creepycoug
Well-known poster
I have a few buddies who are timber cruisers. They worry about those things more than anything else, except for maybe weird people.
All of them carry heat into the woods, and I don't blame them. They also take dogs with them if nothing else to give them a heads up. Those things are deadly af.
I've regularly walked 1-5 miles at a time alone in the woods for work going back to the early 90s (thousands of miles by now) and have exactly one cougar encounter. It was on a short section of stream running right through a town. It ran away from me but still scared the shit out of me. I was, like everyone in my field of work, carrying a walking stick with an small hook on one end and a flimsy knife with no point and a dull, serrated blade.
There are dozens, hundreds at times, of people out walking in the northwest woods alone for work every day, almost year round, with no dog or weapons (by policy). While the number of fatal or dangerous cougar encounters is rising quickly, it's still at zero.
Dogs are nothing but cougar bait [/b]unless you have multiple noisy ones with you.
Not sure I agree with you on that point. They hear and smell the thing long before you're in a position to say "oh shit, it's a cougar".
And the guy who had his stomach eaten last May? The guy on the bike? 1>0.
I'm not saying it's an epidemic; but if I'm in the woods often, I'm going to be prepped. Being eaten alive is on the creep's priority list of things to avoid.
