A Canadian woman says her “mom instinct” kicked in when she saw a cougar chomping down on her 7-year-old son last week — allowing her to pry the beast’s jaws open like it was a house cat.
Chelsea Lockhart was busy doing chores at her Vancouver Island home Friday when she heard her son Zachery calling out for help.
She ran outside and saw a young cougar “attached to his arm.”
“I looked at him and I just thought, ‘Oh my God, my kid could die right before my eyes,'” Lockhart told CTV News on Tuesday. “All you think is what can you do? What can you do in your own physical strength?”
“I had a mom instinct, right? I just leaped on it and tried to pry its mouth open.”
The brave mom fishhooked the cougar by the mouth and managed to wrestle it away from her child.
“I knew that in my own power and in my own strength I wasn’t going to be able to pry its mouth open, so I started praying in tongues. I’m just crying out to the Lord,” she recalled. “Three sentences into me praying, it released and it ran away.”
Zachery got out of the scuffle with only a gash to his head and a few scrapes to his neck and arms. He’s expected to make a full recovery.
“We are definitely well on our way to recovery and Zach is resting at his grandma’s house, having some one-on-one time there,” Lockhart said. “His stitches are healing; he is well on his way to being fully recovered.”
Both the cougar that attacked Zachery and another juvenile male thought to be his brother were put down by conservation officers. It’s believed that they had been apart from their mother for months, and necropsies revealed that they had been starving.