A similar attack happened near where I live a few years back. Lady out jogging near Stanford. Yes, that Stanford. I’ve mentioned other similar events before. This one is down near Los Angeles where a big cat was stalking bikers a few years ago.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/mountain-lion-whiting-ranch-attack-14991846.php
How a California dad stopped a mountain lion attacking his 3-year-old son
By Amy Graff, SFGATE Updated 2:36 pm PST, Tuesday, January 21, 2020A California father didn’t hesitate Monday when a mountain lion scooped up his son from a hiking trail at the California wilderness area 50 miles southeast of Los Angeles.
The dad stopped the attack by hurling a backpack at the animal after it picked up the boy in its mouth.
“The mountain lion came out of somewhere and grabbed the 3-year-old by the neck and dragged him a short distance,” Orange County Fire Authority Capt. Tony Bommarito told USA Today. “The boy’s father threw his backpack at the cougar, which let go of the child, grabbed the pack and sprinted up a nearby tree.”
The father and son were hiking at the Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park with four other family members and called for help after the incident. The boy was treated and taken to a nearby hospital.
[…]
The park was evacuated while the Department of Fish and Wildlife lured the mountain lion from the tree and then euthanized it, according to CNN.
The Facebook group Orange County Outdoors shared a video of the cougar after it had run up a tree. “We do not support the decision to euthanize the cat but understand it’s in the general public’s best interest,” the group said in a statement.
I suppose eventually, after enough people are eaten, including some of their family and friends, the Greens will realize that promoting lots of Top Predators is a Bad Idea.
This, BTW, is due to the law in California criminalizing killing cougar and promoting their return.
Me? If in the outdoors, I always carry a knife, often a machete, and sometimes a gun. I value all life, even my own…
We have one attack like this reported every few years. Nobody knows how many lone hikers who disappear are cat food. Some areas have a lot of pet and farm animal losses… This will continue getting worse as the population of big cats fully returns to pre-hunting levels. Note that these attacks have happened very near urban areas. There is video of coyote packs in the suburbs here. Wild animals are not exclusive to the wilds. Without fear experiences and culling, they move into urban areas.
Big cats, wild pigs, and coyotes are already suburban in California. Bear are on the edge of the suburbs in the hills and I’ve seen them in folks yards. This is what happens when you ban shooting.
Musings from the Chiefio 
Yep when I was growing up mountain lions were quite rare they were actually protected they had been nearly hunted to extinction. Then as their populations started to rebound in the late 1980’s early 1990’s there was the first human kill in living memory a runner was killed by a mountain lion near Idaho Springs. Then a few years later a small child who had run ahead of his family group was grabbed by a lion and killed. There have also been multiple near misses where folks fought of mountain lions or watched them take pets in the back yard. I have a friend that has security footage of a large cat walking up his driveway when he lived near Evergreen, at the time he had two young children and was a bit concerned.
We also have had documented coyote attacks in built up areas. A man walking into work in the very early morning (about 5:00 am) was attacked by 3 coyotes and fought them off.
This one was photographed just off the fairway of a golf course less than a mile from my home.
This one was photographed about 200 yards from me on a local walking trail near work, and may be one of the coyotes that participated in the attack. Wild live destroyed the coyotes involved and this guy disappeared from that trail the same week.
In the last few years it has been very routine for moose, deer, bears and mountain lions to be spotted in the spring and fall as they try to fatten up or the younger ones start looking for new territory.
Of course wild life is not that far out of town anyway.
I got this picture just a few miles up in the hill at a local ski area just outside boulder
This critter was grazing right off the walking trail I took my lunch walk on a few years ago, so lots of “bait” for the predators around here.
By the way the above photos are all mine and copyrights reserved.
Happens when you ban shooting and also ban proper forest management which in turn, when it burns, shrinks the wildlife habitat and promotes encroachment in urbanized areas to compensate. Just sayin, just about everything supposedly green is usually backwards in the end.
Just look how beautiful all those acres of cut down forests look with those inefficient/intermittent black solar panels on them. They do wonderful for the local ecosystem, no? Doh!
This is one of the many Elk that live year around up in Rocky Mountain Park and will be very interesting to our wolf packs when they move a bit west over into the Grand Valley and into the front range.
Recent conservation efforts have also increased other formerly rare animals.
This guy literally spent the night perched on the hand rail of my apartment stair case (about 12 ft from my front door) a few weeks back.
I named him Fred but he found other more suitable roost locations the next day.
This is a bald eagle that was defending his rabbit catch from the Turkey Buzzards just off the parking lot where I worked about 9 years ago. There is a mating pair of them near where I currently work which I occasionally see shopping the prairie dog buffet in the fields near where they roost.
There is a lot more wild life out there than most folks realize but are oblivious to.
We also have a lynx that walks through our parking lot at work occassionally but so far I have not personally gotten a picture of him.
When I had free range bunnies in the back yard, I also had occasional visits from various predatory birds. We would toss “stuff” at them until they moved on. The airsoft gun worked best…
@L.L.:really nice pictures, Btw. Wish I’d bothered to take pictures…
Thanks EM (nice pictures) I finally got around to reactivating a hosting account so I can share some of them.
California needs Grizzlies also. They would need to be protected from harm. They need to be able to roam the streets of San Francisco, unfettered.
Sacramento would also be good habitat.
That would be cruel, the poor bears would likely overdose on opioids and other street drugs.
Personally I think the “big cleanup” will happen with the next Great San Francisco earth quake but unfortunately no telling when that would happen.
They already realize that as that is their goal! It is the insane version of NIMBY. They figure they will be (or in the words of Saberhagen- Good Life) the last ones to go.
This idiocy also happens in Oz. The Greens have banned shooting crocs and netting sharks, so people are eaten. Indeed I noticed than an inland town was overrun by camels a while ago. In the good old days the locals would just have shot them, of course.
Might also be part of the agenda 21 plan, make the wilderness dangerous, disarm the public and in self defense they move to the mega-cities.
I used to think they were just brain dead stupid but that only fits if you assume they share some of your reasonable expectations.
Once you start asking how does this outcome advance their oppressive agenda, you realize it does make sense but only to a sociopath, it is vile, evil and predatory but logical why they do what they do.
They want the cities to be hell holes, because eventually the people will demand draconian action to clean them up and of course they will provide it with their storm troopers, curfews, and oppressive laws and surveillance state.
Bureaucrats always destroy the society they manage, ALWAYS. . it is their nature to expand their realm of control and demands for wealth and power to Control Everything. Today we are watching their Deep/Dark State trying to subvert those that were elected to prevent their coup.
President Trump has demonstrated the results of only a slight reduction in the bureaucratic state regulation. The Bureaucratic state must be reduced to a minimum or they will strangle our society.
I(t is them or us! We don’t need them. ..pg
I live in Carson Valley, Nevada, and often hike up the eastern slope of the Sierra east of Lake Tahoe. My hikes start in Nevada and routinely go into California. I won’t say whether or not I carry a firearm on these hikes.
That said, since California doesn’t manage its booming mountain lion population through hunting, many cats migrate into Nevada where the population is steadily increasing. Nevada now issues over 100 hunting permits issued annually for mountain lions. There has been a persistent cat roaming around Genoa, Nevada–known for its large and complacent/docile deer population. The deer make easy prey for this adult cat.
It all started with Bambi. (Not really. Hitler was “green” and used it to his advantage.)
But I believe that 25% (or more?) of the U.S. were farmers when Bambi came out. Those that weren’t farmers had relatives that were farmers; grandparents, aunts, uncles. Most in the U.S. were only once removed from family farming where some livestock was raised for slaughter to feed the family. Additionally, a high percentage of the population hunted for supplementary food.
Anyhow, I seriously believe that Bambi was one of the cultural markers of our society that helped the Commies, in their long march through the institutions, push emotion over reason in the U.S.
I place Bambi as partly to blame for the mess that is the U.S. of today. Not kidding.
Coyotes are now common in Southern Ontario and these are not your scrawny, rangy western coyotes. They are genetically a hybrid of the eastern coyote and timber wolf called a coy-wolf by some. They can run up to 80 pounds. And they do hunt in packs. I live on the river near the downtown of London Ontario. I regularly see deer in the neighbourhood. This fall I found a deer carcass not 5 minutes walk from my home. It had been torn to shreds with mostly hide and bones remaining. Almost certainly killed by coyotes.
Back in the late 1970s & early 1980s, I solo backpacked into the Ventana Wilderness (Big Sur, Monterey Co., Calif.). I once even led a backpacking trip 12 miles along the same trail. Were I still in Silicon Valley (from which it’s barely more than a long commute), I’d never do that nowadays. I’d timed my setting out on the trail for sunset, to dodge the heat of day. Nowadays, I have no doubt that it’d be absolutely foolish to follow such a plan.. Mountain lions are ambush predators, and crepuscular (i.e., favoring dawn & dusk), are they not? The trail was cut along a high-relief gorge of the Big Sur River, and safe movement was single-file, so even with a firearm, there was nearly no room to maneuver against a sudden feline attack, but many dozens of feet of sharp slope for potentially disastrous falls.
This was right before the Mountain Lion Foundation was founded by the wealthy Margaret Owings, so she could meddle in yet another aspect of state wildlife-protection policy [*]. She was moving on from her successes in precluding conservation of the state’s shellfish fisheries, by her meddling as founder of the Friends of the Sea Otter. She in particular had no interest in scientific fact; she was once quoted in the San José Mercury Sunday supplement as loving the rhetorical freedom that ignoring science and other facts provided her.
I got to know single-species wildlife protectionists much better than I ever would’ve wanted, had I known what I was getting into.
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Note *: State wildlife policy was determined back then by the Dept. of Fish & Game (DFG), which was mostly genuinely dedicated to its increasingly contradictory missions to conserve fish & wildlife while providing its citizens with opportunities to harvest them, yet protecting fish & wildlife populations. and the governor-appointed Fish & Game Commission. Alas, by the early 1980s, DFG’s funding for research & enforcement had already begun its legislatively caused downward slide.
@Compu Gator re State Fish & Game or Wildlife departments or whatever a State calls them:
I was born and raised in a State where the Department of Wildlife was funded solely by hunting and fishing licenses and by boat licenses. All license revenue went straight to the Department’s budget and they had to make do with that. Fish and Game was sub-unit of Wildlife.
The employees, up until very recently, were all into hunting, fishing, boating, hiking, camping, wildlife preservation, and increasing fish and game populations for the food and sport opportunities for the State’s residents based on their own love of those activities.
Now the old gang, who fished/hunted/camped/hiked, has retired, but even the tree hugging, Bambi protecting, magic mushroom eating college grads that are taking over still do a decent job of developing and protecting the wildlife of the state. They are a good bit on the anti-hunting side, but they are surprisingly OK with it as a tool to maintain as optimal balance of wildlife as possible that the State lands will support. Their decent resource management probably a blessing of Bureaucratic Institutional Inertia left over from the old guard.
N.B., then:
a) The fishing, hunting, and boat license revenue is a heapin’ honkin’ pile-O-money.
ii) The State Legislature and Governor have been trying for years to get that revenue to go into the General Fund where they can skim most of it and toss a bone to the hunters, fishers, and campers who actually pay the freight for the resources they use.
The money grab comes up every few years and the State’s residents absolutely pulverize any politician who tries to mess with the funding system. The pollies’ male/female whatzits are separated from their anatomy and shoved so far down their throat that they never try it again. It’s always a few years before a new batch comes in and tries again to put that revenue into the general fund.
As a consequence of Wildlife being funded by the people that actually use the resources, once-threatened wildlife populations are growing, we have great parks, plentiful well maintained boat launches, a variety of campgrounds from primitive to deluxe, ever expanding hiking trails, and fairly sane rules balancing protection and harvesting of wildlife. And this is all despite the eco-loonies that graduate and are hired by our Division of Wildlife.
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My first job out of college was an Engineering position at McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis, Missouri. I had to move from my home State to take the position. I bought my Missouri fishing license thinking I was dutifully supporting my passion for fishing. It wasn’t long before I found out that all hunting, fishing, and boat licensing revenue went into the general fund and Missouri’s ‘Wildlife Department’ (mumble mumble whatever it was called) got whatever the State deigned to trickle back to them from what was left over of the revenue was diverted to cronies and vote buying.
Any boating/fishing/camping improvements were majorly sucky-poo because of that.
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After 2 1/2 years of fun playing around FA-18s, F-15s, AV-8s, and F-4s, me and 5,500 of my closest friends and coworkers were all let go from McDonnell Douglas on the same day because the company lost the contract for the next generation fighter to Lockheed. That’s the nature of the game in the aerospace biz.
However, fishing nut that I am, I was never so glad as to return to my home state where every penny I paid for outdoor activities in State fees came right back to me.
Listen up! For those of you who are under governance where the users pay the tax directly to the body that oversees their favored activity and then get it right back to themselves, DON”T EVER let the pollies divert that revenue to the General Fund.
Fight to your last breath! Even the recent college graduated SJW greenies do a far better job than the legislators, who only throw moldy crusts of bread back to those that paid for better fish and game management.
/storytime + precautionary tale
@HR – re: funding of DGIF – yea, kind of like how the lottery profit was all going to education. It does, but then the general funds are reduced by a commensurate amount. That is how it is in the Old Dominion.