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
tldr dont run, stay big and aggressive looking. the moment you turn around or act small itll attack on instict.
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.
No chance you’re gonna choke a cougar, but i don’t have a better suggestion haha. They’re real beasts.
From what I’ve read the only way you’re gonna choke something that big is if you jam your entire arm down their throat and pray you last long enough.
That’s how this guy did it. My right wrist has been shitty since I broke it back in college. I’ve already decided if I ever am in this situation, this is my plan. Jam the ole shitty wrist down his throat. If I live n have to amputate it, that wrist won’t be missed much. It only brought pain anyway.
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.
It literally just tried to kill a person on a bike trail. Being known to attack anything isn’t a reason for us not to defend ourselves.
I’m aware we need predators, but we also need to not get ambushed by big cats. It might be too of the food chain, but we’re higher.
Next time it might attack someone who can’t fight it off, like a child or a smaller group.A cougar is not worth a human life, no matter how good they are for deer conservation.
Interesting question arises from that - is a cougars life worth humans not venturing freely in forests (basically ‘the sacrifice of not being able to use that bike trail’, intentionally, for the good of the wildlife)?
And attacking a group of not that slow humans sounds a bit like distress. I don’t know anything about that situation, don’t claim to, just saying that disease and perhaps demeanour aren’t the only two things that can result in an attack like that - an attack which does sound like an attack-to-kill-for-food situation (the part where it didn’t let go of the face for 15 minutes) and not just for the sake of attack.
I think this is an excellent question to put out loud. I’m sorry someone downvoted you but it really is worth asking and thinking about. To be clear I am not saying that I think the answer is “yes.” But this sort of thing isn’t without precedent.
Story time: I used to be a very avid cave explorer and I enjoyed it more than just about anything. Caving is a tough sport to do though because many caves are on private property and the landowners often refuse access. So a lot of caving is done on national forest/park land. Around 2006, an invasive species of fungus arrived in the USA from Europe. This fungus infected multiple species of bats with a high mortality rate but didn’t affect humans (White Nose Syndrome is the disease name). Over the next few years the spread of disease was well documented, predominantly along the known migratory routes of the affected species.
In reaction, the National Parks and National Forest managers started closing off access to caves on public land, as a ‘precaution.’ Caving as a sport essentially became nearly impossible for most people overnight. This isn’t a mainstream, popular activity like mountain biking so nobody outside of cavers gave a shit and there wasn’t much of an uproar and the policy stood. The national park where I spent most of my time still has all caves closed to recreational caving.
So the people who manage these public lands absolutely do ask the question of when animal lives outweigh human use and I think that publicly asking those questions is a good way to make sure we don’t have the decision made for us without having a chance to weigh in.
I really miss caving. /rant
Also a caver who was effected by the policy, and while I miss the hell out of spelunking, I love bats more. I have 2 small caves on my farm and have never been in them for that reason alone, also have multiple bat boxes I’ve built for them as well. My need to cave outweighs the need for these creatures to exist.
I totally hear you and respect your decision. That said I think very few of these decisions are as binary as it seems when presented by authorities:
- Not every cave is a bat habitat for instance - so does it make sense to blanket close all those caves?
- What about caves where WNS has clearly arrived and wiped out the population. Should the cave remain closed 15-20 years after?
- Could we explore mandatory decontamination procedures / quarantine time for visitors between caves (being able to go to even one cave a year would have been infinitely better than never).
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.
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.
What would be handy to have for defense? Something like bear mace, boar spear, or air horn? Would one of those stranger danger backpack alarms scare em off?
A gun. And plenty of ammo.
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.
Yeah this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Bears (brown, not so much black) and wolves don’t see people as prey? Wrong. Humans just cross paths with them less frequently.
Humans may not be the prey of choice for bears and wolves. But that’s the case for mountain lions too.
You’re both wrong, none of them see humans as prey. JFC. None of them want anything to do with humans.
*Downvote all you want. This is fact. People need to be afraid so common parlance has bought into the completely wrong idea that these animals hunt humans. They do not.
This is not fact. This is blind conjecture from an anonymous unqualified user who takes time to respond to down-votes but is too lazy to actually raise a substantive source, or lacks one altogether. Opinion is not fact.
Beets, Bears, Battlestar galactica.
Not opinions just facts
I changed my mind. These are 100% fax.
Yeah, don’t literally “run away”. But even if you did most wolves won’t follow. They’re not around humans enough to consider us food. And they’re not going to attack stuff their unsure of.
Coywolves or a rare Wolfpack that lives close to humans might, but that’s really 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.
Poor cat…
