© Troy Landreville Tula cuddled with her owner Andrew Dodge while at the same time showing the puncture marks on her shaved neck, the result of a bite from a cougar that nearly took the Maple Ridge dog’s life.
One dog is injured and another dead after two separate cougar attacks in Maple Ridge this week.
The first incident happened at a popular Maple Ridge hiking area Sunday evening.
According to Andrew Dodge, he was hiking with his dog Tula - a three-year-old shepherd-husky-cross - in the Malcolm Knapp UBC Research Forest reserve, between Mike Lake and the Incline Trail, next to Golden Ears Provincial Park, when Tula ran ahead of him. All of a sudden, Dodge "heard a big fight and lots of yelping."
Running as quickly as he could in the direction of the sound, and shouting Tula's name, Dodge managed to find her coming out of the trees "very distressed" and hurt.
"She took off back down the trail and I ran after her until we reached the car park at Mike Lake," he said.
It was there that Dodge noticed Tula "had been bleeding in the neck area."
"She was very weak but made it back to the car where I took her to the emergency animal hospital in Langley."
Comment: Holyrood Park is a park in the center of Edinburgh. There was nowhere for this creature to go without being seen by others: the park is surrounded by urban areas on all sides.
Its sudden appearance, and disappearance, its 'supernatural' size, and the creature's being so close to someone who couldn't see it are tell-tale signs of this being a paranormal 'Big Cat' event, a common phenomenon in British cryptozoological science.
That local authorities kept the case under wraps for several years (and 'lost' the evidence) suggests they may have been royally spooked by what they saw!