Two cougars shot in yard near Sisters

The woman came out onto the porch of their home in the woods well after daybreak, about 7 a.m., on August 20. At first, she thought she saw a coyote trying to get at the eight puppies locked in a pen by the barn.

The dog, which had been inside the house, flew past her out the screen door. She thinks the dog, mother of the litter, knew something was wrong.

The house cat shot up a tree not far from the puppy pen.

The young mountain lion, it wasn't a coyote, went up the tree after the house cat.

The woman screamed for her husband, who had already left for work once that morning but came back home because he hadn't hooked up with his ride to the job-site. She yelled that a cougar was in the yard, and trying to get the puppies, the cat.

The husband came out of the house and scrambled to get his rifle from the shop. The woman thought the lion was now out of the tree and held at bay by the dog against the fence of the puppy pen.

The man shot and killed the cougar by the pen.

Then the woman saw a second lion. It was still in the tree, and it had their house cat in its mouth.

The husband shot that lion. Dead pet and dead predator both fell to the ground.

The husband, an avid woodsman and hunter, said he thought the lions were in their second year. He thought they were diseased, because they were emaciated, and because they were out hunting in his yard in broad daylight. They didn't run. He worried about rabies.

The lion's bodies were about three feet long and standing a couple of feet tall, with a frame a little larger than their 60-pound dog, but the smaller cat probably weighing half as much.

"I have never seen an animal that skinny. It looked like a skeleton with fur on it," said the woman, about the smaller of the two cougars.

But still capable of harming their animals, or the preschool children who frequently play in the yard where the two lions now lay.

There is no doubt in the husband's mind that he did the right thing, that he was protecting the safety of his family and property. But he didn't know if what he did was legal.

He had a friend call the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife for an opinion.

ODFW told the friend that they probably would want to do an investigation, to determine if the lions could actually have gotten into the puppy pen and if the shooter truly felt his family and property were in "imminent danger."

The husband felt this was an interrogation he didn't need. He didn't know how to prove that he felt his family and pets were in imminent danger, other than the fact the lions were hunting in his yard and behaving strangely.

He had heard stories about how rigidly the Oregon State Police can be in enforcing game laws.

"The cougars were hunting in my yard. They weren't acting normally. Do you have to wait until a pet or a child is killed before you can do something?" he asked.

He dumped the dead lions in a canyon. And thereby more certainly did break the law, according to Steve George of the ODFW. The shooting should have been reported within 24 hours. The carcasses belonged to the state and should have been turned in.

Steve George said the law is written this way to prevent shooters from hunting lions without a permit or out of season, from killing a cougar they know is in the area and claiming a trophy without the cat representing an actual danger.

Still, George was vague on whether a property owner needed to see a cougar actually ready to pounce before a shooting was justified.

George said that because the one lion had the dead house cat in its mouth, that shooting was clearly justified. Depending on the security of the puppy pen, it was doubtful that the other cougar posed an "imminent danger," according to George.

Because of this ambiguity, and the failure to report the shooting within 24 hours and turn the carcasses in to the state, the husband and wife asked that their identity not be revealed in this story.

George thought the two lions were probably this year's litter, based on a third-hand description of their size. While spring litters are most common, cats can breed any time of the year, George said.

George also said that young, growing cougars can often appear very thin, though he did not discount the possibility of disease. Cougars are as susceptible to distemper and feline leukemia as any of the 45,000 feral house cats in Deschutes County, according to ODFW. These cats readily transmit devastating diseases to their wilder cousins.

For this reason, it would have been worthwhile to have had the bodies before they were so decomposed that examination was futile, George said. Two Sisters-area veterinarians confirmed that they could learn little about possible diseases from corpses that had been in the sun for a few days.

It is also possible that these two lions were litter mates and their mother had been killed before teaching her kittens how to hunt.

Five days after the shooting, the couple discovered that their dead house cat had left two kittens in a nest at the bottom of a tree about 30 feet away from where their mother and the two lions died.