I can't control my heart rate ... there's a cougar on me!

So, I helped cheetahs close on saturday night and we were prepping for a cheetah/tiger feed around 4:30 and we have a visitor flag us down and say that they saw a cougar in one of our cheetah pens above the Asia section of the park. Well, of course, we doubt it so we get as much info as we can. The lady swears it was a cat with no spots and that she has seen many cougars in her day and that it was definitely not a cheetah that they has seen. So they show us where they'd seen it and.... of course that is where our ambassador cat, Taini, had been housed all day to give her a break from her village pen. So we thank the guest and go to the fence to call Taini over and make sure she's ok. We call.... and call..... and call..... and no Taini. Hmmm. Not good. 

We go around to the DT side and go into the pen to find her. 

We call her until we finally see her up in the top right corner of the pen up on a hill. She doesn't respond but she does finally start coming down to us. Normally this cat loves attention. She'll normally come right up and start purring. So she slowly comes down the hill sits in front of her water bucket and drinks for like five minutes, not purring, acting VERY nervous, and when we touch her she acts irritated and huffs at us.

We're wondering at this point what the heck happened and obviously getting nervous ourselves .... is there a cougar in this pen with us right now? 

As we're trying to calm Taini and comfort her I'm attempting to groom her and pluck at a small tuft of matted fur on her lower back. She huffs at me while she's drinking her water so I back off. Dana looks a bit closer and spots an inch long gash on her right "knee". Fantastic.

We have vet staff come up to check her out and are even more aware of our surroundings especially since Taini is so jumpy and keeps glancing nervously up to the corner she had been hiding in. Vets decide it's worth stitching so we move her back down to the village and dart her. Once we get her on the table in the clinic we see a puncture wound canine width from the tear we had spotted initially. 

Curius...... veerrrrry curious.

So we clean her, stitch her, and put her back home to recover then hike back up to the corridor pen with noisemakers, pepper spray, and a rifle and do a sweep of the pen to make sure no cougar was still in there. The last thing we need is a less feisty cheetah encountering this cougar and getting more seriously injured. By the time we were done checking the pen I was covered from head to toe in poison oak. Yep, since I'm one of the only ones who has no reaction to it (so far) I got to crawl through thickets of poison oak... go me!

Just another day in the wilds of Roseburg.