Boy, 8, miraculously survives after cougar attacks him, tries to break his neck during camping trip
Warning: Graphic content, readers’ discretion advised
ALBERTA, CANADA: An eight-year-old schoolboy miraculously survived after being brutally mauled by a cougar. Cason Feuser required 200 staples to pull his back and neck back together after the big cat attacked him by Bishop River near Rocky Mountain House in Canada’s Rocky Mountains on July 31.
Feuser was camping with his two sisters, a close family friend and three others when the predator attacked him from behind. According to Daily Star, his entire head is said to have fitted in the animal's jaws.
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The cougar then tried to break his neck. It is then that Alishea Morrison, a family friemd, quickly acted and saved his life by dropping a huge rock on it. This action by the 40-year-old shocked the cougar and it let Feuser go.
However, the child was eight hours away from his parents, who had to board a flight to meet their son after he was airlifted to Stollery Children's Hospital, in Edmonton, Alberta. The boy's parents, Chay and Corey, both 37, arrived and saw the puncture wounds on his neck and face.
Morrison, who is also a nurse, recalled the horrifying incident. “Cason's sister Addisyn looked back and screamed 'cougar' and that's when I jumped up and came around behind Cason and the cougar and I saw Cason within the cougar's jaws. The cougar tried to pull him up towards the campsite as all the kids were running towards the trailer," she said, according to the Daily Star article.
She added, "I looked at the cougar and reacted how any mum would and I grabbed a rock and hit the cougar in the head - it took off towards the camper and then my dog Jersey chased it away from the kids." Morrison said that the ambulance reached them in 26 minutes, but she was concerned Feuser wouldn’t make it as his injuries were quite severe.
Chay said that Morrison and the dogs were a prime reason they all managed to survive. She said, "I think at that moment if she didn't have the dogs with her, the cougar would've attacked her. She saw the cougar jolt Cason to try and break his neck so she was sure if she had been a second longer the cougar would've been on its way into the woods with him."
The mother remebered how she and her husband got through the tough phase. Along with the doctor, they kept giving him “play-by-play” updates on how things were going. Chay said, "He [the doctor] just kept saying it was a miracle - his airway was missed by one millimetre, his jugular (vein) got missed and his skull wasn't cracked.”
Feuser is on the road to recovery, but his injuries put him in the operating theatre for three and a half hours. He is currently undergoing silicone wrap treatment for his scars.