Vancouver Island resident Dee Gallant was recently walking her dog Murphy on a logging road near Duncan, B.C. when she had the feeling they were being watched. Gallant looked over to her right and noticed something was off about the colors behind the bushes. She then tells Kelowna Now that what she was looking at was a cougar.
"I looked over to the right and there it was, I couldn’t make it out at first and thought ‘oh that is a strange colour, that’s not a tree. It was crouched down, doing that kind of prowl, predator walk that they do — that was when I waved my arms and yelled ‘hey, you stop!’ and it did."
Now, 50 feet away from the cougar, Gallant had to think quickly to stop the approaching animal. She pulled out her phone and began yelling at the cougar to basically go away, which it didn't respond to. Then came the best idea Gallant had – playing "Don’t Tread On Me" by Metallica.
“I thought it was the noisiest thing on my phone that would probably scare it, that was also the messaged I wanted to convey to the cougar. As soon as the first notes blared out it ran into the bush,” she said. After that, I was a little more scared because I couldn’t see it anymore and once it turned to run out I realized it was a lot bigger than I had thought, about three metres long from nose to tail."
Gallant says she'd like to thank James Hetfield for saving her life, and here's hoping he sees this! Or at least someone in management sees this.
