[pct-l] Mountain Lion Attacks

[hopefl poet]

A cheap and possibly effective lion deterrent could be to wear a stylized human face aka a mask affixed to the back of ones' pack. This is one strategy that the honey and wood gatherers who enter the Sundarbans in India employ to distract the Royal Bengal Tigers who stalk and eat about 300 of these workmen each year. The obvious theory is that the big cats attack from the rear of their prey, most of the time, and seeing a human face staring back from a prey moving away would confuse a cat long enough for the honey-gatherer to say his prayers to Bono Bibi, before being killed. Strangely enough, right after reading some of this thread, I turned on the TV and there was Neil Hamm, the recent lion-attack survivor, in hospital, giving an interview. He didn't say from with direction the lion pounced from. I wonder if someone with a color-copier and a laminating machine could set up a booth at the ADZPCTKO; a bunch of hikers with laminated life-size photos of their face (or someone else's) tacked onto their pack could be a fun sight. Maybe they'd even become collectibles eventually, like baseball cards; especially the ones that survived a lion attack. Maybe this is why that hiker about 8 years ago carried a full-size cardboard mannequin of Kathy Ireland all the way up the AT. 

Fenu