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Through the doggie door! Wow, that would be such a surprise.

SALIDA, Colo. (AP) - Colorado Division of Wildlife says it has euthanized a mountain lion after it entered a Chaffee County home and killed a dog.

DOW says officers tranquilized the lion, but it appeared to be malnourished, and they decided to euthanize the animal.

The lion chased a small dog through a pet door of a home near Salida Thursday afternoon. Michelle Bese took her 5-year-old and hid in a bedroom where her 2-year-old was sleeping. Chaffee County Sheriff’s deputies arrived and helped the family escape through a bedroom window.

DOW officers arrived shortly after and tranquilized the lion. They say it was about 20 pounds underweight for its age.

The family had five dogs. One pup died and two were seriously injured.

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Normally mountain lions are so solitary that meet-ups result in one of them being killed. If this picture is authentic, it’s pretty remarkable.

Photo by Courtesy photo

A Durango Herald reader sent in this photo of five mountain lions and said it was taken recently in La Plata Canyon, “out by the mine.” It is unusual behavior for the solitary animals, said Patt Dorsey, area wildlife manager for the state Division of Wildlife.

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This is a strange story. Normally, mountain lions are solitary creatures, with ranges of miles and miles.  I almost don’t believe it. But I’m glad they aren’t embarking on a mountain lion killfest because of it.

Two brothers hiking in Pescadero Creek Park in San Mateo County had a close encounter of the threatening kind when they came face to face with two aggressive mountain lions, prompting the temporary closure of the park.

The California Department of Fish and Game reports that the men were hiking in the park late Sunday afternoon when one of them was approached by a mountain lion showing aggressive behavior. The man picked up a large stick and started swinging it at the lion while shouting. His brother, who was nearby and heard the shouting, came to his aid and then noticed a second lion approaching.

The mountain lions remained outside the range of the swinging stick, but just a few feet away. Together, the men eventually scared off both animals.

The hikers told DFG wardens that they were confronted for an estimated two to four minutes, which is highly unusual for mountain lions. Thus, the animals were deemed a threat to public safety and the park was closed.

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It’s a conspiracy, apparently. I don’t know why PA would want to cover up if they did have Mountain Lions in the state. Because Mountain Lions are awesome.

On Wednesday morning, about a year after the cougar episode erupted in Sadsbury Township, Samuel S. Fisher finished a farm chore and rode a draft horse into his yard.

He hopped down nimbly. He chatted about post-cougar life on his Amish produce farm.

It’s been rocky, he said.

The scene hasn’t changed visibly since sightings of the big cats began trickling in.

The corn has again grown tall. Woods still loom thickly beyond the pasture.

Fisher continues to maintain that he shot a marauding mountain lion with a rifle last October and then used his pocketknife to stab another big cat that jumped him from a tree.

The claims caused a clamor in the area and triggered a futile helicopter hunt for the beasts.

A state police lab test of the knife revealed human blood, but none from a cougar, said state Wildlife Conservation Officer Dennis Warfel, who investigated.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission concluded the animals were imaginary and threatened to cite Fisher with making a false report.

But that never happened.

After sitting down last winter with Amish church leaders, Warfel said, commissioners decided to drop the matter.

That saved Fisher up to $300 in fines. But it cost him a month at Rest Haven Inc., a private mental health services facility in Goshen, Ind.

Fisher said he went there to get checked out at the behest of his church community.

“I came home with a clean [slate],” Fisher said. But the interlude led to “a heck of a tough winter” and weeks of lost income for his family of nine.

It did not change his mind about what he experienced, he added.

“They’re saying it’s a hoax,” he said of the Game Commission. “I told them just like it was.”

Fisher, a stocky man in his early 40s, sells such commodities as blueberries, tomatoes, homemade cheese and eggs.

His Country View Produce farm on Windy Top Road occupies an out-of-the-way corner of the county.

But he’s far from alone in asserting that cougars roam some of the emptier spots of the Northeast.

Six Sadsbury Township area residents went on record last year saying they’d seen or heard evidence of the big cats.

Stephen L. Mohr, a former PGC commissioner, said he believes them.

“There’s no question there were cats there,” Mohr said.

Mohr is now chairman of the Conoy Township supervisors and president of Unified Sportsmen of Pennsylvania, which has repeatedly sued the Game Commission over its deer-management policy.

After the attack, Fisher said, Mohr came to his farm and helped him find what they thought were cougar prints in the dust.

Unified Sportsmen raised a small amount of money to defend Fisher, said Charles Bolgiano, the group’s legislative aide.

In addition, Mohr’s daughter notified the Game Commission by letter that she was representing Fisher.

That was in November.

The commission never responded, said Kendra Mohr, a partner in the law firm of Pannebaker & Mohr.

Meanwhile, Fisher said, on the night of Nov. 15, “my neighbor’s horse was attacked by something.”

“That hide was peeled over” as if raked by big claws, Fisher said. His own horses bolted through a fence, which he said had never happened in the 22 years he has lived there.

The neighbor’s black two-year-old colt recovered, Fisher said.

On Nov. 26, state wildlife conservation officers confirmed that a farm manager killed a serval cat that was killing chickens roughly 35 miles away in Willistown Township, Chester County.

The serval, an exotic African feline that resembles a small cheetah, had been domesticated, according to the Game Commission.

By that time, apparently, the alleged mountain lions had vanished from Lancaster County.

Unified Sportsmen received unverifiable reports that they were hunted down secretly and killed, Mohr said.

Nobody in the case is claiming the animals were wild.

“I don’t think I’d be alive if this was a wild mountain lion,” Fisher said. “My feeling is it was a [young] pet cat” that escaped or was set free.

Mohr said he believes someone released the cats “to cause a ruckus.” That person then stood back and watched the uproar unfold on the Fisher farm, according to Mohr.

But experts have long since discounted the idea there were any cougars at all.

Mountain lions are solitary animals, pointed out Kerry Gyekis, a forester and researcher with the Eastern Cougar Foundation, Harman, W.Va., which is dedicated to reestablishing cougars in the East.

“[Fisher] reported three cougars” of different colors, Gyekis recounted in an e-mail. “I doubt if that has ever happened in the history of man. Another was supposedly a black cougar … there is no history of any in the Americas … period.”

Game Commission officers found no scat, prints or other physical evidence of big cats, Warfel said.

“We feel [Fisher] believes he saw something,” Warfel added, and that many other reports also are sincere.

He encouraged people to call in unusual sights or sounds.

But he said loud, unearthly screechings can often be pinned to more prosaic creatures, such as great horned owls or raccoons.

The report of a bobcat, too, in this area could be credible, he said. “I’ve heard a bobcat in the wild and it is one gosh-awful … it sounds like a woman being attacked.”

Fisher snorts at such explanations.

“I’m talking something as long as from me to you,” he said, indicating about a 7-foot span.

“My story hasn’t changed since day one,” the farmer emphasized.

Things have thankfully quieted down. However, Fisher added, “I still dread going into the woods because you never know what’s in there.”

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The PA Game Commission is on the scene this morning looking for a possible mountain lion that attacked a farmer at 5:30 Thursday afternoon.

An Amish farmer saw two large cats in his backyard, went to get a gun and then shot one of the cats injuring it, leaving a trail of blood into the woods. When the farmer followed the cat, on of the cats attacked him cutting his shoulder and arm.

The game commission maintains that mountain lions do not live in Pennsylvania and have not for over 100 years.

Bobcats live near the Harrisburg area. But members of this Amish community, who have seen the cats mid August, say there is a distinct difference between these cats and a bobcat.

The two differences between a bobcat and a mountain lion are size and tail length. A mountain lion is double the size of a bobcat and has a much longer tail.

The game commission is combing the woods looking for the injured cat.

They said they are not sure what the animal is and hope to find the animal or a hair sample to help identify the animal.

As for the farmer attacked, he was treated at Lancaster General Hospital. He is suspected to be ok.

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A Santa Barbara County man is recovering after being attacked by a mountain lion on San Marcos Pass.

The man lost his pet cat in the attack. He and his girlfriend were walking around their home near the intersection of Painted Cave and Old San Marcos Road when he says the mountain lion attacked them.

After killing his cat, the mountain lion tripped the victim and bit him in the arm. The 6′4″ man was able to strike the mountain lion and it ran away

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DANSKIN, B.C. — A B.C. mother who fended off a cougar attacking her seven-year-old son says her boy is recovering well but doesn’t want anyone discussing the ordeal in front of him.

Mary Metzler said her son, David Metzler Jr., needed 22 stitches to close a gash on his head after the cougar pounced on him.

Metzler’s son was the second child in the province to be attacked by a cougar in less than a week.

She said her boy also has puncture wounds on his back and that his right eye was swollen shut immediately after the attack on New Year’s Eve morning in the tiny central B.C. community of Danskin.

Metzler said her son initially had trouble sleeping and still doesn’t want to hear any talk of what happened to him.

“If we want to discuss it with someone we go to another room,” Metzler said Tuesday. “He asked us, ‘Please don’t talk about it in front of me.’ It makes it hard for him all over again.”

Metzler heard her son’s terrifying screams while she was volunteering to clean her kids’ school during the winter break.

“When I opened the door and stepped out (the cougar) looked up at me and when it looked up it had Davie’s tuque in its mouth,” she said.

“I walked up to it with my scrub rag and smacked it in the face.”

Metzler initially didn’t know what kind of animal was mauling her son, who’d been sledding with his five-year-old sister.

“Now looking back, I realize what could have happened, how it could have ended, but right then I didn’t think about that. I just knew something had to done and it had to be done quickly.”

Metzler said the animal stared at her before taking off, leaving her to race to a nearby ferry terminal so she could make the 40-minute trek to a hospital in Burns Lake, B.C., with her injured son.

“It just so happened that a paramedic from our side of the lake was also on the ferry,” she said, adding she received some assurance that her boy, who was bleeding from the head, would be OK.

“You do a lot of praying,” she said of getting through the harrowing experience.

Just two days after the incident in Danskin, another boy was attacked by a cougar, outside a home in the southern B.C. community of Boston Bar.

Austin Forman, 11, was saved from a lunging cougar by the family’s golden retriever.

An R.C.M.P. officer happened to be nearby at the time and was able to shoot the animal as it battled the dog named Angel.

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Pinned face down in the snow by a cougar, seven-year-old David Metzler Jr. was already bleeding from wounds to his scalp and back when his mother came running from the church, armed with nothing but a scrub rag.

Mary Metzler, 30, who does volunteer work at the Mennonite church in the tiny community of Danskin, in central British Columbia, didn’t hesitate when faced with the chilling scene.

“I saw this animal on top of my son with his mouth at his head… I knew if I went back and took time to call for help it would be too late,” said Ms. Metzler.

She charged the mountain lion and smacked it in the head with her cleaning rag, prompting the 30-kilogram animal to drop its prey and flee.

“I just took it and hit him in the face,” she said of what has to be the most unlikely weapon ever used against a mountain lion.

It was the second of two cougar incidents in different parts of B.C. in recent days. On Saturday, an 11-year-old boy, Austin Forman, said he was saved from an attack when the family’s golden retriever grappled with a cougar outside his home in Boston Bar, in southern B.C. RCMP Constable Chad Gravelle shot and killed the cougar as it continued to fight with the dog in the Formans’ yard.

In the Danskin encounter, Ms. Metzler went to the empty church on the morning of New Year’s Eve to tidy up.

She left her youngest child, two-year-old Joseph, in a play area, while David Jr. and his sister, Doris, 5, went outside to slide their toboggan on a small hill next to the building.

Ms. Metzler had gone to a stockroom for cleaning supplies and had just picked up a rag the size of face towel when she heard piercing screams so full of terror that she knew something dreadful had happened.

“I’ve heard children scream before … but nothing like this,” she said. “I knew instantly. It was a petrified scream.”

Ms. Metzler ran across the play room, glancing out the window where she could see David Jr. being mauled.

“I didn’t recognize it as a cougar at first,” she said. “I just knew it was an animal on top of my son.”

The cougar had taken the boy to the ground less than three metres outside the church door. Ms. Metzler crossed that space in an instant and, just as she got within striking distance, the cougar raised its head.

“It looked at me, eye to eye,” she said.

Then she wound up with the cleaning rag and whacked the startled cougar so hard that it fled. She scooped up her bleeding son and ran back to the safety of the church.

“I got him in the building. Then my next thought is, where is Doris? I had lost sight of her. I got Davey … but where’s Doris?”

Running back outside – and unaware that there was a second cougar lurking nearby – she found the little girl racing toward her around the corner of the building.

“Her face was white. Her eyes were big, but she was safe.”

Piecing the attack together later, Ms. Metzler said the two children had been sliding on the hill when Doris fell, and her brother ran to help her up. Then they saw the cougar, just metres away.

Doris screamed.

“At first they froze. Then Davey made a run for the door and that’s when the cougar got him,” she said.

With the cougar holding her brother on the ground between her and the door, Doris turned and darted around the corner of the church. She kept running and, by the time she’d circled the building, her mother had vanquished the cougar.

Ms. Metzler stanched her son’s head wounds with the cleaning rag, bundled the crying children into her van, and drove 30 kilometres north to the hospital in Burns Lake, where she met her husband, David Metzler.

“It’s a mother’s instinct: ‘Don’t mess with my kids,’” Mr. Metzler said of his wife’s action. “I also believe the Lord’s hand was there.”

David Jr. had his wounds stitched up and is so well recovered he went back to school yesterday morning.

Sergeant Gary Van Spengen, a senior conservation officer, said two conservation officers from Burns Lake, Mark West and Jeff Palm, heard about the cougar attack from hospital staff. They went immediately to the scene and were soon following the tracks of two cougars near the church.

They lost the animals at dark, but the next morning, helped by cougar hunters with dogs, they found the pair, two females weighing about 36 kilograms and 30 kilograms, and shot them both.

“Cougar attacks are rare, but they do happen from time to time,” Sgt. Van Spengen said.

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The Golden Retriever was covered in blood after saving it’s 11-year-old owner from a cougar attack in Boston Bar, B.C.

A faithful White Retriever saved an 11-year-old boy from a vicious cougar attack in Boston Bar, B.C. Friday.

RCMP say that the boy, named Austin, and dog were in their family’s backyard when a cougar started advancing on the child.

Sgt. Peter Thiessen said the boy was spared from the encounter when the White Retriever jumped in the way and took the brunt of the attack.

The two animals began attacking each other, giving the boy time to run home and call 9-1-1.

A Boston Bar RCMP officer was near the area and arrived minutes later to find the dog in a brutal fight for survival against the larger predator under the home’s porch.

As the cougar bit down on the retriever’s neck, the RCMP officer advanced on the wild animal and fired two shots into the cat’s rear end.

The cougar continued its attack, so the officer walked up to the cat and fired again, this time killing the animal.

Police say the dog survived with minor injuries and the boy was completely unharmed.

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She has asked to remain anonymous, but recognition is required for any supermom who fights off a cougar that’s mauling her 5-year-old son.

Her weapon: a metal water bottle.

The attack occurred Sept. 2 on the Silver Creek portion of the hiking trail to Abercrombie Mountain, northwest of Metaline Falls.

The family, visiting from Rossland, B.C., had spread out a bit. The father and daughter were ahead followed by the mother and the son, who was lagging less than 20 yards behind her, according to Washington Fish and Wildlife Department enforcement supervisor Mike Whorton.

The cougar sprang out of the only patch of cover along that stretch of trail, investigating officers reported.

“The mother was just picking up the water bottle her husband had left on the trail for her when she saw her son go to the ground out of the corner of her eye,” Whorton said.

“She immediately ran over and began hitting the cougar with the stainless steel bottle. She was there so fast the cougar didn’t have a chance to get a death grip on the boy’s neck. The claw marks on his chest indicated the cougar was still trying to turn him into position to get a good hold.”

The mother beat the cat – estimated at 80 pounds – hard enough to make it release the boy. But the cougar retreated only a few feet and looked back.

The mother threw the water bottle.

There was no radar to record the speed or umpire to call the accuracy, but she had enough stuff on that bottle to persuade the cougar to sprint downhill and disappear into the timber.

Steeee-rike!

The boy is healing with no complications from the teeth and claw marks to his head and chest, the family told Whorton.

A hunter with hounds had no luck in tracking down the offending cougar last weekend.

Fish and Wildlife officials issued the hunter a three-day kill permit.

“That’s basically all we can do,” Whorton said. “At this point, if we found a cougar in the area we’d have no cause to believe it’s the cat that took down the child.”

The incident emphasizes a precaution wildlife experts preach to families heading into cougar or wolf country.

Kids should be kept close and between adults as much as possible. Cougars and wolves in particular are known to key in on the smallest and most vulnerable prey in a flock, and that means children.