Among U.S. states, Utah boasts quite a lot of badlands and forests.
The most charismatic of North America’s wildlife calls this state home, and as such, you might run into a few of them when you’re not expecting it.
A news reporter recently came a little too close to one of North America’s big carnivores – and she didn’t know it.
The mountain lion is known by a few other names. Some folks call it a “puma,” others call them “cougars”.
Either way, the cat is one of the largest carnivores you can find in the country.
The only creatures eclipsing it in size are bears (which aren’t purely carnivores) and alligators – which you’re not as likely to run into in forests.
Weighing at 50 to 70kg, a mountain lion weighs as much as a grown person.
That’s plenty big enough to take down a human, which makes them that deadly.
Still, they are gorgeous and ecologically irreplaceable animals.
But make sure you admire their beauty from a distance. Mountain lions can take down a fully-grown deer.
A deer may not sound like an impressive prize, but that’s only because people have the privilege of hunting them with firearms.
Try taking down a 120 pound deer with your bare hands and teeth.
What’s more, mountain lions are, in the words of Robert Muldoon from Jurassic Park, “astonishing jumpers”.
They can cover 45 feet with a single leap, provided a running start. Yeah, not an animal you want to be in the sights of.
This lady was reporting from the edge of a treeline in Spring Lake City, Utah, when a funny looking “dog” walked past her.
“I think it’s a dog, I’m not sure. But anyway…there’s some sort of creature below me.”
Like the professional reporter she is, she keeps her attention on the story and that good old “reporter” voice that we all know.
And as she sighted the furry thing, she identified it as a dog.
Except this was no dog. It was a young mountain lion.
She was covering a story about a damaged road in the county, and the mountain lion seems to have been just as concerned for the road as the other residents.
Being small enough to be mistaken for a dog is a good sign, all things considered.
This one must be a juvenile, not quite the 120-pound threat that a full-grown one would be. But a young puma is still a puma, and you would never want to get too close to one.
They can still send you to the ER with a quick bite to the back of the head.
Even a young one could force you to get stitches if it decided to show its claws.
The cameraman must have been nervous as heck, knowing what the animal was and having to keep quiet.
The anchors watching from the news HQ all got pretty nervous too.
While they didn’t know it was a mountain lion specifically, they could at least tell it wasn’t a dog.
But that blissful ignorance of the animal’s true identity might have saved her life.
She stayed calm and made no eye contact with the cat, and so the cat paid her no mind either.
If she had panicked and reacted, things could have played out a lot differently.
Wild predators react very unpredictably when a person gets jumpy or tense around them. In the end, she was okay and we all got to see this funny encounter.
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