There have been two attacks by Mountain Lions on humans in Squamish B.C. which most people seemed shocked by, even though any old timer or even better any book written when Cougars roamed wild will show you that while uncommon it is not unusual for America’s big cat to attack humans, specifically children or people who look either injured or disabled. From CBCNews:

Conservation officers in Squamish, B.C., continue to hunt for two more cougars after a rash of attacks, including one in which a mother fought off an attack on her daughter, 3, who couldn’t understand why the big kitty didn’t want to “play nice.”

Five conservation officers aided by two dogs and their handlers eventually tracked the cat through several yards and eventually shot it just off Depot Road in the Brackendale neighbourhood, about 60 kilometres north of Vancouver, four hours after the attack Tuesday evening.

DNA samples taken from the cougar will be used to determine whether it was the one that attacked the child, they said.

The cougar is the second killed by conservation officers since Saturday. The other was shot after two dogs were attacked on a popular hiking trail on Friday and Saturday.

That’s nature. It’s why you take a gun in the woods, or nowadays with people who have never been in the wild making the rules for state land why you need a walking stick, a good knife and a first aid kit when hiking. Animals sometime attack humans, humans must protect themselves and their families. Like this brave mother:

In the attack on Tuesday, the cougar pounced on Maya Espinosa from behind as she and her mother were walking their dog and picking berries in Fisherman’s Park near the Squamish River.

Maureen Lee told CBC News she was turning away to pick a berry when she thought she saw another dog approaching out of the corner of her eye, but it was the cougar coming to attack her daughter, Maya.

“All of a sudden it just flew on her, rolled her a couple of times and grabbed her under its belly on the ground like in the fetal position,” Lee recalled.

“She [Maya] was on her back and he had his paws in her head, and I just knew I had to react quick, so I just jumped in there and wedged myself between the cougar and her on the ground, and I just got up and threw it off my back and grabbed her and booked it,” she said.

The toddler suffered puncture wounds to her left arm and head, but was recovering well, her mother said.

Neighbour Wade Rowland said it appeared the young girl didn’t entirely understand what had happened.

“Everyone’s taking it well, they’re in good spirits,” he said. “The little girl, her big comment was, I guess, ‘Why didn’t the kitty play nice?’ ”

Pablo Espinosa, Maya’s father, told CBC News his daughter thought the cat was playing. She was eager to return to kindergarten to tell her classmate what happened, Lee said.

Astute readers will suspect a theme in the attacks. Dogs and children were involved, and though we can’t be sure I assume most of the dogs were medium sized or smaller. In other words Cougars are attacking meal sized animals, even human ones. What is worrisome is that adult humans are not scaring the big cats off.

Scary stuff, unless you’re some left-wing environmentalist for whom children and people walking their dogs have less “natural rights” than predatory animals who might eat them. Here’s a sample of the kind of comments I saw on this story:

Get this straight: no particular cougar near Squamish ate any human flesh. This makes much of what people are saying, in over 300 posts off topic. Cougars that are in this particular prime real estate area are a huge problem because they are also in Olympic Territory. The “world”, meaning more and more ignorant people are arriving for the “games”. Ignorant wandering around wilderness “parks” during berry picking season are a danger to large animals–they are killed. Unless the B.C. government has already decided to kill off all cougars in that area they should stop killing and start relocating these huge cats and other the other large animals such as bear to areas where deer and rabbits are in abundance. One advantage Canada has is her vast mountainous regions that are sparsely populated by humans. Or…the government should just be truthful and admit that they will do nothing and deal with consequences as they happen.

MOM admits, on the video, that she was irresponsible. I am glad, for her sake and her daughter’s, that she was also courageous. It seems that ignorance rules though–most people writing here have “war mentality”.

Their advice is to kill the cougars so they will be safe. Get this: wars do not create peace; they create hatred. Wilderness trails are NOT SAFE and cannot be made safe by killing. Especially during berry picking season.

Or this gem from PaulStacey:

With 7 billion of us. close as dammit, on this earth, why are we so vicious to those animals that would try to redress the balance?

Or this comment from Bubblebum:

looks like people are all for the killing of innocent wildlife.
yes, innocent. They were walking through a forest, where do you think these creatures live?

maybe i should go wanter through your home, then later one have someone shoot you because you wanted me out of your house?

This is where they live, and that is BC shouldn’t you be careful what woods you wander in to? plus they don’t even know if they shot the cougar that attacked. they randomly killed an animal because they thought it might have been it.

You get the idea. Lefty “nature lovers” are completely separated from the nature they love and fantasize about animals in pre-teen anthropomorphic terms. No animal is “innocent” certainly not when they begin hunting humans or the pets of humans. Humans culling dangerous game isn’t “war” against nature, it is nature. The woods aren’t a cougar’s “living room” or house. Most importantly, humans have a right to follow their nature and make their territory safe.

To these armchair naturalists, a child being eaten is “redressing the balance” by some avenging hand of nature. This is nihilism not nature. The anti-social cheering on death and mayhem (much of it avoidable if liberals would allow people to interact with nature armed as we are meant to) because they simply hate other people. Powerless but angry, wallowing in the imagined misery that gives them their perceived moral licenses to be misanthropic, the commenters above live vicariously through reports of their fellow humans being killed by animals because the animals are doing what they lack the courage to do.

Cheering on a child’s death is almost as repellent as killing one, the difference is not in the character of those who do either, but the degree in which they act out their most evil inclinations.