Cougar abattu à Vancouver

[Animal 0]

Cougar shot after dog and owner escape
Woman gets into house as wildcat stalks her pet pug

Maurice Bridge
Vancouver Sun

September 2, 2005

PORT HARDY - A Vancouver Island cougar wound up the loser Wednesday evening when
it tried to make a snack out of Lisa Nicholson's little dog.

In retrospect, Nicholson said Thursday, she should have known something was
wrong when she arrived home shortly before 7 p.m. to find a group of crows
complaining vigorously from a nearby tree.

She and her neighbours had been aware of a cougar in their rural neighbourhood
outside Port Hardy for about a week, and several house cats were missing.

Nicholson was taking no chances with her pug Mylo, so when she took him out for
his walk a few minutes later, she went only as far as the front yard, and Mylo
was on his leash.

The crows were still squawking, but her first indication of real trouble was a
touch on the calf of her left leg.

"I felt something on my leg and I turned, and there's the cougar," she said. "It
just felt like sort of like something brushed my leg."

The cougar later turned out to weigh about 22 kilograms, and Richardson, who is
162 centimetres tall and weighs about 54 kilograms, described it as about
knee-high.

"I looked at him, and he looked at me, and he was looking at my pug," she said.
"He wanted the dog, is what he wanted."

"I was thinking, 'Okay, what do you do?' Both vehicles in the driveway were
locked, so that wasn't an option. I thought, okay, he's between me and the
house, so I'm thinking, what do you do?"

Her carport was nearby, a couple of steps down from the yard, so she slowly went
down the stairs, keeping an eye on the cougar all the time. The cougar stayed
where it was, and kept watching.

"It's an open carport, and I just kind of snuck through," she said.

She got back into the house by a stairway from the carport and called the RCMP,
who arrived about 20 minutes later and cordoned off the area to wait for a
conservation officer, who arrived after another 10 minutes.

The cougar retreated under a table in the carport, and later moved under a boat
in the driveway.

Conservation officer Greg Kruger said capturing it was not an option when he got
to the scene.

"I grabbed a shotgun and walked up to the boat," he said. "I'd made the
determination already that we would not be relocating this cougar, that it would
be put down down due to its previous behaviour, coming after the dog as well as
showing no fear of the person who was right there with the dog."

He was about 15 metres from the boat when the cougar began to emerge, giving him
a clear shot.

"I took it, and hit it in the front shoulder area, which is usually a good
location and a fatal shot," he said.

Although hit hard by a 12-gauge rifle slug, the cougar jumped into a hedgerow
beside the house and disappeared. Cougar hounds arrived an hour later to track
it, but rain had weakened the scent and washed out the blood trail.

The task was further confused by the dogs' discovery of two domestic cat-kills
the cougar had made, and the hunt was abandoned around 11:30 p.m.

On Thursday morning, it took only half-an-hour for the hounds to track their
quarry.

"It was close to a hundred metres from where it was shot," said Kruger. "It was
still alive -- it was fatally hit, it wasn't going to go anywhere, but it did
live through the night -- so we humanely dispatched it with another shot from
the gun."

Closer examination found the cougar to be a juvenile female about one year old,
in reasonable health, but apparently hungry, with low fat reserves and an empty
stomach.

Nicholson escaped from her adventure with a scratch. Once she was safely in the
house, she pulled up the leg of her jeans where the cougar had touched her and
found blood on her skin.

"I didn't really feel anything, and I saw blood and I rinsed it off," she said.
"It's kind of just a scratch, a little one."

She went to hospital to have it cleaned and to get a tetanus shot, and when she
got home and checked Mylo she discovered he, too, had a scratch on his ear,
although she has no idea how he got it."

"He might have got us both with one swipe, because that's the only time he made
contact."

Despite her fright, Nicholson feels sorry for the cougar.

"I kind of do, because we got a really good look at him after the RCMP were
there," she said.

"He came out from his hiding place and he was just sitting there, and we got a
really good look at him and he was quite beautiful, really."

The Vancouver Sun 2005