Dead Lion

[B-N-Trees]

Hopefully them researchers wouldn't proceed to eat out the a%s after they killed the cat, lets hope not anyway!

Actually, I meant too much Ketamine!LOL

Happens way more than you would think.

We have a researcher in our area, a real houdsmen in addition that we get along with real well. He is kind of the "holy grail" to some little known hard facts about cats. He also keeps close tabs on all the cats he collars (bobcats included). I will run this incident by him. I am curious to know what he'd say about it.

[R.M.]

Looks like coyotes the way she is eaten. But I’ve never seen coyotes burry anything like the head is buried. I’d be really interested to see what her teeth look like to see about how old she was.

[trakntree]

She wasn't an old cat, adult, but possibly only around three years old. The way it looks I'm not certain she has ever had a litter of kittens.

[LBell]

So are you just guessing like everyone else or do you know? I'm also interested on how you found her. I have two guesses one is a trapper cought her and killed her hopefully by mistake. A guy near hear actually found a cave a young tom was useing set it and caught him then reported it as a spot and stalk. his step kid spilled the beans at work so we called fish and game they said if we had hard proof let them know, needless to say the boy was not going to rat on step dad. Two is a lion hunter who wanted his young dogs to chew on it for a reward . Not pretty but both are very possible.

[ZeluvaRIP69er]

Probably a pack of Plotts...

Lol, A pack of hot-nosed dog fighting plotts racing eachother through the woods, ran into a lion weezing from a collar being on too tight, and in the middle of the plott's rumble, the lion fell in... The dust cloud from the dog fight killed it, and they threw some dirt over it, one of the dogs got hungry, decided to eat som $hit!

Thats my take on it lol

[dhostetler]

The best clue probably is how you found it? Humans don't typically go crawling into caves without reasons. Did your dogs run something to & from the cave? My guess is it died naturally/crawled in after being wounded by a hunter or rancher. Found and ate on by coyotes and possibly afterward found by another feline who didn't get done burying it before you spooked it. Ate out of the backend is definetly canines and not cats.

I once found a roadkill deer that a lynx buried and ate on for a week.

[trakntree]

Ok, Here's the deal. I caught this cat early last spring. I was helping a local bioligist get a few collars out. At the time we aged this cat as an adult, very young though. Her teeth showed no sign of staining. She was fitted with a GPS collar made by ATS. The collar was set up to fall off in nine months, around Christmas.

I flew for the bioligist durring the summer and located her and another female we had collared in that area. I never made an attemped to catch her over the summer, I was hopeing that she would be packing a litter of kittens with her by then.

The bioligist asked if i would fly for him the other day and locate the collar. I did, and decided to go in on the ground and see if I could find it before the snow piled up.

When I got into the area where the collar was laying, I thought it was odd, there were obviously a hadfull of coyotes cruising the area. I thought that possibly they were working the remains of a kill the female had left behind. When I found the collar I was suprised to find the kill they were evidentally working.

I believe the lion was killed by another lion. It looked to me like possibly the cat was originally buried more than the pictures show, but possibly when the coyotes started working the frozen carcass the dirt was shaken from the unburied portion of the cat.

She most likely would have never been found had she not had a collar on considering the country she was in.

With the cat being frozen solid, I think it's tough to determine. I found a female that was killed by another lion a few years back. She was pretty decomposed but you could tell that there was a clean, pierced hole through the hie on both sides of her head only really visible from the inside of the hide. The skull had had corosponding hoes on both sides.

Either way the cat is going to get sent to a lab in Bozeman. Maybe they can come up with some results.

Just thought it would be interesting what evryone else thought. Not something you come across everyday.

[BlacktailStalker]

An oldtimer I know told me he found a healthy, mature female lion killed by a big tom. The truth was in the snow. Whats even more weird is the fight had started in a tree (or she tried to climb away once it started)
Maybe she was a lesbian.