
interesting

I always carry a gun but I just now put a bigger knife in my pocket. Depending on how this thread progresses, I might put that knife up and strap on a fixed blade.
 
We have regular sightings here (PA) and over the border NY), but those are only publicized by locals. It seems that promoting mountain lions as our neighbors is not part of the official record, and sightings are routinely dismissed as mistakes, hallucinations, or urban legends by officials.

A guy told an interesting story down at the LGS last week, about calling in a mountain lion sighting on his property. He saw tracks, then watched the cat sprint across his field. When he contacted Fish & Game, he was told that PA had "traded" another state (Utah?) wild turkeys for some big cats for predatory control reasons. Sounded logical. The feller called back a few days later and the F&G guy was gone, seemingly vanished due to his revealing an official "secret".
 
I was stalked by a cougar -- she was crouched on a bar stool and swatted my rear with her paw as I walked by............................
I backtracked and baited a spot near two empty bar stools with a
pomegranate martini -- she stuck her nose in the air, her nostrils catching the scent of premium vodka, then slowly paced over and claimed the pomtini -- with her attention diverted, I slowly slipped out of the bar. Diaster averted.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top