In what may be the most badass thing any Canadian has done in recent memory, a British Columbia man fought off a cougar on Saturday by punching it in the face.
The B.C. Conservation Officer Service (COS) said in a Facebook post that the man was working in the Lake Kathlyn area in the central portion of the province when he was approached by a mountain lion. According to the man’s account, the cat “swiped his upper body,” at which point he “punched the cougar in the face and it disengaged.”
The COS has not released the man’s identity, but the agency did say his injuries were so minor that they did not require treatment in a hospital.
The agency’s efforts to locate the offending (and no doubt ashamed) feline have so far proved unsuccessful. A live trap was deployed in the area, and hounds were dispatched the next day, but the cougar didn’t show its face.
“The COS is continuing to monitor cougar activity in the area and will respond as necessary to ensure public safety,” the agency wrote.
Believe it or not, this isn’t the first account of a person defending themselves from an animal attack by socking it in the kisser.
In 2017, a 17-year-old girl survived a shark attack by punching it in the snout until it released her leg. Authorities said the teen suffered six puncture wounds that required eighty stitches, but she made a full recovery.
In 2018, a 78-year-old North Carolina man claimed to have survived a black bear attack by punching it in the nose.
“I was standing in the middle of my driveway and all of a sudden I turned around the [sic] were three bears right beside me,” Sonny Pumphrey recounted in a Facebook post. “Two bears went up the hill and the mama bear for some reason charged me. Only thing I could do was to punch her right in the nose.”
Pumphrey survived the ordeal with only minor injuries.
A Maine woman followed the Pumphrey model in 2023 when she punched a black bear on the nose after it tried to attack her dog. Not appreciating the gesture, the bear briefly latched onto her wrist before high-tailing it back into the woods. The woman received some stitches on her wrist but was otherwise unscathed.
And who can forget perhaps the most famous nose-punching incident? In 2016, an Australian hunter came upon a kangaroo who had one of his dogs in a headlock. The now-infamous video shows the hunter–a zookeeper named Greig Tonkins–square up to the kangaroo and punch it in the jaw. The animal stumbles back a pace but appears to be more-or-less unhurt. The kangaroo had already dropped the dog, so Tonkins runs back to the vehicle rather than push his luck.
It’s always best to avoid a fight with a wild animal rather than rely on your Rocky impression to get out of a jam. But if you find yourself snout-to-snout with something that may or may not put you on the menu for dinner, there’s no harm in going for the knockout punch–it may even work.
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