This one-year-old mountain lion cub was killed by neighbors trying to free a dog from its jaws. Its mother is still nearby.
Warning: The following contains graphic content
Neighbors Chuck McDaniel and Marci Gray were breathing easier by Wednesday, taking photos of the dead lion cub near Lebec Oaks Road and asking the newspaper to warn their neighbors about an unexpected danger. But you could still hear the tension in their voices, the shock that a powerful hunter had seized their neighbor’s dog at about 10:00 p.m. Tuesday May 29. What they saw leads them to ask all who live in the area to keep their children and pets inside at night and around dawn. "My daughters used to go out early in the morning and at sundown to feed the horses," Gray said. "They won’t be going alone anymore." Dawn, dusk and during the night are prime hunting times for mountain lions. The dead yearling cub "was probably being taught to hunt," Gray theorizes. They saw his mother nearby when the cub grabbed a small dog on Philip Jones’ property and tried to drag it away.
"He had the dog in his teeth," McDaniel said. Jones’ children, Gray recalls, were yelling and throwing rocks. "I tried to poke it with a 2×4 to get the lion to drop the dog. He wouldn’t let go, so I hit it with the board about five or six times," McDaniel recalls. "The lion dropped the dog and crawled into the brush, howling; the mother was 80 yards away, they were howling across to each other."
The cub, McDaniel says, "was hurt pretty bad, its leg or back were broken." A fourth neighbor brought a gun as the young lion howled and the older lion came forward toward it.
Gray said she tried getting assistance from the Kern County Sheriff’s dispatch which she said attempted six times, unsuccessfully, to secure assistance from the Department of Fish and Game. Finally, about 10:30 p.m. Gray recalls, the neighbor shot the cat that was wounded. "It is a shame that an animal like that has to die, but it was in bad shape," McDaniel said. "I think people need to keep their animals and young kids in at night. That could have been a small child as easily as a dog." Both worry that the mother cat is still in the area, possibly wounded from being shot, and hungry. Fish and Game trackers Wednesday and were unable to find the mature lion, Gray said.
—Reported by Patric Hedlund
This is part of the June 01, 2007 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.
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