Eagle swoops cat, dog next

[billcoe]

[video:yahoo]10933377&src=news

 

Teddys next, part of the feed the wildlife program. Something identical happened to a buddy who lives on Klamath lake. He (and a bunch of others) watched his neighbors family mutt hauled off by an Eagle while they were having an outdoor dinner party. They never saw the dog again, some toy breed.

[Dechristo]

Have lost more than a few cats to owls. Lost one dog to a lion.

[Hugh Conway]

poison the eagle and W will pardon you!

[pc313]

Wellcome to the food chain!

[Bug]

Domestic cats kill an estimated 29 million song birds every year.

 

Karma.

[Mtguide]

In the early 80's I was living near Pinedale, Wyoming, at the base of the foothills of the Wind River Range. One fall a cougar known as Old Three Toes (missing a toe on the left front paw) came down from the Bridger Wilderness, hunting the ranches along the valley on Pole Creek road. In ten years, I had seen his tracks numerous times on the pack trails, from one end of the range to the other, and that's a big area, over 110 miles. In the first couple of nights it was around, it caused some havoc among the calves on one outfit, and made an attempt at a new colt on another, but had no luck, being fought off by the mother cows and the mares.

 

Over the next three weeks or so, no more calves or colts were bothered, but almost every house and barn cat in the area disappeared, including one of mine. Finally the cougar was shot and killed one evening, in the shop at a neighbor's ranch, trying to pull down an antelope carcass the owner had hanging after a successful hunt. Old Three Toes, who had been a legend in the Wind River Range for almost 20 years, was almost toothless, severely emaciated and mangy, and had obviously had his lower jaw broken, probably by being kicked in the confrontation with the cows or the mares. The left front leg, with the famous three-toed paw, was crooked, with a large hard knot on the foreleg where it had apparently been broken and healed at an early age. He also had a large, jagged, indented scar about 4 inches long on the left side of his head, leading from just above the eye to the ear, which was about half gone, and another large crooked scar almost 7 inches long on the opposite shoulder. There were numerous smaller marks on the head and neck, like bite wounds. These all appeared to be pretty old, possibly from an encounter with a bear.

 

For any wild animal, and especially a predator, an injury of that kind is pretty much a certain death sentence, but somehow this old cat had managed to make it through to carry on a long and storied career. In the last few weeks of his life, he was still living by his wits, beyond the ability of his failing strength, doing whatever he could to keep going. Even in death, there seemed to be a fire deep down in that dark blue eye, now clouded over. He had lived a very long time for a cougar, well beyond the average known life span.

 

We stood around, looking at him, talking about what to do with the carcass. The meat, what little of it there was, wouldn't be much good, tough and stringy. Some wanted to skin him and display the hide with the famed three toes at Faler's General Store in town. Others thought he ought to be mounted by the taxidermist and put in the historical case at the Courthouse. Finally, Murl Morss, the foreman at the Fayette ranch where Three Toes had paid his first visit three weeks earlier, spoke up, his eyes glinting from the shadow under his hat brim. "Fellas", he said, "I think we oughta take him home."

 

Early the next morning, we helped Murly throw his pack string together and ready Old Three Toes for his last journey home to the mountains. And help is what it took, too; Simon the Mule wanted no part of whatever that was wrapped up in a plastic game bag and two layers of canvas. Simon had probably packed over a hundred elk out of the mountains, but he seemed to know that whatever was inside that canvas, was not only dead and wild, but had also been damned fierce. He was snorting and blowing and rolling his eyes like a outlaw bronc. It was quite a rodeo until we blindfolded him with a jacket and took up a hind leg. Once we had the bundle lashed tight and yarded the cinches down, we handed the lead rope to Murly, pulled the leg rope and blindfold, and stepped back to watch the show.

 

Old Three Toes would have been highly honored indeed; Simon put on a real old time skywalking, sunfishing, suck-back-and-spin, chin the sun, and paw-down-the-moon classic sashay, but he could not shed that pack, and as the sun broke over the mountains, he threw up his head, sides heaving, and trotted off behind Murl as we all laughed and hollered and threw our hats in the air.

 

Four days later Murl was back; snow had come to the high country, and he'd made it out just in time. He never would tell us exactly where he took Old Three Toes, except to say that it was somewhere in the high country up under the continental divide, between Timico Lakes Basin and Angel Pass on the north, well east of the Highline trail, down to the Dream Lake/Rainbow Lake country to the south, going northeast over the divide to Wolverine Peak, and back up to the Golden Lakes and Angel Pass. "He's somewhere in that circle," he said, 'cause that's the area where I first started seeing his tracks. I left him in a tree, not under the ground. He musta had a heart like a mountain, so that's what I gave him for a headstone, and that's all I got to say." Then he added, " I was real glad to see that snow fly; no one'll ever find him."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[billcoe]

Hot damn, now THATS a story!

[RuMR]

that rocks...

 

[pc313]

I liked it,thanks MTguide it would be a good book!

[ZimZam]

Teddy's in protective custody.

[rbw1966]

That was a fantastic story mtguide! If we ever cross paths, the first beer is on me. Love to hear more.

 

On my daily bike commute I encountered a feral housecat dragging an owl carcas across the path (springwater corridor). Clearly already badly decomposed and about twice the size of the cat.

 

Some asshat feeds these feral cats.