I’ve spent many hours at Prairie Creek State Park. It is a beautiful place and a great park.
In all of the years that I lived in Humboldt, I’ve only seen one big cat in the wild, running across a rural county road and up the hillside. Even at that distance it was a breathtaking creature. I’ve come across one fresh track in some riverbar mud while backpacking on The Lost Coast, but never saw the cat.
With a small group of students from my Advanced Mammalogy class I was given the amazing opportunity to necropsy/dissect 5 adult cats that had been taken with depredation permits. They had previously occupied a Dept. of Fish and Game freezer that had malfunctioned. So instead of letting the bodies thaw and rot, they handed them over to my university.
I will never forget that experience, and I learned an amazing amount about these beautiful creatures.
If you make a fist with both hands, and hold them 2-3 inches appart, palm to palm, your fists give you an approximate view of the size and shape of the temporalis muscles on the skull of an adult cat if you were staring at it face to face. Absolutely massive muscles that function to slam the jaws shut.
I never owned a gun until living out west, it wasn’t for home defense, it was for my defense against animals who may find myself or my wife tastey.
In the end my wife wanted me to give up the gun on hiking trips for a more humane bear spray…Still I had my doubts about the efficacy of the spray, and put the 38 in my backpack…
ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies, whereabouts in Humboldt Cty did you live? My dad was raised in Rohnerville (when there was a Rohnerville, it’s now incorporated into Fortuna). In fact, Dad’s the same age as Mr. Hamm – I’ll have to ask him if the name rings a bell.
Actually, from what I read, the pen wasn’t that effective. She kept trying to put out the cougar’s eye, and instead the pen (a Bic, I’m guessing) bent until it was useless. If you’re going to carry an anti-cougar pen, make sure it’s made of steel, or at least a space-age polymer.
The pen isn’t always mightier than the sword, not even as a metaphor.
If this woman had sat down and written a witheringly ironic précis criticising the predatory attitudes of mountain lions, and then read it out loud to this animal in particular, it’s doubtful she would have beaten off the attack with any degree of success.
Presumably her other weapon wasn’t an olive branch.
Is pepper spray effective on cougar?? My first impression is, they wouldn’t like it one bit. But I’m not willing to do a real life test, uh. Fighting ignorance is one thing!
Until I see the words ‘…trifecta now in play’ on Fark, I couldn’t possibly comment.
No, wait, how about drinking chardonnay without swallowing a black fly?
Outside magazine seems to think that pepper spray would work, but their article also highlights how rare it is to have a documented attack on someone who wasn’t alone. I’ll have to read some of the articles again to see how far behind Mr. Hamm was, but he was extremely lucky that his wife was with him that day.
Another thing I’ve been thinking about…the blow that finally made the cat let go was a blow to the face/head of the cat. Presumably, while Mr. Hamm’s head/neck area was in the cat’s mouth. It seems like a risky technique, although it worked in this case. I would worry about causing the animal to bite down harder or have the force of the blow push a sharp tooth closer to the spine or an artery. Using pepper spray seems like a safer bet, if she had been carrying any, which she wasn’t.
My mom, brother, and sister-in-law live out in Honeydew and Petrolia, which is where I grew up. I went to high school in Ferndale, and lived there and in Fortuna while attending College of the Redwoods. For my time at Humboldt State I lived in Arcata.
Dunno - in that extreme a predicament, probably anything you do, as fast as you can stands a better chance of working than doing nothing at all while you cook up a plan.
