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
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.
We have a bell on our cats collar precisely for this reason. It’s impossible to know where they are unless they want you to know otherwise.
I tried putting a bell on a cat once but he learned how to sneak without the bell jingling and would still bring home presents
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.
Oooo yeah is it true that birds and nearby animals get quiet or leave when a predator is nearby?
Better safe than cat food in that situation all by yourself!
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.
I think there was one guy who did… a mountain lion, maybe? I’ll have to find it again
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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.
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.
Wolves almost never see adult humans as prey. Since 1761, only 77 non-fatal attacks and 40 fatal attacks from wolves. However, of those 40, only 9 occurred in the last 100 years and 2 of them were death from rabies. Many of the non-fatal attacks and a few of the fatal attacks were from captive wolves. Most of the attacks involved children and/or pets.
Wolves have been practically extinct in the US for many decades. That’s a major reason why there are so few incidents. However, I agree that viewing adult humans as prey isn’t “typical” wolf behavior.
Would a healthy wolf prefer to hunt a human over other prey? No. But we’re talking about wild animals. If you encounter a wolf in the wild you don’t know if it’s hungry or sick, and the animal may absolutely treat you as prey.
40 since 1791
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.
They don’t have to consider humans food for the chase reflex to kick in. All predators in general but canines in particular have a set of reflexes that make it very dangerous to turn your back and flee.
It’s why you don’t have to teach puppies to chase a thrown stuffed toy, even if it’s entirely novel to them.
A bear might just be trying to scare you off, but it’ll chase you down solely because you ran.
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.
Black bears are less likely to attack humans (some are brown colored though). Brown bears are grizzlies.
Very good points! Preventing these encounters is the best thing you can do. Number one thing with bears is don’t have any food on you.
My dad was solo backpacking in the California back country and thought he had stashed all his food in a sack hung from a tree, but forgot about a granola bar in his pocket. He had a dream a bear was licking his face and when he woke up, a black bear was licking his face. He felt around his pockets, found the granola bar and threw it, and the bear went after it and then left him alone.
I have no doubt he wouldn’t have survived if it had been a hungry Grizzly.
Wait a minute.
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.
Not sure what you’re talking about; it looked more factmongering to me.
This cannot be a fact:
Big cats tho?
It’s very easy for them to consider humans food.
If this is a fact:
A total of 126 attacks, 27 of which were fatal,[1] have been documented in North America in the past 100 years.
You win time, friend. But I will return!
Although…nah. You win. Until next time!
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.
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?
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.
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.
I think it happend at india, and the monkeys took revenge on all the dogs at the village. You might be able to find some videos about the incident on youtube.
You might be able to find some videos about the incident on youtube.
No. No, I don’t think I will.
Monkeys are pretty fucked up themselves, I don’t have much sympathy.
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.deleted by creator
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.
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
Yes, that is an even better case for what I meant (also sorry about the situation - I try to comfort myself that some professionals will go film & document stuff like that so that millions of us can enjoy it somewhat but without additional damaging effects).
At some point we just get to the tipping point. And Im also not saying that the answer is yes (rather ‘it’s complicated and highly nuanced’). Like, if there were only 10 mountain lions left in the world Im sure a poll would show ppl would want to save the cat & restrict human movement. The other way around too, if human population fell to a few million or whatever, the perception of individuals “value” would def change.
I want to encourage (I always try to do this) everyone to think about how hard would be to determine that line even if we had all the data, knowledge, & perspective on the matter. And ofc we dont.
Living without or with progressively less & less biodiversity, unique habitats, etc is something we are already doing for future generations. And how do you explain to alpha or beta gen that people in the past wanted to go hiking in the woods unprotected so for that convenience & 0 risk tolerance no large predators exist anymore.
Since my grandparents were born humans went from like 1.7 billion to 8 billion people atm. We need to accept we can’t live beyond our means for long and that immediate effects of our actions are not all of the effects our actions have. Literally not all of us can go bike on that mountain trail. And it’s a luxury.
Mountain lions while not endangered are considered near threatened. So it’s not like they’re deer, but conservation is still needed to protect them. Hell for the longest time they hadn’t been seen in the Southeast. It’s only recently that they’re making a come back, and a lot of that is from massive conservation efforts.
You’re absolutely right though, do we end up telling the next generations that we pushed further into their territory and killed most of them, because we wanted to be safe from danger while out on a day hike… unfortunately people in this thread seem to say the answer is yes, that’s exactly what they’re ok with.
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).
In general, we advise people not to go to places where it might upset or endanger animals or risk an encounter than might cause the animal to need to be killed.
If and when humans go there anyway, we still prioritize human life over the animal.
It just doesn’t track to say “if you go into the woods, we’ll let you get eaten by cougars”.
This woman didn’t deserve to die for riding a bike in a nature trail.The animals motivation for the attack is only relevant for conservation efforts. Is there a disease we need to be aware of? A behavior shift, or a famine?
For the purposes of protecting people, we can’t let an animal that has actively attacked survive, but depending on why it attacked we might be able to intervene to prevent other attacks and help other animals.Oh, yeah, I understand that, I was thinking more like prohibition, for conservation.
Yeah, totally justifiable to restrict people’s movements, give them stuff fines or even jail time for conservation.
If push comes to shove though, the person’s life takes priority over the animals.
A cougar is not worth a human life
Agree to disagree. I can name half a dozen off the top of my head worth a fraction of a cougar’s life and their removal from this timeline’d immediately improve humanity on a global scale.
Yes, let’s just kill everything because we want to take the land for ourselves. Being way the fuck up in Mt Lion territory is risky, you shouldn’t be bringing a 6 year old out there anyways.
Yes, killing an animal because it attacked a human is exactly the same as killing everything to clear the land.
You can look up where the attack happened. It happened on a marked trail outside a city, about 30 miles from Seattle. Not exactly the middle of nowhere.
Or are you saying that you shouldn’t take children outside of major metropolitan areas in the Pacific Northwest?30 miles from a city can go from suburbs to wilderness quickly out there. And yes killing a near threatened species because you want to go hiking in a safety bubble is exactly what you’re advocating.
No, killing a specific animal that attacked a human is what I’m fine with.
Don’t be an asshole and tell people what they believe without having the decency to even get it right.
You greatly underestimate the risks of sedating a dangerous animal, both to human and to the animal. Ask a vet or wildlife officer. It’s not like the movies. Also if they are checking for certain brain diseases, there is simply no way to test an animal and keep it alive.
Lol no I don’t, I’m not some city dweller like the mass majority on lemmy. I’ve dealt with large cats and predators. They had this thing pinned down, and euthanized it right there vs shooting it after they let it up. Sedation wouldn’t have been an issue.
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
