In the warm and fuzzy world of some folks, wild animals all have big moist brown eyes, cute noses, and a cuddly personality. But that doesn’t exactly square with reality. Take, for example, the incident involving Mark Reynolds, a 35-year-old guy who went out for a mountain bike ride in California in January 2004, and was later found dead and partly eaten by a cougar (mountain lion). Nothing warm and fuzzy about it.
Of course, the warm and fuzzy crowd will claim that was an anomaly. Well, try telling that to the family of the 41-year-old Arkansas woman who was killed in her own front yard by a cougar in May 2003. Or the incident in Colorado in 1999 when a 3-year-old boy went missing and was later found to have been dragged away and killed by a cougar.
I could go on and on. The list is really pretty long. And that’s just cougars. What about bears, or moose, or bison, or coyotes, or …? Let’s pause momentarily for a dose of wildlife reality. There are lots of wild animals that will attack a human, sometimes with fatal results. It does no good to play the denial game. The only good thing we can do is learn the truth and then figure out what to do if we are ever in a violent confrontation with a wild animal.
[Great advice at How to Survive Wild Animal Attacks by Outdoor Life. The whole article is long but well-worth it if you venture outdoors in less urban areas. Be sure to shop our webstore for protection against wild animals.]