Women pinned cougar during 'hand-to-hand combat' to save friend trapped in its jaws
Women pinned cougar during 'hand-to-hand combat' to save friend trapped in its jaws
The cat dialed back pressure through its crushing jaws, and the friend was able to pull away, fellow cyclists said in an interview one month after the incident east of Seattle.
The cat dialed back pressure through its crushing jaws, and the friend was able to pull away, fellow cyclists said in an interview one month after the incident east of Seattle.
A group of Seattle-area cyclists who helped one of their own escape the jaws of a cougar recounted their story this weekend, saying they fought the cat and pinned it down.
The woman who was attacked, Keri Bergere, sustained neck and face injuries and was treated at a hospital and released following the Feb. 17 incident on a trail northeast of Fall City, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife said in a statement.
Bergere said she spent five days at an area hospital and was still recovering.
Fish and Wildlife Lt. Erik Olson called the actions of her fellow cyclists "heroic" in the statement. But the extent of the cyclists' battle with the 75-pound cat wasn't immediately clear then.
Do NOT play dead with a cougar. They will fuck you up.
Fight back like your life depends on it.
https://www.nps.gov/pore/planyourvisit/yoursafety_mountainlions.htm
That's pretty badass of the women. Using the bike to pin that big cat down in just the right spot must've taken some brass too. The thing would be hissing and freaking the fuck out trying to claw you while holding it down.
When your friends fight off a mountain lion, and then pin it down, that's how you know you have some good friends.
In the article I read one of them dropped a 25 pound rock on its head until she was exhausted. She’d almost given up when it finally started letting go. Before that they were stabbing with a small knife and kicking the shit out of it with tree branches and nothing was really working. They also tried choking it out but said it felt like it was made of iron. Scary shit.
I was hiking in the Rockies with friends. We got to our next campsite when a group behind us asked if we'd noticed the massive kitty footprints along the muddy trail. No. No we had not.
You don't see or hear them when they're hunting until they want to be seen. It's incredible.
Went hiking by myself once up a mountain in Aspen about a week or 2 after a mountain lion attack. I was about 1000ft up from the base in the woods when I noticed it was too quiet. I questioned my judgment and turned my ass around and couldn't have gotten down that mountain any faster.
It's always wolves and bears in movies, but if either attack a human it's because the human ignored warnings and the bear or wolves couldn't retreat anymore...
Big cats tho?
It's very easy for them to consider humans food.
A Cougar can stalk a human for miles before striking, and you'll never know it's there.
If you turn around and see a cougar staring at you, you're already considered food and running doesn't help. You need to act like a bear, make a shit ton of noise and pretend you're not currently shitting your pants. And you'll likely scare it off. Act like prey and run tho, and it's going to act like a predator.
Run from a bear and wolves, and they got exactly what they wanted and won't chase.
As unlikely as it is to ever come up, you shouldn't run from wolves or bears either. They both have a strong prey drive and might chase to kill even if that wasn't their objective in the confrontation.
Run from a bear and wolves, and they got exactly what they wanted and won't chase.
That is the worst advice I've ever seen: a black bear can run 30mph/48kmh and will run you down if you run. Wolfs have a strong predation drive and will also run you down but in a pack. Both of these animals look for weakened prey and weakened prey always run.
With bears the big thing is prevention. Make sure to keep your presence known as not to scare a bear by having little bells on your backpack.
Also knowing what bears are in the area will help. Brown bears are much less likely to attack a human, whereas Grizzlies will have no hesitation. To tell which ones are in the area, look for bear scat. If you come across Brown bear scat, you will notice it has nuts and berry seeds in it. If it's grizzly bear scat, you will see it filled with little bells.
I'm sorry, this is just fearmongering based on a rare event-
A total of 126 attacks, 27 of which were fatal,[1] have been documented in North America in the past 100 years. Fatal cougar attacks are extremely rare and occur much less frequently than fatal snake bites, fatal lightning strikes, or fatal bee stings.[2][3][4] Children are particularly vulnerable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_cougar_attacks_in_North_America
Bears, wolves and cougars are, generally, not dangerous to humans.
Even the article linked to calls it rare.
If anything this proves his point even more.
27 fatalities out of 126 attacks is an insane death rate. I guarantee you it's much lower for bears, and maybe wolves too.
This would be because, like the posted stated, bears don't have the intention to kill you they just want you to leave. If they attack it's less likely you will die from it.
Cougars attack with the intent to kill you though, hence the higher death rates.
Yes it's rare, but the poster never said it was common.
These animals aren't dangerous until they are. In the wild, you don't know if you're encountering an injured or desperate animal. My main issue with OPs comment is the terrible advice on what to do when encounting one of these predators.
Also, how was the mountain lion population in the US doing until recently? Extermination of wild populations is a major reason why incidents in the past are so rare.
I was stalked by a cougar once while walking my dog. It was evening and we were on our regular walking trail with a headlamp and flashlight.
Then I see a pair of eyes reflecting back at me about 20m into the trees, just staring straight at us.
My dog is clueless because he's just sniffing at bushes to pee on.
Immediately I start walking backwards, never taking the flashlight off the eyes, and they start following us all the way back to our property completely silent until they eventually disappear once we get to the lit up pathway. Luckily we were only about 400m into our walk.
snapped a photo with flash to try and see if I could make out if it were a deer or not, but deer don't try and follow you lolLooks more like two bobcats than 1 cougar.
The one with eyes has huge ears, and I think the other ones eyes are just blocked. But it looks like ears and the flank of a bobcat. Just a little in front of the obvious one behind that stump.
They wouldn't be following for you if they were bobcats tho, maybe if your dog is under 25lbs. Or maybe it's a breeding pair and they want to know why a human and dog are walking around their den at night
I dunno, maybe that is a cougar tho. Where I grew up authorities spent decades saying we just had bobcats and no cougars. It wasn't till someone shot one that was prowling around a barn till they admitted we had a cougar population and they didn't seem afraid of humans.
They havent gotten anyone yet.
Got it. I will turn my back and run away from any threatening bears I encounter. Should I also make any high pitched squealing sounds? Perhaps I should climb a tree?
JFC no Cougars don't consider humans to be food. Attacks are very, very rare and almost always from sick or malnourished Cougars who can't catch prey and are trying to eat anything.
What a fucking boss.
I think it's hilarious just how unprepared anything is for how much getting suddenly beat the fuck up can hurt.
Humans are one of the only species that can spontaneously gang up and lay the smack down on ya.
Baboons gang up on leopards all the time, our genetic line has been ganging up on threads since we weren't even apes but monkeys. It's the age old tradition of forming a mob and curbstomping everything that brought us to the top of the food chain.
Man, there's a war between feral monkeys and dogs in certain parts of the world. Like nothing has made me more angry at dogs than seeing an infant monkey in its jaws. It's the only time in my life I wanted to drop kick a dog.
Not true. Orca's and dolphins very much do the same. Same as hyena's, lions, all corvids, some primates, otters, elephants, buffalo, some parasitic birdd and more form mobs. Mob mentality is a great tactic.
Ngl, the title had me questioning some very important details of the event there ...
Wouldn't that make it 'hand-to-claw combat'?
I'm just wondering what an older sexy woman was doing with another woman in her jaws...
But, hey, who am I to judge, right?!
Wow, she didn't even risk her bike to fight off a cougar and opted for hand-to-
handclaw combat: This lady might be the most badass cyclist of all time.Women, can't live with them, can pin them down when they try to...ohhh a real cougar! Oh ok, yeah man fight back.
Poor cat...
And they killed the cougar...wtf... you're in it's territory.
If a wild animal attacks a human, we typically kill it, if for no other reason than to keep it from doing so again. We also need to know what caused it to do so, like if it had an infection that made it particularly aggressive or something.
We're animals too, and vastly more dangerous. It's silly to think we won't defend ourselves.
Cougars are known to attack anything. They're literally top of the food chain. They already had it pinned, all they had to do was sedate it, and cage it, check it out at a vet and then release it. We need predators big time in NA, there is a reason the deer population has gone chaotic and they now have tons of diseases. There was 0 need to euthanize this animal.
Yes, humans aren't fair that way at all. Everything and everywhere is our habitat now, including just like roads thought forests etc. Not to mention we outnumber mountain lions by an absurd number.
I know why you are getting downvoted, but we really aren't connecting the dots between "sad loss of natural habitats" and this kind of overprotective thinking. Even more extreme perhaps - wild predators get killed for killing (basically unprotected) livestock, which lives where they do). And then we wonder where all the birds went, why are the deer so unhealthy, etc.
We tend to expect a finely tuned ecosystem to survive in an area a 100th of it's original size - often in a non-continuous way (separated by farms, highways, cities, etc). And a few decades later we wonder why species are disappearing.
Yep, I'm getting down voted for being annoyed at the ignorance here.
Yeah, this one specifically had a chance of deciding to avoid attacking humans since this attack didn’t pay off.
This really saddened me too to hear. I was hoping it just escaped into the wilderness
are you vegan?
No, but I do large animal rescue and wildlife conservation.