After suffering a cracked skull in the attack, a hero dog who protected its owner from a mountain lion attack while hiking has died.
According to posts on her owner’s Instagram, Eva, a fierce Belgian shepherd who got substantial injuries while helping to fend off the attack, died this morning after having several seizures.
According to the post: ‘We said goodbye at 9:20 this morning.
‘There were no changes to her condition overnight. Goodbye my beautiful sweet girl.
‘You are my world, my light, my best friend. The world is a much darker place.’
On May 16, Erin Wilson, 24, narrowly escaped being mauled to death by a mountain lion on a Northern California trail, due to Eva, who suffered terrible injuries in the process of fending off the attack.
Wilson was hiking with her pet on the Big Bar Pass in Northern California’s rural Trinity River area on May 16 when she was attacked by a wild cat.
Eva was off-leash a few steps ahead of her when she started the trip, she added. Wilson told the Sacramento Bee that her pickup truck was still visible on Highway 299 when she was attacked by the growling predator.
Wilson was scratched through her jacket as it lunged at her left shoulder.
‘I will never be able to live up to how amazing and loyal she is to me,’ Wilson said at the time.
‘I yelled ‘Eva!’ and she came running,’ the 24-year-old hiker said. ‘And she hit the cat really hard.’
The mountain lion appeared thin, but Wilson claimed it still outclassed the 55-pound Belgian malinois, which is two and a half years old.
Wilson stated, ‘They fought for a couple of seconds, and then I heard her start crying’.
Wilson pounded the cougar with her fists, rocks, sticks, and whatever else she could find while the cougar plunged its fangs into Eva’s head and clung on. The hiker even went so far as to poke the cat in the eyes.
With its back paws, the mountain lion pushed the owner.
Wilson claimed on the crowd funding site GoFundMe, ‘They battled for a few moments until I heard her cry’. ‘The cat had her by the left side of her head. For the next several minutes I tried everything I could to free her. ‘
Wilson dashed to her car, flagging down a driver, Sharon Houston, to get a tire iron to smash the thing with.
Wilson was ‘pretty scrapped up,’ according to Houston, a self-described ‘overprepared’ camp counselor.
There were just a few other drivers on the route, and Big Bar is so isolated that most of the area do not have cell phone service.
Houston told the blog Redheaded Blackbelt that Wilson told her that ‘a mountain lion had just attacked her dog and she wanted to know if I had a weapon–which I didn’t other than my little pepper spray’.
The frenzied dog owner, she said, was angry and afraid at the same time and carried an extendable baton.
‘She was very determined to stop this mountain lion from attacking her dog so I couldn’t leave her,’ the passerby said.
After repeated beatings on the beast, Houston claims it released the dog and switched its attention to both ladies.
The cougar ‘swiped at us and bared its teeth’ Houston told the blog.
‘I opened up my pepper spray and just hosed its face,’ Houston told the blog. ‘It was the longest 5 to 10 seconds…I begged, ‘Please work, please work, please work.’
It bolted after being sprayed with chemical mace.
Capt. Patrick Foy of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife told The Sacramento Bee, ‘I think it’s safe to assume that dog probably saved her life’.
Eva began having convulsing fits halfway through the drive to the vet’s facility, which was roughly an hour distant.
‘I didn’t think she’d make it every time it started up,’ Wilson said.
The Malinois had two skull fractures, a perforated skull cavity, and severe swelling around the left eye that her blocked eyesight.
According to officials, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife is investigating the attack, collecting DNA samples from the dog’s wounds, and attempting to capture the cougar.
Mountain lion attacks on people are uncommon; there have been 20 such cases in California since 1986, three of which were deadly. Authorities have stated that if the animal is caught, it will be put down.
‘My dog is my hero and I owe her my life,’ Wilson said.