An Army veteran near Cody, Wyoming, kicked and wrestled a juvenile mountain lion with his bare hands to save his Labrador, then faced a round of painful rabies shots.
Adam Borkhus was out along South Fork Road near Cody with his Labrador retriever, Diesel, trying to photograph elk when the dog’s yelp stopped him cold.
He found a juvenile mountain lion in a tussle with Diesel. Borkhus carried bear spray and a pistol just in case. He used neither. He kicked the cat and fought it bare-handed for about 20 seconds rather than risk hurting his dog.
The mountain lion ran off. Diesel bolted straight back to the car. The Army veteran walked away with minor scratches and a round of rabies vaccine shots still ahead of him.
Borkhus did not sugarcoat what the animal could do. He described the fight in plain terms after the encounter, in an account Breitbart reported from the Wyoming coverage and a KTVQ interview.
"I’m 6-foot-3 and 320 pounds, and that cat couldn’t have been more than 70 pounds. He hit me in the chest and put me right down. That thing was strong,"
He said he focused on one job while the swipes came in.
"I was trying to keep his mouth away from my neck and face. I think it was just as panicked as I was. It was so fast I didn’t even have time to really realize what happened,"
About 20 seconds. That was the whole fight. No Hollywood standoff. A veteran, a dog, and a young mountain lion that wanted out as badly as Borkhus did.
The Labrador was unharmed. His behavior did not change. Borkhus summed up his dog the way a lot of owners would.
"He’s just his own dumb self."
Borkhus chose fists over firearms and spray for a simple reason: he did not want to hit Diesel by mistake. That choice left him with scratches and a medical chore most people never face after a walk in the woods.
Rabies in mountain lions is nearly nonexistent, the reporting noted. He still went through the vaccine shots. Minor wounds were enough to put him on that path. The pain of the shots came after the pain of the fight.
Wyoming Game and Fish has long described the big cats as hard to spot. Their habits are built around ambush, not open confrontation with people.
"Their cryptic behavior is a result of the successful stalk and ambush predation strategy they use to survive. Mountain lions’ primary food source are deer and elk, although based on research conducted in Wyoming they eat a variety of mammals including porcupines, raccoons, beavers and coyotes,"
Wildlife advocates also note the animals are known as cougars. On South Fork Road that day, the usual menu was not the issue. A family dog was in the wrong place at the wrong moment, and an Army veteran stepped in with what he had, his hands.
Cowboy State Daily carried Borkhus’s account around September 25. The encounter itself was described only as recent. No agency response on scene, no public hunt for the cat, and no exact timestamp made the public record in that coverage. What did make the record was a man who heard his dog in trouble and refused to stand back.
In a country that often outsources grit, a Wyoming veteran still met a mountain lion the old way, and brought his dog home.
