From:
Cougar Attacks in the U.S. and Canada
From:
Cougar Attacks in the U.S. and Canada
HOUSTON (June 8, 1998 9:20 p.m. EDT http://www.nando.net) - Armed only with a pocket knife and a mother's powerful instincts, Mary Jane Coder fought off a mountain lion that tried repeatedly to attack her young daughters on a remote Texas trail.
The family survived, but just barely.
"It was incredibly scary," Coder, 41, told Reuters in a telephone interview on Monday. "We came very close to dying."
The attack took place on May 25 in Big Bend National Park in west Texas while Coder paused to take photographs of her three daughters -- Jessica, 9, Dallas, 8, and Meagan, 6 -- during a hike in the Chisos Mountains.
Coder had Dallas in the viewfinder when she noticed that the girl, sitting on a boulder, was not smiling.
"She started screaming "Mommy, Mommy, get me down from here.' I turned
around and there was a big mountain lion getting ready to pounce," Coder
said.
Coder, who lives in the south Texas town of Harlingen, quickly pulled the
girls behind her and told them to get a pocket knife out of a backpack. In
the meantime, she threw a rock at the lion to try to scare it away, but the
big, tan cat's only response was an angry hiss.
She shouted at the lion and waved the knife, but the animal
* began running at the girls one by one, "trying to cut
them (out of a herd) like they were baby deer."
"My kids started scattering, which was the worst thing to do. It would go
toward one of them and I would run toward it and it would veer away," Coder
said. "I was shouting at them to come to me and shouting at the cat to go
away. It was running back and forth after them. It was chaos."
At one point, Coder was so close to the mountain lion that it reached out
and whacked her hand, puncturing it with a claw. "It was like it was batting
me away to get to my children."
After about 15 minutes, Coder was able to push the girls under a rock
ledge. She looked up and the big cat was poised on a boulder just above
her. She told the girls to pray.
"That was the most fear I have ever known," Coder said.
"I thought to myself, if you stand here and stare at it, it's going to
consider it a challenge. And if you get into a fight with this animal,
you're probably going to die and it's going to get your children," she
said.
She told the girls to walk quickly back up the trail toward their car,
which was two miles away. They did so, and Coder, walking backward with
her small knife in hand, followed with an eye on the lion until she could
no longer see it.
But a few hundred yards down the trail, Meagan screamed.
The cat had circled around in front of them and was waiting in the bushes.
Coder went ahead of the girls and, brandishing her knife, shouted at the
lion.
"I yelled 'get out of here. no!' like you do with a dog," she said. The cat
stayed in the bushes and the Coders hustled on to their car, safe at last.
Coder, who is a case worker with a children's protection agency, said the
only physical reminder is her sore hand, but the vision of the hungry cat
remains. Mountain lions can grow to 300 pounds and Coder said their
attacker was full-grown.
Rangers at the park told the Valley Morning Star,
the Harlingen newspaper, that the lion is a reclusive animal that shies away
from humans, but may have gone after the Coders because a severe drought
has made food scarce.
* The trail where the encounter took place has been
closed, but there are no plans to hunt and kill the cat, they said.
* Coder does not believe the cat should be destroyed,
saying, "he was doing what mountain lions do."
By JEFF FRANKS, Reuters
Original Story Published in The Nando Times
* My note:
Are these attitudes ones that should be
fostered in the light of the following research
It is not just human encroachment into their
territory that is responsible for more and more conflicts
Are we willing to give up
and even expanding attacks into long-populated, suburban areas?
Do we believe that we are above the danger from this impressive predator?
From:
Cougar Attacks in the U.S. and Canada