iStockphoto / Bransen Jackson
Sliding glass doors are incredibly fragile. I learned this at a young age when a cousin of mine ran full speed into one and shattered it in front of the entire family. That event evidently left an indelible mark on me because I would never be able to get comfortable with my pet in a situation like this moment below where it is face to face with a large and menacing mountain lion.
In the tiny kitty’s defense, it might possess some innate feline radar that tells it ‘this is a big cat. I’m a small cat. We’re both cats and cats don’t like to kill other cats.’ But as a pet owner I would be freaking OUT if a huge mountain lion came up to my sliding glass door and was thirsting over my cat.
This moment was filmed in Vancouver Island recently and has since gone viral on TikTok. Vancouver Island is home to an estimated 600-800 cougars at any given time giving it the highest concentration of pumas found any where in North America. So while mountain lion sightings aren’t quite as rare there as they are elsewhere an actual pet-puma encounter like this is incredibly rare:
A good friend of mine lives out on Vancouver Island and I’d heard tales of how many pumas there are out there over the years but it wasn’t until TikTok that I started seeing a lot of these videos and believing it for myself. Another person on the island shared two videos of cougar sightings on her property, four weeks apart, with the pumas walking confidently out in the open or coming right up to the house to investigate… July 13th:
And here’s that same homeowner a month later on August 13th:
It’s funny to me because as a Floridian constantly have people in my life telling me they could never live with the constant sightings/encounters of alligators, snakes, sharks, bobcats, spiders, etc. But for me, it would be significantly more unnerving living in an area where a mountain lion could be lurking in the shadows at any time. Feeling like a mountain lion was constantly watching me would fray my nerves.
Of course, this can happen in most Western US states and isn’t specific to Vancouver Island. A home security camera in Utah recently captured 5 cougars roaming their yard at night:
Pro-tip for anyone out West worried about big cats: get a livestock guardian dog. My Great Pyrenees x Anatolian Shepherd mixed breed dog wouldn’t let those animals within 500 yards of our property. I’ve watched her chase off all sorts of giant animals up in the Adirondacks. They’re the best!