Footage of a cougar chasing a man in Provo Canyon in Utah
Kyle Burgess was returning from a run in Slate Canyon in the late afternoon of Saturday, October 10, when he came across four creatures on the trail in front of him.
“Seriously, I didn’t know what they were and I usually pick up my phone like, ‘Cool, animals’,” he recalled on Monday in an interview with reporters from local stations.
Burgess quickly realized that they were cougar cubs. Before he could react, the 26-year-old man from Orem found himself face to face with the cubs’ mother in a tense encounter he filmed.
The meeting took place around 5 pm. on a canyon trail in southeastern Provo. In a 6-minute video posted on Instagram TV and YouTube, Burgess focuses on two of the four cougar cubs playing as he descends the canyon. About 10 seconds later, the pups’ mother appeared from a bend in the path and came towards Burgess.
He stepped back, shouting at the animal to see if it would stop following him. The animal sometimes tried to attack it.
“No! No! Go away! Please go away!” Burgess yells, at one point during the encounter.
Finally, after a little more than 5 minutes of following him as he stepped back, Burgess grabbed a rock and threw it at the animal. The cougar turned and left.
“It was a very long 6 minutes,” he added.
The cougar (Puma concolor) is a large cat of the subfamily Felinae. It is native to the Americas. Its range spans from the Canadian Yukon to the southern Andes in South America, and is the widest of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere. It is an adaptable, generalist species, occurring in most American habitat types. Due to its wide range, it has many names including puma, mountain lion, panther, painter and catamount.
