The thing to remember is that most predators aren’t interested in fights to the death. They want to kill you and eat you with minimum fuss and bother. From the cougar’s point of view, killing you and eating you is a bad deal if it has a significant risk of getting injured. So fighting off an enraged cougar might be extremely difficult, killing one with your bare hands nearly impossible, but convincing one that it should go away and leave you in peace is much easier. If you act in ways the cougar doesn’t expect or do things it doesn’t understand then it will lose a lot of confidence.
great…now I have this Bruce Lee vs. Rottie mix fight scene in my head complete with smack noises and immortal opponents.
<laughs and wipes away a tear…> Yeesh… If only real life had those sound effects! It’d be a great party trick no? I could to a strike to the air and have a thunderous SNAP! It wasn’t as graceful as I made it out. It was more an issue of timing and knowing that there was no way I could outrun the damn thing. Adrenelin is your friend.
Just out of curiosity, how’d you manage to grab the rear legs of a jumping dog? I’m not doubting you did, but my brain is slipping gears and I can’t figure out how one would do this - so help me out.
I’m imagining the dog jumping straight at my face leading with it’s muzzle… it’s front legs are doing a “Superman” out front like this, but I think I’d get a face full of teeth if I grabbed them. I’d need to grab the back legs to swing it head-first into something. Did you side-step the jump, and/or was grabbing the legs the right way at the right time the “extremely lucky” part of your encounter?
I’m not going to mince words with this one, people: very, very few wild animals are a serious threat to a full-grown, reasonably fit human. Big cats may look scary, but few of them (for example, bears, african lions and tigers) are really equipped to deal with humans from a position of real superiority. Mountain lions aren’t up there.
There are several reasons for this. First of all, you are bigger. And quite probably stronger. Anmd you have a lot more range of motion and a lot more brain. Don’t panic, and you should easily drive the predator off. You can take an amazing amount of damage (most people really don’t understand how tough they really are), and the predator cannot afford to get into a fight. They have claws, but those are a lot less dangerous than you may imagine. They have teeth, but those are limited weapons. Mountain lions, IIRC, rely on quick attacks to put the prey down fast. They are not equipped to do battle with a human being, who has much more stamina.
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It may jump out and attack you. Ball up your fists and block it from hitting your throat or guts). Those are the real places you are vulnerable. Human skin is actually fairly tough and will protect you well enough.
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Don’t run. Stare the bastard down and prepare to fight. Get angry. Get pissed. This little pathetic beast thinks it can contend with YOU the apex of evolution. You are going to tear its fraggin head off for sheer insolewnce alone, and wear its shredded hide as slippers!
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If it continues to attack, grab a weapon or just use your fists to beat it with every ounce of power you’ve got. This will srprise it and hopefully get it to go away. Keep your eye on the bastard and don’t let him get behind you. Even if you get hurt, don’t worry about it. He wants you to slow down, to flee, or to nurse your wound. You want to terrorize this little cat trash. Kick it, hit it with a stick, throw rocks at it.
Actually killing one with no weapon would require geting on its back. I don’t reccomend trying this, though its hardly impossible.
Would that explain why virtually any wild creature meeting a human will flee, even if the only humans they have exposure to are primitive?
If we assume that a wolf hunting in a pack or a cougar using stealth is “natural” then we should likewise assume that humans use spears, stealth and sundry dirty tricks in hunting. I *wonder * if our tendency to exterminate creatures we consider dangerous tends to select for preditors that defer to us?
Whereas most mountain lions do understand how tough they are.
Which is why cougars are good at stalking prey and the surprise attack. Your first warning will probably be teeth in your throat.
Your advice is reasonably well grounded in human psychology, but will probably avail little. When a creature built for killing that kills tough prey every week faces one that may never in its life have killed anything bigger than a mouse, the outcome is fairly certain.
FYI dogs (domestic) kill more humans every year in the United States than mountain lions do…a lot more. Deer are the #1 killer of humans in the United States (admittedly usually by causing car crashes but while travelling in Canada I was told the deer were more likely to hurt me than a bear but that is mostly due to stupid tourists thinking Bambi isn’t dangerous and approaching too closely…they can and do use their hooves in defense not to mention horns if available).
The #1 killer of humans overall? Mosquitos. By a HUGE margin (something like 2,000,000 people per year).
Pardon guys…this is all very interesting, as I am a huge suck in the woods and scared of my own shadow. But… how would someone fight back with rocks or sticks WITHOUT bending down? Carry a bag full of them ahead of time? lol. I could see if something tackled you and you were already on the ground, reaching for a rock or something to help you get back on your feet, though.
Also, would a menstrating woman be more vulnerable? My father always told me that, however he’s a joker and I never did know if he was serious about it. Up here in Northern Ontario, whenever we go blueberry picking in the bush, I was also advised to take a whistle and make a ton of noise so as to not surprise any bears or any other dangerous animal. I’d rather bring a shotgun than a friggen whistle though. And have, 
(Sorry this second part wasn’t about mountain lions but I got on a little roll there…)
Slight side-step and a grab of the outside foreleg. Grab rear leg while turning and swing for the fences. The tree was a lucky break for me. I really didn’t have a choice to get away, and I really didn’t want the damn thing getting it’s teeth on me.
When I’m in a dangerous environment, I’ll pick up a rock or big stick as a matter of course before danger presents. I might get got as I bend down, but that’s the breaks, ya know?
I don’t know how `smelly’ menstrus is to the average predator animal, and if it would make any difference over and above the scent of the average human being. (I’m not saying humans aren’t clean, I’m just saying that these beings have large portions of their brain devoted to processing olfactory information and inhabit a world of smells that is closed to humans.) But I’d imagine that humans are, if nothing else, noisy enough to give more than fair warning to anything out there, predatory or not.
Which brings me to my question: How advisable is it, now, to carry noisemakers into the woods? Time was, the thinking went that bears and cougars wanted to avoid humans, and would get out of our way if we’d just wear bells and such so’s not to sneak up on them. But with the latest Orange County mankillers*, how advisable is it to advertise one’s presence?
*Which would make a great name for a band of some sort. Punk, maybe, or rap.
I don’t normally do asides in General Questions but these Serengeti Bushmen deserve respect. On an unremembered documentary show two Serengeti Bushmen with loincloths and wooden spears were tracking a herd. Two cheetahs beat them to the kill scattering the herd. These two mostly naked pre-stone age equipped men stole the kill from the cheetahs. One grabbed the carcus while the other one beat the ground with a stick.
Those guys work for a living!
Another lesson to be drawn for the OP is to concur with other’s posts that bluff is your best bet. I noticed that the Bushman never actually hit one of the cheetahs. Perhaps if he did then the bluff would be called when the cheetah realized it wasn’t hurt.
Cheetahs aren’t actually all that tough to scare off. Not to take anything away from the bushmen or anything - I wouldn’t be first in line to risk my neck in that environment. I’ve also seen nature shows about baboons, and how they will drive off cheetahs from a kill… even multiple cheetahs while being out-numbered. Those poor scrawny kitties get disprespected by pretty much anything their own size and even smaller; they’re built for speed not fighting.
However a leopard would be much harder to steal from. I’ve seen one leopard stroll up and scatter an entire baboon troupe - dozens of them just on sight. Talk about baboons being typical bullies .
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- Well let’s start small first: a (wesern hemisphere) mountain lion/puma grows to less than 100 pounds at the southern end of its range, and up to 150 pounds at the northern end of its range. Southern pumas eat more smaller animals such as jackrabbits, because there’s much fewer bigger animals around to catch and eat, and the ground they hunt is open and the small animals are easiest to find. Northern pumas on the other hand eat BIG, it is not uncommon for a 150-pound puma to kill a 750-pound elk. This is the largest prey-to-predator weight ration of land animals there is; no other terrestrial creature will regularly hunt and kill prey five times its size. So if a puma really wants you and you are alone with no weapons, it don’t matter who you are–you are puma food.
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- Another difference is how (smaller) cats tend to attack: they will try to grab on to the prey’s head/neck area with their mouth and front claws, and then they will kick into the stomache area with their hind feet, ripping the bowels open. Even domestic housecats will engage in this behavior when pressed. By comparison dogs only grab one point with their mouth and thrash their head around to try to rip it open.
- It is observed by people who live in areas with big cats that they tend to wait until you are not watching them to attack. That does not mean that any attack can be prevented, just that looking away tends to preceed it–so should you encounter one, keeping your eyes peeled on the cat is of primary importance. -And cheetahs are the wimpiest of the big cats; they make the safest pets because they are built very lightly compared to other big cats (and they are very aversive to physical attacks) and they have small teeth and unhooked claws. To top it all off Cheetahs do not hunt prey larger than themselves; in fact they prefer it quite a bit smaller. They are built for speed, not getting into close-in fights and they know it.
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- As far as “pumas vs. dogs”, I also meant to include that in California there have been lots of cases of “disappearing dogs”, and so far, I have heard of not one case of a domestic dog slaying a healthy puma. After the 1986 ban on puma hunting, one of the first observed attacks was an adult collie getting carried off by its neck. I read a lot of shooting and hunting boards that link to these stories, but I live quite a ways away and someone in the area would probably hear more about these things…
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- As far as “pumas vs. dogs”, I also meant to include that in California there have been lots of cases of “disappearing dogs”, and so far, I have heard of not one case of a domestic dog slaying a healthy puma. After the 1986 ban on puma hunting, one of the first observed attacks was an adult collie getting carried off by its neck. I read a lot of shooting and hunting boards that link to these stories, but I live quite a ways away and someone in the area would probably hear more about these things…
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My breed of choice, the Dogo Argentino, is regularly used to hunt wild boar and puma in Argentina. These dogs are hunted in packs, generally ranging from two to maybe six or so dogs, but they can and do take down these big cats.
Note: these are not your average pet pooches, so as to whether a standard American pet dog could take down a puma, or a dogo one-on-one, I’d say it’s very, very unlikely. Dogs have one set of weapons, while cats have five, along with being extremely lithe and agile, and killing for a living. As far as smiling bandit’s assertation that the average human is probably stronger than one of these cats, I’d find that very difficult to believe, considering the relatively sedentary lifestyle that most Americans lead. A dogo puppy at four months is strong enough to pull you over if you’re not paying attention when it lunges at the end of the leash, if you don’t have some serious obedience training and mental control over these dogs, there is absolutely no way you’d have a physical advantage over it once it hits adulthood (I’m excluding those trained in physcal combat, etc). Since they (dogos) generally top out at around 120, I have no problem believing a mountain lion would have me for dinner in a hand-to-hand fight. Even if I were physically stronger than the cat, I’m pink and fleshy and unarmed, whereas it has a set of three inch long canines and four paws full of powerful claws. I might be able to intimidate it with lots of noise and motion, but if it wants me dead, I’m going to be dead.
~mixie
Do they close with the puma and kill it, or do they simply corner or “tree” it for the benefit of the human hunter?
People have trained dogs to hunt lions in Africa, but the dogs must learn to keep their distance.
Guns is good !!!
I took on and won against an excited German Shepherd once, and got my arm chewed a bit and strained every muscle I had. ( adrenaline is not always your friend) I’m 6’4"+ and at that time was about 220 and in good shape.
Many years later I was talking to the guy who let me in with this gal:
GAL
and he was explaining about how big cats have a short attention span and unless really hungry or mad, they mostly needed distraction. His weapon of control around this gal was a spray bottle of ammonia which was all he needed to distract her. They do not like ammonia and it gets their attention. Also why the old performers used a chair, the 4 legs of it confuses the cat and they are not sure what to attack.
But again:
Guns is good !!!
I hike in the mountains a lot. I assume I have been observed by mountain lions many times. They are cats, after all. Watch your cat sit patiently observing a mouse sometime. Or the area where the mouse disappeared into. You are that mouse. The mouse doesn’t know it is being observed.
If lions had a taste for people, the hiking trails of the Western US would be littered with their bones. But attacks are very rare indeed even though they will know you are there.
If you are attacked, you are in deep shit. Play with your cat sometime and check out that kicking of the back legs as it holds your arm with it’s front. That is your guts being spilled on the ground.
I’ve always thought that trying to get your fingers into the lion’s eyes would be the best last resort defense, but I hope never to have to test that.
I also carry bear spray, a powerful pepper spray made to deter charging bears. Practice a quick draw.
A sheath knife may be a good idea. Not a lockback. No time for that in an attack.