Connection: Animals Becoming Bolder

Insects and horses may be more dangerous than cougars in Washington state, but there have been more cougar attacks on humans in the past decade than in the previous 90 years.

State statistics show 17 people died from insect bites in Washington in the past two years, apparently from allergic reactions. In the same time, horses killed 32 riders, but there has been no fatal cougar attack since 1924.

Still, eight of nine recorded cougar attacks on humans in Washington were in the 1990s.

Last summer’s attack on 4-year-old Jacob Walsh, on the lawn of his Kettle Falls-area home, was the final straw for the Washington Legislature. Lawmakers overrode portions of a 1996 initiative ban on hunting cougars with hounds after hearing testimony from Walsh’s family.

The boy required four hours of surgery and 200 stitches after a cougar clamped its jaws on his head and neck and tried to drag him away. Jacob’s aunt, Vicky Baker, saved his life by confronting the cougar and shouting, “Let him go, let him go, let him go.”

The incident was chillingly similar to an attack a year earlier on 5-year-old Carmen Schrock of Chewelah, Wash., who was camping with her family at the Noisy Creek campground near Metaline Falls, Wash. Carmen’s skull was fractured when a cougar sank its teeth into her head and tried to drag her away.

The cougar let the screaming girl go when her mother, Carolyn Schrock, ran to the rescue with a 10-month-old baby in her arms.

Although cougars typically are intimidated by adults, several encounters in the past two years suggest the animals are becoming bolder around humans. A month after the attack on Carmen Schrock, another cougar in the same area stalked a 6-foot-1-inch Forest Service worker for a half-hour.

Two young cougars repeatedly ventured into the city of Republic in January this year, and a homeowner shot one of them just outside his living room window as his 7-year-old daughter was getting ready to go outside.

Last month in Blanchard, Idaho, Leland Tripp looked out his window and saw a cougar closing in on his two young children. He ran outside to chase the cat away, but it went only about 350 feet and sat down.

The animal ignored the commotion and waited to be shot - just like the one that killed Andrew Anderson’s dog and cat and confronted his screaming wife at their Sullivan Lake home in January.