Vancouver Island resident Dee Gallant has avoided a potentially deadly encounter with a cougar by blasting Metallica’s “Don’t Tread on Me” from their infamous 1991 Black Album.
The encounter took place on Tuesday, July 23 when the young woman was walking her husky retriever Musky down a well-weathered trail outside Duncan, B.C.
In a video she recorded, Gallant is seen shooing and hissing at the mountain lion, calling it a “bad little kitty” and issuing such threats to the predator as “I’ll fight you.” She then turned off the video function to blast “Don’t Tread on Me” by Metallica while her dog waited faithfully by her side.
“I thought I’d just take Murphy for a little hike like we usually do,” she told Global News in an interview. “It was an evening so it started to get a bit dusky. We got a little ways up and I saw something watching me. I looked off to my right, and there he was, just standing there, staring at me.”
“At first, I wasn’t intimidated,” Gallant said. “I thought, ‘Wow. This is really cool. Look at that cougar.’”
However, the serene imagery quickly dissolved, and Gallant recognized the severity of what she might be faced with.
“I stopped filming, went to my iTunes and found Metallica’s Don’t Tread on Me,” she said. “I thought it was perfect because it gives him the message that I want to send, and it’s a really intimidating-sounding song.
“I immediately put it on and I held it up high in the air,” Gallant explained. “As soon as he heard the first note, he bolted. He was just gone. I had some other artists in there that I was scrolling past, going ‘No. No, no, no.’”
Luckily, she made the right choice. The riveting bullet-like drumbeats and down-tuned electric guitar that kick off the tune seemed to do the trick.
She thankfully avoided an escalation of the already very dicey situation and is left with a great story to tell. It sure beats the hell out of cougar wounds.