the perils of living in the middle of nowhere and spending a lot of time in the woods: all of the creepy "weird shit happens in the forest at night!" stuff is way less scary bc I notice that the authors get details wrong
I used to love horror set in the woods and now I'm like "Well damn you're clearly a city person"
this one got a bunch of shit wrong about cougars :sob:
p much the only time you're going to be stalked by one, it's bc it wants yr dog.
truly.
The vast majority of hostile cougar encounters fall into one of two categories:
-you got between a mom and her cubs (see: that dumbass guy from Utah a few years ago who got chased)
-the cougar is sick, injured, or has something else wrong that means it cannot hunt normally and is desperate
Typically when there are cougar sightings on the trails out here, the people who maintain the trails will post placards at trail heads and advise people to either leave dogs at home or keep them on leash and walk in a large group.
But they don't, like, shut the trails down or bar people from the woods, unlike what the author of this short story would like you to believe, and if they do, it's to protect the cougar, not you
cougars aren't a threat. BEARS largely aren't a threat, not in North America, not as long as you're not fucking reckless. No one is closing national or state parks over either of them.
honestly tho the biggest threats in the woods out here are:
-poison oak
-poison ivy
-ticks
-other humans
-accidentally running across an illegal grow-op
@titania yeah the area where i camp most summers has recently-ish started bear proofing their trashcans, which they had not needed to do in the last three decades. Very “in retrospect, incredibly fucked up that this wasn’t necessary before” the first time i stopped by the park office after the change
@Satsuma I'm glad!!
It's actually kind of wild, I grew up in bear country (black bears in the Uintas + summers in NW MT), so the idea of not bear-proofing stuff is wild to me
@titania yeah I’m glad they’ve rebounded so successfully!
@Satsuma oof. Probably. Tho both are making a comeback and you love to see it.