OK, looks like the cat or dog of the home is toast if it comes out. That would be a REAL shocker to
walk out into. Yikes!
What are the rules about shooting them when you find one on your front porch or
in your shop? the good news is that MOST of them seem to decide that large adult humans
are a bit too large, so rarely attack --- except kids and women.
Look up 'cougar attacks' on the web. There used to be a woman, Linda, IIRC who had put
up a web site cataloging cougar attacks and getting stories. She started when there were a
lot of tracks around her horse barn, and she was worried about dogs and horses, and herself.
Local cops and game cops (east of Ft. Collins, IIRC) just said that they were dog tracks, no big
deal, forget about it.
Attacks are from above, trying to bite the base of the skull for
an instant kill. Usually fails on bigger humans, but frequently the fangs slice the scalp to the bone
across the rear of the skull. Multiple survivors report having to hold their scalp up out of their
eyes, with blood every where and fighting off a big cat. Several folks have managed to kill
or drive them off with a Buck knife or equivalent.
I asked a friend who teaches anatomy
to MD students and he says that the scalp is stretched tighly over the skull, so if sliced, it
retracts, and drops your forehead and hair in your eyes...
Fighting off a 100 lb cat with a Buck knife
on one bloody hand, while holding your scalp up so you can see with the other.... Not a nice
image in my brain! Thank goodness human attacks are still pretty rare.
Here is a link, she is Linda Lewis, looks like the pages are only partially up now, probably
$$. We corresponded via e-mail and she was doing out of her own pocket, and that was
at least 10 or 15 years back.
http://www.angelfire.com/co/KlueLass/lions/attacks2.htm
http://tchester.org/sgm/lists/lion_attacks_nonca.html
apparently some collaborator's site,
http://www.topangaonline.com/nature/lionatk.html
They are closer than most folks think. A friend in Fla; we went to college together, stayed
in G'ville. He does consulting in biology and water flows (we have done a good bit of cave
diving together, he is really world class diver, gets invited to be a support diver for Nat Geo cave
diving articles). He also just looks for cool stuff to do. He was assisting a UF researcher a
few years back who had captured and radio collared a few Florida panthers. He reported that
one that they were locating (they went out to locate them each AM) showed up on the edge of
town, and as they did crossing direction finding lines of position, eventually realized that it was
laying up on the palmetto patch in the front yard (sort of native shrubbery feature, left when
clearing out the underbrush) of a home at the edge of suburbia. The patch was about 8x10 ft.
The area had several homes under construction just down the street and they found tracks
along the back edge of the properties that were being built on, at the edge of the woods.
The casually asked the construction guys if they had "seen anything unusual around here",
and got all negative responses. The scientist decided not to freak out the family that had a panther
spending the hot part of the day in their shrubbery.
They are out there much more than most know, and we still rarely see them.
Bill