© KVAL NewsEd Thompson shared these photographs from a game camera of a cougar on his property.
The homeowner called her dog, and the cougar left the house, said Brian Wolfer with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.
The homeowner wasn't too concerned about the late October incident and planned to lock the pet door when not in use, Wolfer said.
However, Wolfer called it "kind of concerning" that a cougar would enter a home that way. He advised homeowners to lock doors and keep pet food secure, even inside the house.
Ed Thompson, who lives in the area, said the incident illustrates the conflict between rural Lane County residents and the cougar population.
"I'm afraid that many people don't understand the breadth of the cougar problem right in Lane County's backyards," Thompson said. "In the Dexter/Pleasant Hill area alone there have been well more than a dozen livestock killings including sheep (two of which were ours), goats and an alpaca just this year."
Perhaps surprisingly there are a few problems with Big Cats here in the UK. According to many (and including witnesses who are friends) we now have a significant population of cougar and (much worse) black leopard. The population could now run into the thousands and sightings have been made all over the country. Last time I looked there have been eleven attacks on humans, probably by surprised cats, and hundreds of cases of sheep and cattle being taken all over the country. I myself was once walking along a field edge in Kent which had recently been ploughed. During this process many large flints had been lifted leaving holes typically a foot in diameter. Where I walked I found a couple of hundred of these holes filled with what I guessed might be Great Dane Spoor. While large I knew that dogs were not so finicky and that this seemed like cat behaviour. I contacted a friend in the States who knew the guy who shot the tiger in the entrance to the Smithsonian in Washington. He came back with: "It's Tiger, Panther or Puma, keep away". Indeed that is just what I did on that day, avoiding a small but deathly quite wood where the footpath was taking me in favour of the open field.
While our now established populations of big cats are potentially dangerous, a black leopard can take prey twenty times its own weight, they generally prefer to keep away from humans and even livestock, living in our small woods which make up 11% of the land area of this country and living on rabbits, hare, badger and fox and the odd wild boar.