On July 3, a 19-year-old in Arroyo Grande, California, suffered a minor concussion after he was attacked by what he claims was a mountain lion. After conducting an investigation, however, wildlife officials say forensic evidence points to something much less intimidating: an ordinary house cat.
The teen, whose identity has not been released, told officials in his initial report that he was riding a dirt bike when an animal dropped from a tree and nearly ripped him off the bike. In an interview with The Tribune, he alleged something grabbed his helmet, ripped him backward, and almost knocked him out just as he revved the throttle to get “out of there.”
“Initially, I did see something about the size of a dog — a large dog — drop from the tree and barely miss me,” said the teen, who later returned to the scene to see if something else might have fallen on him. “There was nothing I could have hit my head on. No tree had fallen.”
After receiving the teen’s initial report, California Department of Fish and Wildlife law enforcement officers launched an investigation. They interviewed the victim and collected DNA samples for lab testing.
Capt. Patrick Foy, with CDFW’s enforcement division, tells Outdoor Life that the evidence they collected did not support the teen’s claim of nearly being mauled by an apex predator.
“Our investigation, including interviews, collection of evidence in the form of clothing the reporting party was wearing, and forensic analysis of that evidence, did not confirm the presence of a mountain lion,” Foy says. He did not clarify whether investigators searched the scene of the alleged attack for additional clues.
What the investigation did reveal, he says, was DNA from Felis catus, a domestic cat. Regardless, the victim is sticking to his story.
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The teen told reporters in a follow-up interview that he has a pet cat at home, which could explain the DNA they found on his helmet and clothing. He also said that the glaring absence of mountain lion DNA in CDFW’s forensic testing was because the cougar “barely grabbed onto the back of my helmet and ripped me back.”
“The reporting party has a domestic cat, so it was not a surprise,” says Foy, adding that CDFW continues to take the incident seriously.
“We have been closely monitoring our Wildlife Incident Reporting (WIR) database to see if others in the community have reported seeing a mountain lion,” Foy says. “That is negative so far.”
Mountain Lion attacks on humans are extremely rare. Only 24 confirmed mountain lion attacks on humans have been reported in California since 1984, with most attacks occurring on young children. According to the CDFW, “a person is 1,000 times more likely to be struck by lightning than attacked by a mountain lion.”
But with nearly half of these confirmed attacks occurring within the past decade, it seems that conflicts with humans are on the rise in California. In March, two brothers were attacked and one was killed by a mountain lion while they were shed hunting near El Dorado National Forest. Taylen Brooks, 21, died after wrestling the lion off his 18-year-old brother.
This marked the Golden State’s first fatal mountain lion attack in 20 years, and the tragedy has led Taylen’s uncle, Malcom Brooks, to call for changes to California’s policies around lion management. He joins a growing number of hunters and rural California residents who think the state should bring back cougar hunting in some form — or at least find some way to make mountain lions less comfortable around humans.
“We’re really playing with fire, and what happened to Taylen and Wyatt may well end up being the tip of the iceberg,” Brooks said. “Figure out a way to make pursuit permits a possibility for people who have lion hounds. Put pressure on this population. Get them to de-habituate from human population zones.”
Rough estimates put the statewide cougar population at between 4,000 and 6,000 cats. According to CDFW, the population is “considered stable based on the best scientific knowledge, research, and methods available.” Despite the abundance of these cats, however, California wildlife managers have one less tool in their toolbox due to the state’s laws protecting mountain lions
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The state hasn’t hosted a mountain lion hunt since 1972, and the feline predators were reclassified as a “specially protected mammal” when Golden State voters passed the California Wildlife Protection Act in 1990. The new laws made it “unlawful to take, injure, possess, transport, import, or sell a mountain lion or a product of a mountain lion.” (Under the law, lions mounted by taxidermists, even if they were taken in another state, are illegal to possess in California.)
And since many Californians care deeply about protecting the state’s mountain lions, issuing dramatic displays of public grief when a 12-year-old urban cougar was euthanized after being struck by a car, the chances of state policy being overturned by public vote is a long shot.
However, some may reconsider their stance if mountain lions start regularly falling from trees.