A four-year-old boy suffered no serious injuries after a mountain lion attacked him while he was with his family in a park. It happened in Leavenworth, a small town in west-central Washington about 100 miles east of Seattle.
“A cougar did come out, knocked down a young boy,” Michael Jewell, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife police captain, told KOMO-TV. “Fortunately, the family had some dogs with them that they were able to turn loose that intervened and scared the cougar away.”
Officials tracked and euthanized the lion. They said it was 18 to 20 months old and appeared to be healthy.
Mountain lion hunting is allowed in Washington but doing so with hounds is not.
One week earlier, a mountain lion attacked a young boy at an urban park in California. A mountain lion also killed a bicyclist about 30 miles east of Seattle in 2018.
(Photo source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)