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“She was
literally in the mouth of the mountain lion when the quick
thinking and heroic reactions of her mother and other adults
saved her life," said Gregg Losinski, conservation educator with
the state Department of Fish and Game. "The cat dropped her and
backed off.”
Losinski said the girl and her young cousins had been put down
for a nap in a tent early Friday evening when the child strayed
from the campsite and was almost immediately pounced upon by the
big cat, also known as a cougar.
The lion had the girl in its jaws and was trying to drag her
from the campsite when her mother and other relatives screamed
and shouted as they charged the animal, which fled, Losinski
said. The name of the girl and her family were not immediately
disclosed, although authorities said they were from Idaho.
The family contacted authorities shortly after the attack, which
left the girl with scratches, Losinski said. Fish and Game
enlisted the aid of a hunter with hounds to track the lion
suspected in the incident and local sheriff’s deputies
ultimately shot and killed it.
It is rare for mountain lions to attack people and even rarer
for one to kill a human, with fatal attacks occurring about once
every seven or eight years in the United States and Canada, he
said.
No-one in Idaho has been killed by a mountain lion in at least a
century, even though the animals, which are subject to regulated
hunting, number in the thousands in the state, said Losinski.
A mountain lion last injured a person in Idaho in 2011 when a
boy was swiped by a cougar that had killed the child’s pet dog.
The only other known case involved a 12-year-old boy on the
Salmon River in the early 1990s, according to the Department of
Fish and Game.
(Reporting by Laura Zuckerman; Editing by Sharon Bernstein and
Alistair Bell)
[© 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights
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